This thesis explores the development and complexities of queer existence shown ‘from below’, that is to say, focusing on the direct speech of non-elite homosexual men and sexual and gender non-conformists from the late imperial era up to the 1930s. The current historiography of homosexuality provides a somewhat limited view, emphasizing the importance and overarching influence of medical and legal discourses on queer subjects. The thesis offers a different perspective, shifting the analysis of hegemonic discourses of experts to the self-expression of homosexuals and gender and sexual non-conformists in the tumultuous time of the 1920s. More broadly, the thesis seeks to answer the question of when a modern homosexual identity emerges not as a scientifically constructed type but as a self-accepted category. The thesis attempts to reorient our understanding of the difference between the sodomite and the homosexual, demonstrating the process of self-fashioning as a crucial element of modern sexuality. It has been previously acknowledged that the Russian Revolution of 1917 and the abrogation of the anti-sodomy article greatly influenced the understanding of homosexuality by medical professionals and triggered the proliferation of new approaches to it.
Following this assessment, the thesis demonstrates how homosexuals and gender and sexual non-conformists inventively absorbed new knowledge to fashion themselves and made sense of their ‘abnormal’ sexuality. Even those who continued self-pathologizing were not passive objects of expert indoctrination. They conflicted with the doctors and sought new options to be cured. Others overcame the limited frame of ‘deviant sexuality’, insisting on their inclusion in the new society on their terms (‘no conventions will convince us that our actions are criminal and abnormal’). Being primarily focused on self-identified homosexuals and those males who experienced same-sex relations, this thesis also recognizes that emancipatory impulses were not restricted to them and greatly influenced a gamut of sexual and gender non-conformists who cannot be easily defined in modern terms of LGBTQ nomenclature
