THE CALVERT JOURNAL: Where can we turn to uncover the pre-history of LGBTQ rights in modern Russia?
It’s difficult to learn about LGBTQ history in a country where the community still struggles with homophobia at all levels of society. Most of the current research on the topic is still carried out by foreign scholars, and most of the [the] historical Russian texts on homosexuality, even when written by prominent scholars and writers, are disregarded. So where can we turn to learn about the phantom queer cultures that laid the ground for LGBTQ life in Soviet and post-communist Russia?
Historian Dan Healey, whose 2001 book Homosexual Desire in Revolutionary Russia was translated into Russian in 2008, argues that despite several prohibitive laws sexuality was considerably less regulated in pre-revolutionary Russia than elsewhere in Europe at that time. Several researchers claim that historical accounts show that before the 18th century, Russian society held rather lenient views toward homosexuality, and that homophobia was at least in part “imported” from Europe by Peter the Great — along with European traditions in food, architecture and fashion. Some argue that it was Peter’s father, Tsar Alexis, who first started persecuting gay people, but the first law that made homosexuality illegal (initially only for men in the army and navy) was signed by Peter in 1716. For civilians homosexuality was made illegal in 1835 — again for men only. However, not only there few recorded cases of these laws were actually applied, but the rapid urbanisation that followed the abolition of serfdom in 1861 allowed for LGBTQ communities to form in the capital, St Petersburg, as well as Moscow and other large cities. » | Text: Tasha Raspopina | Monday, June 3, 2019
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