Ten interviews of Siberian gays, lesbians, bisexual and transgender people, based on videotape transcripts of 1990s interviews were first published in the original Russian. The book is named after the Siberian queer film festival that took place in Tomsk in in 1996. Sonja Franeta, the interviewer, writer and translator, traveled extensively throughout Russia, from Khabarovsk to Moscow along the Trans-Siberian Railway, stopping in several Siberian cities to meet LGBT people and talk to them about their lives. Some interviewees spoke about their experiences as sexual minorities for the first time. People from Novosibirsk, Krasnoyarsk and Tomsk discussed how they were able to survive the secrecy and stigma of being queer. Men were put in prison camps and women institutionalized in psychiatric institutions during the Stalin years and after. Interviewees also talked about family backgrounds and changes in politics. This is the first book of its kind in Russia, documenting gay and lesbian and transgender stories in the voices of the people themselves.
About the Author Sonja Franeta is a writer, educator and activist born in the Bronx, New York to an immigrant Yugoslav family. She has lived in Moscow, in Novosibirsk, and in St. Petersburg, Russia. As a North American delegate at the International Gay and Lesbian Symposium and Film Festival (Moscow and St. Petersburg, 1991), she began her first interviews of sexual minorities at that conference and continued her project for the next ten years. Her poems, prose and translations have been published in U.S. journals and anthologies and in Russian and other publications. She graduated from New York University and received an M.A. in Russian Literature and then an M.A. from the University of California at Berkeley in Comparative Literature.
