The History of Sex: Prague -- Another Kind of Christmas Market -- (Chapter X, Part 31)

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The History of Sex: Prague -- 'A Lot of Clients Don't Like Stretchmarks' -- (Chapter X, Part 30)

'Well, how was it?' my 'friend' leers afterwards, sitting alone in the bar. (Martina's off screwing another john.)

'She was gorgeous.'

'Were you happy with the service?'

'Yeah. She was gorgeous.'

That's my line, and I'm sticking to it.

And anyway, John pretty much fills in the rest of my hour for me: 'Did she give you a shower? Was she enthusiastic? Because some of them just lie there. Was she shaved? They're very clean, don't you think?'

I nod knowingly.

'What was the name of that girl again? Linda? I'll have to remember her: Twenty-four. Lives in Prague. No kids—and no scars or anything?'

I couldn't say, but the best answer is probably no.

'Good. No stretchmarks. A lot of clients don't like that.'

Sweet Paradise club: Catering to pigs

I can't help but feel sleazy. Just one night of this warps me; maybe that's what happened to the nice guy John used to be.

At my insistence, though, we round out the night by returning to Wenceslaus Square and an upscale strip club that used to be a Communist hangout.

Ladislav Bittman told me he took the KGB's chief of disinformation to the Alhambra during a night on the town in 1965, joking that by leaving their panties on, the girls had performed a 'socialist striptease.'

But even that was too decadently Czech for the visiting Soviet. 'During the first break indicated he was ready to return to the embassy.'

The History of Sex: Prague -- 'The State is Pimp' -- (Chapter X, Part 16)

For the most part, the protests against the invasion were fatality-free.

A unique eyewitness account comes from a sex writer who toured Czechoslovakia before, during and after the Prague Spring.

Mankoff's Lusty Europe is a vintage sex guide, one of those books you can't believe was ever published, let alone in 1972—and by a reputable publisher.

Having already ventured behind the Iron Curtain into East Berlin, author 'Allan Mankoff' (rhymes with…) also trawled the streets of Prague.

'There are no apparent pimps,' he concluded. 'The State is pimp.'

Dolled-up 'Tuzex girls' would sleep with foreigners for hard currency to buy Western luxuries in state-run 'Tuzex' stores.

One 'beautiful young coed' was selling herself for thirty dollars a night. 'The Soviet Union will never let us go… and so, I shall sleep with a hundred men and then I shall have enough money to go to England.'

Mankoff also described the tense scene as a schoolgirl mooned Russian troops in the Old Town.

'For a frightening instant, one young guard who looks no more than seventeen teases the nipple of her heaving breast with his bayonet. Then he lowers it, grins, says something dirty in Russian, and the girl runs off in the direction of the macabre, death-mask likeness of Kafka which marks his former residence.'

One of the main goals of the Prague Spring had been to force the Party to punish those responsible for the purges and show trials of twenty years earlier.

The media had taken advantage of its freedom to try to rehabilitate a little-known martyr of democracy and genuine heroine of postwar Europe.

Milada Horakova had fought against the Nazis and spent nearly five years in concentration camps.

Horakova defending herself at her trial

After the War, she resigned from parliament to protest against the Communist coup.

Accused of conspiring against the regime, she was arrested, tortured and sentenced to death in 1950.

Her last words under the gallows were: 'I have lost. I die like a soldier—with honor. I love my country and its people… I wish for you… I wish…'

And then the hangman cut her dead.

'The Communists did what the Nazis never dared to do. On June 27th, 1950, Milada Horakova was hanged.'
You can read this Cold War 'comic book' about her life here.

* * *

The History of Sex: Prague -- Premature Perestroika -- (Chapter X, Part 15)

And most of the government's reforms were very moderate indeed.

As a teenager, Jan Kaplan took advantage of the new freedom to travel to visit London.

He describes the Prague Spring as typically Czech, comparing it with the attempts by national hero Jan Hus to gradually change the Catholic Church from within a century before the Reformation—a statue of the martyred reformer is one of Prague's landmarks.

Student Jan Palach committed suicide by self-immolation in Wenceslaus Square
to protest the crushing of the Prague Spring.
This still is from Burning Bush, a Czech miniseries set in the era. 

'You can't live in central Europe and be landlocked and hope to change things except from within,' Kaplan says.

'The Czechs were developed, and the Russians were peasants, with an almost feudal form of control in the way that they implemented Socialism. The Czechs could have done it far more elegantly,' he adds wistfully.

That may be, but the Russians realized that their template for undermining democracy now threatened to break up the Communist bloc.

In August 1968, the Soviets decided to crush the 'premature perestroika,' and the Red Army that had once liberated Prague returned to shackle it.

The History of Sex: Prague -- Sex and Communism -- (Chapter X, Part 12)

By the Sixties, though, all that had changed.

The Czechs were both physically and psychologically closer to the West than the Soviets, with easier access to new ideas.

Whereas those born before the Communist coup tended to be true believers, the younger generation knew that Socialist rhetoric rarely matched social reality.

'I don't remember anyone having any qualms about hopping into bed with one another,' says Jan Kaplan, a Czech émigré.

'Part of the allure of collective farms and summer projects was that they were fuckfests: "To hell with bourgeois ideas of chastity; let's have a lot of sex!" How did you get young people to build factories for free? Because at the end of the day, they got to fuck themselves silly.'

Jan Kaplan was also a consultant for
Prague's Museum of Communism

Not surprisingly, then, Prague flourished as a center of sexpionage during the Cold War.

Che Guevara partied there with Fidel Castro's brother while trying to broker an arms deal for Cuba.

According to their official minder, both the Czechs and the Russians viewed Che as 'an anarchist,' while Raul Castro—now the president of Cuba—'was no laggard in debauchery:' 'Every night I went with him to some nightclub, where we would stay drinking and dancing with the hostesses until the small hours. I would also procure blonde girls for him to sleep with—he was obsessed with blondes.'

Che Guevara's lived in Prague for a few months in 1966
before setting off on his ill-fated trip to Bolivia
(Source: Czech news site)

To find out more about the heyday of sexpionage, I've decided to try and track down one of the last veterans of the era.

Like many top Czech spies, Ladislav Bittman defected to the West after Soviet troops crushed the 'Prague Spring' of 1968, a doomed attempt to reform the Communist bloc from within.

In The Deception Game, written shortly afterwards, the former deputy chief of 'Department D,' describes how he helped pioneer the field of disinformation.

'For a long time I was a disciplined Communist intelligence officer, speaking the same language and thinking along the same ideological lines as my fellow officers, praying with them to the same god named Lenin, admiring the majestic panoramas of the Charles Bridge and Prague's Hradcany Castle from the headquarters of the Czechoslovak intelligence service.'

The spies' HQ was actually a former monastery kept intact by the Communists because of its artistic value.

'As a result, Party and official meetings took place in the monastery's chapel, where portraits of melancholy saints looked down from the walls.'

The former spooks' HQ
(the dark facade beneath the dome)

The History of Sex: Prague -- The Breaking Point -- (Chapter X, Part 10)

For straight targets, the most sinister honeytraps involved being framed for rape and threatened with life in a Soviet jail.

After Verkhonoye, Vera's first assignment was to seduce an American businessman in Moscow.

She was given a job as a chambermaid at the man's hotel and 'accidentally' walked in on him while he was showering.

He offered to show her a good time in bed, and as soon as he'd finished, two KGB men posing as hotel security broke through the door.

Vera started to scream that the man had raped her.

While the goons pummeled him, the man begged her to tell the truth, but she swore she'd been attacked.

Behold, the nipple transmitter!
In Sexpionage, David Lewis writes: 'If a female undercover agent wears fake nipples fitted with radio equipment, even the most intimate body search won't reveal that she's wired for sound. Powered by body heat, the nipple's chip transmitter with microphone is said to have a range of several hundred feet.'

'Then, suddenly, they all began to laugh,' Vera said.

'The American got up and pulled on his clothes, saying to me in Russian that I was very good in bed. It was a final examination, and I passed successfully. Even while I believed that the man was an innocent victim, his whole life threatened with ruin, I felt nothing for him… A man was merely a target, to be rapidly assessed and then dealt with.'

Then she added a quote that's almost too good to be true.

'By the time our training was completed, we were hard, cynical, sophisticated young women capable of bedding any heterosexual man and providing him with the time of his life.'

And here's a close-up.
On his website from his days as a photojournalist,
Lewis shows how to make a nipple transmitter 

In time, however, Vera's pillow talk with Westerners made her doubt her indoctrination.

In 1963, she was ordered to bed a French student who was due to marry an aristocratic girl back home.

The boy was very much in love with his fiancée and initially resisted Vera.

However, she eventually seduced him.

The KGB showed him the photos and threatened to derail his marriage unless his father, a major figure in mining, handed them commercial intelligence.

'The boy said he needed time to think it over,' Vera said. 'The same afternoon he walked in front of a car near Red Square and was killed. Perhaps it was an accident. But it was the breaking point for me.'

* * *

The History of Sex: Prague -- Gay Honeytraps -- (Chapter X, Part 9)

The tale of Claude put a positive spin on the real-life story of John Vassall, one of Britain's infamous Cold War traitors.

Lewis reckons a raven from Verkhonoye helped blackmail Vassall.

A gay man from a good family, the embassy attaché was invited to a party in Moscow where he was photographed sleeping naked with a man.

Back in London, he agreed to steal official documents for the Soviets from his office overlooking the back garden of No. 10 Downing Street.

In fact, if a similar plot had worked, Communist puppetmasters would have pulled the strings at No. 10 itself.

In his memoir, a former spy named Josef Frolik recounted how one of his colleagues at the Czechoslovakian Embassy in London spent two years trying to trap a Conservative who 'was not markedly heterosexually inclined.'

The Tory was unmarried and a keen musician, so the Czechs arranged for a bisexual organist from Moravia to visit London and bump into him at recitals.

As they chatted, the British MP mentioned that he'd like to play the organ at the Church of St. James in Prague.

The Czechs immediately invited him to visit—the idea being that once he was there, the Tory would also take a turn on the Moravian's organ.

Unfortunately, 'at the last moment, some wise member of British Counter-Intelligence warned the would-be organist that someone waiting for him in Prague was prepared to play another kind of tune.'

Sexually ambiguous to the end, Ted Heath went on to become Prime Minister (only to be posthumously 'outed' by a gay Tory in 2007).

The History of Sex: Prague -- 'Their Trade is Treachery' -- (Chapter X, Part 8)

If the KGB's swallows occasionally found their work hard to—well, you know—then pity the poor ravens.

A defector called Dimitri Labyav told Western debriefers that he'd been instructed to seduce only middle-aged women, given the surplus of unmarried female secretaries in Western Europe after the War.

'To have sex with a pretty girl is easy, but being passionate to order with a frigid spinster takes skill,' he noted, no doubt eliciting sympathetic nods from his interviewers.

Labyav's first hands-on lesson at Verkhonoye came in the form of a Russian peasant who was 'ugly, uncouth and unwashed.'

For some of his gay cadres (who had been blackmailed into service), having to make love to women as old as their mothers was too much.

'Two of them committed suicide during my stay there.'

A WISER, IF SORER, MAN

By the 1960s, sexpionage had become such a problem for the West that it featured in a cautionary MI5 booklet.

As its title indicates, Their Trade is Treachery is written in a lock-jawed, humorless style that's often unintentionally funny now.

Contrary to the fictional womanizing of James Bond, gay entrapment appears to have been more of a peril for the British than hetero honeytraps.

Case No. 1 tells the story of 'Claude Robinson'—'a man who liked the Russians'—and learned the hard way about vodka: 'Claude gulped a great deal'—especially when he was 'subjected to a homosexual assault,' then photographed and blackmailed.

In the case study, he promptly reports the incident to the embassy and is whisked out of the country a wiser, if sorer, man.

In reality, though, reporting a sexual indiscretion to your superiors wasn't that easy: a forced return from a foreign posting was a black mark on any diplomatic or corporate career, and if that threat didn't work, the KGB could always post the photos to your family or the media.

The History of Sex: Berlin -- The Wall Comes Down -- (Chapter IX, Part 18)

Homosexuality wasn't legalized in West Germany until 1969 (once again, East Germany's Communists one-upped their democratic counterparts, having repealed Paragraph 175 the previous year).

By then, though, the main battleground for gay rights had shifted across the Atlantic.

In June that year—just days after West Germany abolished its Nazi statute on sodomy (and the same day as Judy Garland's funeral)—gay men in New York fought back against a police raid of the Stonewall Inn on Christopher Street, inspiring 'Friends of Dorothy' around the world.

West Berlin held its first Christopher Street Day festival a decade later and, by the time the AIDS epidemic took off in 1983, the gay scene was well established.

On the other side of the Berlin Wall, though, the scene was more subdued.

The first East German film about homosexuality, Coming Out, didn't come out until November 9, 1989—the same night the Wall fell.

The History of Sex: Graz and Vienna -- The Prophet of the Second Sexual Revolution? -- (Chapter VIII, Part 37)

In keeping with the demented sci-fi theme, the modern videos on display promoting 'orgone therapy' are cheesily reminiscent of Scientology promos, minus the celebs.

Unlike L. Ron Hubbard, though, the Austrian never lived to see the triumph of his new reich.

As an ex-Commie flogging sex boxes to American gullibles during the Red Scare of the 1950s, it was only a matter of time before Reich attracted the Feds.

In a disturbing parallel to the Nazis' book burnings, the US government ordered all his writings about 'orgone therapy' to be incinerated.

Prosecuted as a fraud and sentenced to two years in jail, Reich died in captivity in 1957, turning him into a martyr of sorts for later free spirits.

In its cover story announcing 'The Second Sexual Revolution' in 1964, Time magazine conceded reluctantly that 'Reich may have been a prophet. For now it sometimes seems that all America is one big Orgone Box.'

And since then, the West's libido has been unleashed to roam the world—and come back and pee on Freud's very own doorstep.

Just down the street from his former home in Vienna is a high-brow erotica shop with a painting of an eighteenth-century woman crouched on a bed, her naked hindquarters quivering in the air.

With a winged penis as its symbol, the store takes its name from de Sade: Die Philosophie im Boudoir. 

Though its counterpart in London boasts more relics, the Freud Museum in Vienna is obviously hallowed ground, for it's here that psychoanalysis was born—his most famous patients passed through these portals—and it's here that the prophet of a new age was persecuted by the heathens of his own land and forced to flee (Forgive them, Father, for they know not what they do.)

'It was one of the most privileged emigrations of the Nazi regime, because they allowed him to take everything with him,' says the museum's director, Inge Scholz-Strasser, noting that after Freud left, his home became a 'Jew-collecting apartment:' a temporary residence for poor Jews who were dispatched to concentration camps.

The History of Sex: Graz and Vienna -- Here's Where It Really Gets Messy -- (Chapter VIII, Part 34)

As a diagnosed masochist (and elementary schoolteacher), then, Anna Freud preached that kids could be taught to control their irrational impulses and conform to society—a notion that sounds far more benevolent than it really was.

In keeping with her father's methods, Anna secretly tested her theories on the children of her lifelong female companion, the heiress Dorothy Burlingham, daughter of artist Louis Comfort Tiffany. Sigmund called her kids 'naughty American children.'

Anna and Sigmund managed to escape the Nazis, 
thanks to the strings pulled by his foreign disciples:
'It was one of the most privileged emigrations of the Nazi regime,' the director of Vienna's Freud museum told me.
'They allowed him to take everything with him.' 

Obsessed that the boy was homosexual and therefore in her view abnormal, Anna subjected him and his sister to live-in analysis throughout their childhoods.

At first, her methods seemed to work: the children turned into apparently model citizens who married and had children of their own.

Sure enough, the son didn't become gay—but he did end up drinking himself to death.

His sister committed suicide in the same house in north London where Sigmund had 'died in freedom' and Anna had subjected her to experiments (ironically, the house is now a shrine to Freudianism: the Freud Museum at 20 Maresfield Gardens).

And they're still at it:
The Anna Freud Centre in London

As for Anna herself, her dad's dodgy analysis left her with a father complex so severe she ended up dying a 'vestal' virgin guarding his legacy, huddling in his overcoat as an old, childless spinster on Hampstead Heath.

By that time, unfortunately, Anna's theories had been foisted on a generation of schoolchildren on both sides of the Atlantic.

The tragicomic implication of all this is that when the inevitable backlash came, the rebels of the Sixties wound up kicking against the wrong targets.

Behind the scenes, Freud and his disciples were as much (if not more) to blame for creating the consumerism and conformity of the 1950s as the usual scapegoats: namely, religion, bigotry and the nuclear family.

What's more, when a generation of disillusioned rebels tried to break with the past and create a new future, they looked to another misguided follower of Freud as their savior.

* * *

The History of Sex: Graz and Vienna -- Austria's Awfully Boring Masochists -- (Chapter VIII, Part 16)

Prior to coming here, I struck up an email correspondence with a transvestite who used to run Graz's (now defunct) club devoted to S&M—or simply 'SM,' in German.

He/she then forwarded my email address to an online forum, and since then, I've received helpful tips about Graz's miniscule SM scene.

In fact, the aficionados have decided to hold one of their special meetings, a Stammtisch, at a local restaurant in honor of my arrival.

So it would be rude not to go, right?

Weirdly, the setting for the BDSM do is a traditional wood-beamed Austrian restaurant, the kind of place that sticks antique farm implements on the walls for decoration and makes its waitresses dress up like wenches for ambience.

The arrival of 'Grazy' and his girlfriend—both in high heels and black fetishwear—elicits a few bemused chuckles from the pensioners dining nearby, but there's no real shock or disgust.

After all, today's bluehairs are yesterday's longhairs: these sexagenarians came of age in the Sixties.

And whether they're able to accept it or not (forever young!), most of Grazy's entourage isn't much younger.

Having met the Terribly Nice Sadists of France, I feel bad being mean to Austria's Awfully Boring Masochists; then again, they probably prefer it that way.

THE USUAL SEXBAIT

The twenty or so people who show up are typical of the regulars you see on swingers' sites: mainly well-preserved women who serve as sexbait for their balding partners, plus a couple of young guys tagging along in the off-chance an orgy breaks out.

At the top of the long wooden table sits Grazy, all dolled up in a bobbed wig, a black corset and a miniskirt with matching choker and armband.

Judging from his button nose and neatly symmetrical features, he's probably as cute as a guy as he is as a girl—and boy does he know it.

His poor girlfriend, on the other hand, has a face that's curdled round her nose. She's probably a big softie deep down, but her default expression is defensive: she doesn't so much stare daggers at you as an entire fortress, complete with vats of boiling oil.

You have to feel sorry for her: it's bad enough having a better-looking partner, but having a boyfriend who's hotter than you dressed as a woman would drive any girl crazy.

The History of Sex: Venice and Florence -- 'Fock is Fock' -- (Chap. IV, Pt. 12)

He leans forward for emphasis: 'This is important to know—Venice is no sex, no fetish, none of these things.'

'Venice is love—' Maria clasps her hands to her heart melodramatically—'Love, romantic love. Not sexual love.'

'Just for tourists, because there are too few people here.'

Barely 60,000 locals, at last count—roughly one-third its size in Aretino's time.

'And tourists that come here are looking for romance, not for sex. Not for fetish or transgressive or strange things, no. It's walking hand-in-hand, looking at the Grand Canal.'

'Venetians and tourists are narrow-minded. I don't know why, but it's so.'

'For fetish parties, you need open-minded people.'

Max and Maria's own mindset strikes me as somewhere in between.

A decade after their baptism into bondage, their view of Fetish seems quaintly outdated, akin to the idealists of the Sixties who realized belatedly (if ever) that they'd opened the gates to hucksters who would've turned the Garden of Eden into a peepshow.

Bondage in advertising: A Design Institute billboard...
across from Naples Cathedral

It's odd, for instance, that Max and Maria find it so shocking that parties promoting sexy dress might actually inspire some revelers to have sex.

'But then it's not a fetish party!' Maria exclaims, her accent getting stronger the more worked up she gets.

'A fetish party is a fetish party; a sex party is a sex party; a swingers' party is a swingers' party. I don't like that people use fetish or BDSM—'

'—just to fock.'

'Just to fock. No.'

'Fock is fock.'

'If you want to fock, you go to the parties in which you can fock,' Maria continues. 'But I go with normal clothes, not latex or PVC or high heels. No. I go, I fock. But I don't like there to be an excuse to fock.'