"One Does Not Talk about It, but It Is There": Unfolding Western–Soviet Queer Kinship in the Late Soviet Union

Abstract: The article reveals a previously hidden dimension of Soviet queer history by situating the USSR within a transnational queer context. It reconstructs previously unknown contacts between Soviet and foreign queer individuals from the early 1960s to the late 1980s. The article demonstrates that many left-oriented Western queer activists viewed the Soviet socialist project as inherently queer and understood Stalin's recriminalization of homosexuality as an abrupt departure from the ideals of the world's first socialist revolution. They traveled to the USSR to establish contacts and, in some cases, to critique the criminalization of homosexuality from a sympathetic leftist perspective. In doing so, they also produced acute and revealing observations about the lives of nonheterosexual people in the Soviet Union, as well as about broader societal attitudes toward them.