Stonewall Never Happened: Conceptualizing Queer History and Rights in Russia and Eastern Europe

For the LGBTQ+ community in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, 1989 held out the promise of new freedoms and opportunities. As communist regimes collapsed across Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union disintegrated, emerging liberal democratic regimes seemed to herald a bright future to LGBTQ individuals. 1989 was supposed to be for queer East Europeans what 1969 and Stonewall symbolized for LGBTQ Americans: a year of sexual liberation and political emancipation. This talk explores how LGBTQ rights in Eastern Europe and Russia have fared under democratic regimes since 1989, paying particular attention to the harsh repression of gay-pride parades, street protests, and political theatre. 

Marko Dumančić is Assistant Professor at Western Kentucky University. He works on a range of topics involving gender and sexual identity in the Soviet Union during the Cold War. His primary research examines changing conceptions of masculinity in post-Stalinist society of the 1950s and 1960. He is currently completing a monograph entitledThe “New Men” of the Soviet Sixties: Masculinity in Film and Society after Stalin. His work has appeared in Journal of Cold War Studies, Cold War History, and Studies in Russian and Soviet Cinema. 

This talk is co-sponsored by the UNC Provost’s Committee on LGBTQ Life and the UNC Curriculum in Women’s and Gender Studies