Little Queers

These days a man kissing a man or two women walking hand in hand are sights that give about as much offence as someone wearing socks with sandals. Which is all well and good. Writers don’t have to be proactive in showing that gays and lesbians are ‘the same as other people’, nor is there any need for ostentation in their depiction of various ‘deviations’. In short, the mere fact of homosexuality no longer serves as the basis of a story.

In the collection of short stories Little Queers Jan Folný shows that he is well aware of this. ­ The volume’s title – poised as it is between irony and compassion – is indicative of the author’s attitude to his ‘heroes’. ­The characters paraded in these interrelated stories include a frustrated family man who meets a young Vietnamese in a gay bar, a famous singer who misses his class reunion, a professional footballer in love, and an elderly man preparing to move to a rest home. Folný is able to switch convincingly between genres and narrative styles, thus proving that in the Czech Republic this theme has at last moved out of the ghetto and become literature worthy of the description.