Cover of Homosexual Desire in Revolutionary Russia
Homosexual Desire in Revolutionary Russia The Regulation of Sexual and Gender Dissent
by Dan Healey
University of Chicago Press, 2001
Cloth: 978-0-226-32233-9 | Paper: 978-0-226-32234-6 | Electronic: 978-0-226-92254-6
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226922546.001.0001

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ABOUT THIS BOOKAUTHOR BIOGRAPHYTABLE OF CONTENTS

ABOUT THIS BOOK

The first full-length study of same-sex love in any period of Russian or Soviet history, Homosexual Desire in Revolutionary Russia investigates the private worlds of sexual dissidents during the pivotal decades before and after the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution. Using records and archives available to researchers only since the fall of Communism, Dan Healey revisits the rich homosexual subcultures of St. Petersburg and Moscow, illustrating the ambiguous attitude of the late Tsarist regime and revolutionary rulers toward gay men and lesbians. Homosexual Desire in Revolutionary Russia reveals a world of ordinary Russians who lived extraordinary lives and records the voices of a long-silenced minority.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

Dan Healey is a Senior Lecturer in History at the University of Wales Swansea in the United Kingdom.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Plates

Tables

Acknowledgments

List of Abbreviations

Introduction

Part I. Same-Sex Eros in Modernizing Russia

1. Depravity’s Artel’ : Traditional Sex Between Men and the Emergence of a Homosexual Subculture

2. “Our Circle” : Sex Between Women in Modernizing Russia

Part II. Regulating Homosexual Desire in Revolutionary Russia

3. Euphemism and Discretion: Policing Sodomites and Tribades

4. The “Queer Subject” and the Language of Modernity: Reforming the Law on Same-Sex Love Before and After 1917

5. Perversion or Perversity? : Medicine, Politics, and the Regulation of Sex and Gender Dissent After Sodomy Decriminalization

6. “An Infinite Quantity of Intermediate Sexes”: The Transvestite and the Cultural Revolution

1. Hierarchies in the Russian bathhouse

2, 3, 4. Egorov Bathhouse, Kazachii Lane, St. Petersburg, ca. 1910

5. Nevskii Prospekt, St. Petersburg, ca. 1910

7. Cinizelli Circus, St. Petersburg, ca. 1914

8. Prince Feliks Iusupov and his family, 1901

12. The female homosexual A. P. in a skirt, Saratov, 1925

13. Advertisement for Spermokrin, late 1920s

15. A group of bachi, Samarkand, 1913

17. Bachi posing for a camera, Samarkand, 1913

18. Soviet Moscow’s cruising grounds: Nikitskie Gates Square, 1930

20. Soviet Moscow’s cruising grounds: Sverdlov Square, 1938

22. Inside the bathhouse: rows of benches, 1939

23. Inside the bathhouse: the washing chamber, 1932

24. Soviet transvestite, 1957

25, 26. Pathologized sexualities—a female homosexual and transvestite, ca. 1965

27, 28, 29, 30, 31. Pathologized sexualities—“female homosexuals,” ca. 1965

7. “Can a Homosexual Be a Member of the Communist Party?” : The Making of a Soviet Compulsory Heterosexuality

Part III. Homosexual Existence and Existing Socialism

8. “Caught Red-Handed" : Making Homosexuality Antisocial in Stalin's Courts

9. Epilogue: The Twin Crucibles of the Gulag and the Clinic

Conclusion

Appendix: How Many Victims of the Antisodomy Law?

1. Sodomy Convictions, 1934–50

2. Sodomy Convictions in USSR and RSFSR, 1961–81

3. Sodomy Convictions, 1987–91

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Book published by University of Chicago Press, 2001. Page maintained by BiblioVault.