Authors

Discussion

Inspired by approaches put forth in recent scholarship on LGBTQ+ history of the post-Soviet space, I engage in transnational and transtemporal analysis of queer lived experiences from the late Soviet period to the early 2000s. Using methods like ethnography, interviews, and life histories, alongside archival research, can reveal the “in/visible” spaces queer individuals carved out during communism and post-independence. 

My work examines the history of Belarusian and Ukrainian LGBTQ+ communities from the early 1980s to the late 1990s through a bottom-up approach. Drawing on oral history interviews and private queer archives in Eastern Europe, the research will analyseover 30 magazines and 15 interviews with queer Belarusians and Ukrainians. This methodology sheds light on queer experiences, struggles, and resilience to relieve the lack of local transitional justice and legal and prosecutorial failings. This approach enables an exploration of the heterogeneity of Soviet experiences regarding state control, policing, and homosexual repression. 

Moving beyond state-centred perspectives, I shift from homogenising the region, victimising the communities, and defining emancipation solely with public expression sexuality. Bridging the late Soviet period and the nineties, I challenge conventional chronologies and dispute the notion of the nineties as a universal transition. Instead, I explore the coexistence of stigma, repression, and positive develop, such as cross-border mobility, transnational exchange, and the decriminalisation of homosexuality. By studying Soviet history with the history of sexuality, my research brings about a necessary re-evaluation within the Eastern European context. Western narratives of queer liberation overlook the Soviet monopoly on power, which fostered alternative nonconformist lifestyles, prompting an examination of queer identity formation within local ‘non-visible’ spaces of resilience, self-expression, and self-determination. 

My study tackles how power, agency, and resistance intersect and reinforce one another, and their expression in daily life. I investigate the material and immaterial dimensions of ‘private’ and ‘public’ spaces, informed by queer practices and authoritarian control. Key questions include: How did Soviet power—through policing, biopolitics, and state-society dynamics—shape queer self-identification, understanding, and collective identity into the nineties and beyond? Furthermore, what do Belarusian and Ukrainian queer experiences reveal about national identity formation during the independence period?