ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book addresses three major audiences for whom the analysis should have relevance. It describes the individual-level institutions that engendered in Soviet homosexuals a sense of fraternity with one another. The book focuses on the array and arrangement of societal-level institutions that defined the social environment of Soviet homosexuals’ everyday life: the bureaucratic rules and demographic patterns that dictated their living conditions and the geographic locales that served as the loci for gay and lesbian social as well as sexual behaviors. It examines the socio-legal situation that Soviet gay men and lesbians had to abide and discuss the few attempts that were made to create both political and social-economic group-level institutions for gay and lesbian people in the USSR. In the USSR, the social-scientific study of homosexuality was, until the final years of Soviet rule, simply taboo.
