SUMMARY:

This is the publication of a series of unique archival documents – letters from homosexual men and women, written in the mid-1920s to medical experts. Signed and anonymous, these letters present a unique window on the subjectivity of the early Soviet gay community, without intervention by any intermediaries and thus unhampered by legal, medical, or political censorship. Although the letters were penned by undereducated people of lower social background, their authors very persistently and eloquently elaborate their distinctive self-perception and contemplate their group identity and place within the Soviet society. They addressed medical experts as consultants rather than ultimate arbiters and authorities, in the mode of dialogue or even polemic.
For the first time, these sources depict the everyday life and sexual practices of gays in Odessa, Rostov, and the Russian countryside in the 1910s and 1920s. The authors of the letters creatively use elements of expert knowledge available to them to elaborate and express their personal and group experiences and self-perceptions. Interrogations of one of the authors several years later, in 1933, within the context of a large-scale trial of homosexual men of Leningrad, put these instances of free speech from the mid-1920s into historical perspective. The OGPU documents published alongside the earlier letters capture the beginning of a radical shift in the rhetoric and even vocabulary of the public discourse on homosexuality in the Soviet Union and the rise of homophobic hegemonic discourse.