The recent prohibition of the propaganda of non-traditional sexual relations to minors has received substantial criticism at the international level and has been the subject of increased academic inquiry, usually focusing on activism. Using a Foucauldian framework, this paper takes a different starting point, with the understanding that the politicization of homophobia has resulted in the creation of the homosexual as a symbol of the perverted West.
This paper seeks to understand how the politicization of homophobia has affected apolitical sexual minorities of the post-Soviet generation, by analyzing interviews with Russian homosexual and bisexual men conducted over the Winter of 2016 using social media.
The key aims were to understand how sexual minorities have responded to the homophobic conditions of society by examining their lived experience, in order to investigate their notions of community, possible forms of resistance to biopolitical governance, and essentially to discover how they make sense of their sexual identity in light of the conditions they face.
The results reveal that the interviewees accept their own sexual orientation but reject the idea that it should mean something. Further, they seek to distance themselves from an imagined “LGBT community” and the actions of LGBT activists in Russia, which they perceive as ‘perverted’ and ‘harmful’. When discussing their sexual orientation, they juxtapose their own ‘normality’ and ‘masculinity’ opposed to this ‘alien’, ‘feminine’ and ‘abnormal’ community. Rejecting the notion of belonging to a wider community, they instead seek to educate their own friends and family and in turn, build smaller communities based on friendship and kinship rather than sexuality.
