Queer in Russia: A story of sex, self, and the other

by Laurie Essig

Queer in Russia is an engrossing and highly readable sociological study that will disturb readers who hoped or assumed that President Yeltsin's 1993 decriminalization of consensual sex between adults of the same sex would unlock the Iron Closet. Since 1917, homosexuality has officially existed in Russia only as a legal or medical category, either a criminal act or an illness. Russian men and women who experience same-sex desire have so internalized the various proscriptions of society and the law that they are hardly rushing to proclaim themselves gay, Laurie Essig found, let alone unfurl the rainbow flag. Many are happier viewing themselves as transsexuals--simply born into the wrong bodies--than as violators of Russia's rigidly gendered behavioral codes, and others are too strongly nationalistic to embrace what is widely considered a Western liberation movement. Incidentally, Essig discloses both an exquisitely lyrical Russian alternative to the term queer--"people of the moonlight"--and a creepy clinical designation for lesbianism--"sluggishly manifesting schizophrenia"--a phrase that (happily) has no equivalent outside the former Soviet Union. --Regina Marler

Genres: Nonfiction, LGBT, Queer, Russia

273 pages, Kindle Edition

First published June 24, 1999

About the author

Laurie Essig teaches sociology at Middlebury College in Middlebury, Vermont. She has written for a variety of publications, including Legal Affairs, Salon, and the Chronicle of Higher Education. She blogs for the Chronicle's Brainstorm blog.

Reviews

[Marius · Rating 4 out of 5]

First and foremost, this book is an incredibly valuable historical document, being researched and written in the 90s in Russia, at a time when absolutely nothing was certain, and even less so the future of queers in the country. The author takes part in the queer activism of the time, seems to personally know all the important actors and describes the formational events of the movements. Even though the author is a scholar, the theory steps back, but through its connection to the actual events still makes powerful points.

Nevertheless, the author's account are extremely personal. Most of the information stems from her own experience or interviews with friends and acquaintances, only sometimes from newspaper articles. This gets problematic when she starts speculating about public figures' sexuality or very personally attacks the ignorant but probably well-meaning non-Russian organizers of workshops or festivals in Russia over a couple of pages.

The subjectivity culminates in the afterword, when the author reports a dream that she had, discussing it for probably half a page. Much of this personal account happens in the footnotes. And there are many of it - sometimes four in a sentence, resulting in 50 pages of footnotes for 175 pages of text, so you are basically skipping to the end of the book all the time.

Nevertheless, I have learned more from this book than from most non-fiction reports I have read. How homosexuality or queerness has historically been shaped as a subjectivity and not an identity in Russia, how queerness and nationalism went hand in hand in the 90s and why queer movements have never managed to establish queerness in the public discourse. This makes it an amazing read to understand today's Russia and its repressiveness against sexual minorities.

[Liza · Rating 5 out of 5]

I took the photo on the cover of this book. It's a fine book, too.

[Fenriz Angelo · Rating 5 out of 5]

Queer in Russia is the scholarly work of Laurie Essig, a sociologist deeply interested in Russia's queer community from mid 80's to mid 90's.

During the years she was in Moscow, Essig managed to amass an impresive amount of research by discovering and getting involved in queer activism, obtaining any documents mentioning homosexuality in either fiction or non-fiction works, and interviewing or hanging out with key members of queer Russian's groups that formed during her time there. All this expertly condensed in less than 300 pages.

Although it doesn't cover the period of time I was interest in (and to be honest this is the furthest I'd find on the subject historically), reading about the transition from the criminalization of homosexuality to a mild acceptance and how russians acted on and defined queerness was truly fascinating. Specifically when it comes to the failed attempts to create a political queer group to publicly fight for queer rights. Even Essig was bewildered in the beginning of her research because as an American lesbian from New York, she couldn't understand queer Russians not wanting to be part of a liberation movement, however, taking in the context of their cultural background, russian's were burned out of political propaganda and also the majority saw taking querness in a political sense like stripping themselves of russianess to label themselves solely by what they do in private which wasn't appealing at all. Something she truly understood years later when american and German members of queer rights organizations from their hometown came to Moscow to meet with fellow queer groups and organice a stonewall event (americans) and a queer film festival (germans). Both events resulted in a backlash from the russians whom saw westerns like colonizers and didn't like their patronizing attitude, Essig herself had the same sentiments. On top of all, russians saw westerner's queer expression vulgar, with no sense of aesthetics.

There's also an extensive analysis of the ties russian queerness has with nationalism and examines 3 prominent figures of neonazi/nationalist organizations who are also homosexuals, two of them publicly out who also have cooperated in queer organizations before getting involved in politics. Essig does a great job reflecting the attraction to such contradictory ideology and doesn't judge where these subjects come from.

This book was very enlightening, i learned not only about queer russian's lifestyles but also made me ponder about the complexity of sexuality as a whole.
In the end it made me curious to know how the queer community evolved in the 2000's when there was more openess and internet became more accessible. Considering the current re-criminalization of queerness I feel this book serves as a lookout on how queer life is going to be in the near future for the people who cannot leave.

[Reuben Woolley · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is an incredibly impressive book. As a history, it documents murky and hard to trace moments of public queer activism when it briefly looked feasible for a strong Russian LGBTQ+ movement to develop, and links it to the absolute car crash that was 1990s russian politics — particularly insightful is the final chapter on leading gay activists (Slava Mogutin, Evgeniya Debrianskaya) and their links to the Russian neofascist movement. As a piece of queer theory, it takes heavily from Foucault and Butler, and deconstructs the idea of a queerness based on ‘identity’ as something innate to queer politics (particularly interesting looking back at it from an era where ‘identity politics’ has become a supposed wedge driven between ‘leftism’ and ‘queer politics’) and explores how Russia‘s incredibly bizarre historical development of queerness as a political object/subject led to a queer population that struggled to gel with Western European terminology and concepts surrounding queerness. Something intriguing to me is that the modern Russian queer scene seems much more open to/welcoming of those same western terms and concepts— I wonder if there’s anything written that charts why and how that came about.

There are things in the book which are more or less useful and more or less suitable after 20 years of putin and his particular engagement with homophobic policy, but as a document of 1990s russian queerness I found it engaging, insightful and aware of its own limits. The only genuine criticism I have is that the question of “western imperialism”, a term which the author uses but doesn’t really explore the implications or even really a definition of, could do with rethinking. It seems absurd to me that one could call it ‘imperialism’ when an American LGBT organisation offers comparably small amounts of money to anti-government gay organisations in Russia, to allow them to keep functioning (regardless of how misguided those organisations’ understanding of the russian conception of queerness is, or how much they tried to educate on ideas of LGBT identity that were more comprehensible to an American audience than a russian one).