Doing LGBTQ+ History in Russia Today

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University of Dundee

What are the questions that young historians of Russia’s LGBT+ life are asking today? Join us for a fascinating look at LGBT+ life in Russia

Is it possible to write new queer histories in Putin’s Russia? How do young historians get away with doing their research in a politically hostile environment? Are there any sources to write the story of the queer past in Russia and the Soviet Union? Hosted by the University of Dundee's very own Professor Perry Willson, we will take you on a tour of new and exciting stories from the LGBTQ+ past of the Soviet Union and its core nation, Russia. You will meet brave, talented young Russian and Western researchers. Together, we will explore some of the stories they have uncovered in today’s Russia about the history of queer people under tsars and commissars. They include:•	Nika Polyakov, a gay man who explained what the Russian Revolution meant to homosexuals to the leading psychiatrist of the Soviet Union. •	Harry Whyte, the Scottish Communist who stood up to Joseph Stalin when the dictator made male gay love a crime. Artists are taking a leading role in telling Russia’s queer stories too. The Philomena Project’s ‘Voices’ brought stories of Chechen Muslim women-loving women to the stage in 2019. But how can artists and activists bring these stories to life when ‘gay propaganda’ is banned?Dan Healey is Professor of Modern Russian History at the University of Oxford. He is a historian of sexualities and genders in modern Russia and the Soviet Union. His publications include Russian Homophobia from Stalin to Sochi, published in December 2017 by Bloomsbury Academic, and the first full-length history of homosexuality in Russia, Homosexual Desire in Revolutionary Russia: The Regulation of Sexual and Gender Dissent (University of Chicago Press, 2001). A new translation of this book by Tatiana Klepikova will be published by GARAZH Museum in Moscow in 2022. Professor Perry Willson's main research interests lie in women's/gender history and in the history of Italian Fascism. Amongst other topics, she has published on the role of women in the Fascist Party, the Fascist mass mobilising organisations, the history of the private sphere, and on representations of motherhood in Italy and its diaspora. Her most recent monograph explores the history of Italian women over the course of the twentieth century.Banner: Yegorov Bathhouse, St Petersburg, 1910. Photo: Karl K. BullaImage of Dan Healey: Charlotte HalePoster: 'We exist': Art &amp; Queer festival with 'Unstraight Museum', Minsk, Belarus, 2017. Photo: Dan Healey

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Doing LGBTQ+ History in Russia Today

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