Authors
Charlotte Dowling1; 1 University of Oxford, UK Discussion
This paper investigates the extent to which bisexuality has featured on Gay.ru, the largest queer website in Russia to date. Through analysis of posts tagged under ‘bisexual life stories’ (bi istorii iz zhizni) since the website’s creation in 1997, I identify two primary strands of content: first-person, user-submitted life writing; and material republished from print journals and other websites. I argue that these traces of lived experience are central to understanding both the history of bisexuality on Gay.ru and the ways perceptions of bisexuality have evolved among Russians since the late 1990s. Surveying this content, I trace how bisexual people, who may not have had any real-life connection to lesbian and gay communities, sought a sense of belonging and mutual, or simply self-, understanding online in the early days of the Runet. I then highlight how other first-person ‘life stories’ posted were not, in fact, authored by self-identifying bisexuals, but were rather written about them by an interviewer, friend, colleague, or (ex-)lover to speculate about how their sexuality should be defined. These personal tales of sexual history, marriage and threesomes frequently reveal anxieties about the accepted gender performances in sexual relationships and underscore differences in how men and women were expected to experience sexual encounters and fantasies. Is Gay.ru, then, a more ‘bisexual’ digital space than its name suggests? 
