Authors

Evgeny Gurin¹;  ¹ University of Oxford, St Antony's College, UK

Discussion

21^st century Western media depictions of Russia as hegemonically homophobic have rarely been challenged, masking a far more nuanced reality. Political elites’ views clash with cultural icons, while public opinion is altogether understudied. At the same time, until this year the Eurovision Song Contest attracted both significant viewership within Russia and serious efforts by Russian state media to win a competition that celebrates inclusivity and queer identity. In a country with little room for open discussion of LGBTQ+ issues, Russian online forums on Eurovision in the 2000s and 2010s reacting to queer representation at the contest offer a rare glimpse into public perspectives on this topic. This paper takes a social and cultural history approach to examine and compare Russian attitudes at the elite level and at the audience level to queer visibility at Eurovision.

Through a textual analysis of 11,703 Russian-language forum posts on key Eurovision entries, this paper finds a wide spectrum of reactions beyond merely homophobia. Close reading of these posts also provide a nuanced counter-image to more uniform coverage of Russia as homophobic in Western news media, examined in the context of LGBTQ+ legal history in the USSR and Russia. This paper expands understanding of Russian attitudes towards queer representation and offers a framework for further transnational social history of Europe through the prism of Eurovision.