Queer in Russia: A Story of Sex, Self, and the Other

Queer in Russia is an engrossing and highly readable sociological study that will disturb readers who hoped or assumed that President Yeltsin's 1993 decriminalization of consensual sex between adults of the same sex would unlock the Iron Closet. Since 1917, homosexuality has officially existed in Russia only as a legal or medical category, either a criminal act or an illness. Russian men and women who experience same-sex desire have so internalized the various proscriptions of society and the law that they are hardly rushing to proclaim themselves gay, Laurie Essig found, let alone unfurl the rainbow flag. Many are happier viewing themselves as transsexuals--simply born into the wrong bodies--than as violators of Russia's rigidly gendered behavioral codes, and others are too strongly nationalistic to embrace what is widely considered a Western liberation movement. Incidentally, Essig discloses both an exquisitely lyrical Russian alternative to the term queer--"people of the moonlight"--and a creepy clinical designation for lesbianism--"sluggishly manifesting schizophrenia"--a phrase that (happily) has no equivalent outside the former Soviet Union. --Regina Marler