‘Homosexuality was coined by a Hungarian’: the gay-sauna travelogue questioning central Europe’s illiberal image

A new book, With Wittgenstein in a Gay Sauna, reveals the deep-rooted queer subcultures in cities from Budapest to Prague – defying regional stereotypes and inspiring an art exhibition on masculinity

The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein argued that our understanding of reality is fundamentally bound by and shaped by the language we use to talk about it. But there is one place where the Vienna-born thinker’s argument ceases to make sense. “Gay saunas are spaces where language dies,” says Vratislav Maňák, a Czech writer and literary scholar.

With Wittgenstein in a Gay Sauna, a book that made a major splash when it was published in Czech and German earlier this year, Maňák fictionalises Wittgenstein, who had romantic relations with both men and women, entering a Viennese Herrensauna called Kaiserbründl, hailed in newspapers at the time as “the most stylish bathing establishment in the world”.

“To his left and right he sees moist male backs glistening in the water, upper bodies covered in thick hair and nipples hardened by the cold,” writes Maňák. Wittgenstein is shown to be tormented by his desire, by a tension that on the wooden benches of the Kaiserbründl only a handjob can resolve.

“Although Wittgenstein wanted to solve all the mysteries of philosophy, he overlooked the biggest part of human existence: the body” says the 38-year-old, who teaches journalism at Charles University, Prague.

Wittgenstein, the most influential philosopher to emerge from of the Austro-Hungarian empire, never opened up about his homosexuality. Maňák came out relatively late in his life, in 2017, several years after he had earned a reputation as the award-winning author of short stories. Yet his essayistic travelogue defies a public image of central Europe as a deeply homo- and transphobic, or even closeted region.

Contrary to what the strong presence of far-right populists in the political landscapes of Hungary, Czechia or Slovakia may indicate, Maňák finds queer subcultures to have deep roots in central Europe. Visiting the historic 16th-century Ottoman Turkish bath Rudas in Budapest, a men-only space on weekdays, he reminds us that the very term “homosexuality” was first coined in the 1860s by a Hungarian, translator and progressivist Karl Maria Kertbeny.

Maňák experiences sexual epiphanies while raving at Berlin’s KitKatClub. In Prague, he guides the reader through the city’s past and present cruising routes, including rocky trails above the swimming pool in the Podolí district. As long ago as the 1970s, local gay men held a commemorative happening when the public toilets by the Prague State Opera were torn down and took away flame-red tiles as souvenirs from the demolition.

“Even though gay saunas are a generational thing, and younger people have their own queer spaces, it shows ways how you can subversively reinterpret urban space and enjoy it – it’s a textbook of subtle social resistance,” Maňák says.

Many conservative and far-right politicians in central Europe tend to frame homosexuality and queerness as cultural imports from the “decadent” west, which arrived on the wings of liberal democracy after 1989. Maňák’s travelogue is not the only recent book to question that narrative.

“Central Europe, particularly its capitals Budapest, Vienna and Prague, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, played a central role in developing the idea of sexual identity, as many important modern sexologists came from here,” says Anita Kurimay, a historian at Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania and an author of 2020’s Queer Budapest, 1873–1961.

Her book shows that Budapest has long had cruising spots along the Danube and invitation-only gay clubs in mansions, which were tolerated as a public secret. “Thanks to widely spoken German and French common among educated elites, these capitals were part of European conversations and circulation of ideas as well as bodies,” says Kurimay.

Outside of the medical and legal professions and internal police discussions, the subject was indeed mostly a taboo. But there were exceptions, such as the surprisingly progressive 1908 crime novel series Homosexual Love by Hungarian writer Soma Guthi, in which Detective Tuzár solves the tragic love case of two wealthy gentlemen. Interwar Czechoslovakia had progressive homosexual magazine The Voice, which agitated for sexual reform and published dating ads.

Under state socialism, the decriminalisation of male homosexual acts took place in Czechoslovakia and Hungary in 1961, earlier than in the UK and some other European countries. However, people could still be prosecuted for public-offence acts. “Certain liberal sexual politics under socialism didn’t necessarily challenge gender norms,” Kurimay adds.

In Prague, Maňák’s book has also inspired a new exhibition focusing on portrayals of masculinity in central European art at Prague’s DOX Centre for Contemporary Art. Entitled Andros, Greek for masculine, it majors on themes of loneliness, vulnerability and incompleteness: the displayed paintings show blurred or melted faces of men and the ancient ideal of male body is deconstructed to point where only sculptures of fragmented torsos remain. Each work serves as a reminder of how conventionally understood masculinity loses its contours.

“Masculinity, which society once regarded as the central unit of measurement, has thus lost its perfect profile because it, too, has proved to be incomplete, marked by deficiency and irreparable cracks,” he writes in the exhibition catalogue. Yet Maňák sounds hopeful. “I don’t like to use the term ‘crisis of masculinity’”, he adds. “Because not every transformation is necessarily a crisis.”

An English translation of Vratislav Maňák’s With Wittgenstein in a Gay Sauna will be published by Seagull Books in 2027