Born in New York to Yugoslav parents, Sonja Franeta is a writer, educator, translator, and activist. In 1991, she was a delegate to the first Russian Lesbian and Gay Symposium, organized by International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission (IGLHRC), and she helped facilitate LGBTQ film festivals in Russia.
From 1992 until 1996, Franeta collected video interviews with Russian gay, lesbian, and transgender people. Before Russia repealed its sodomy laws in 1993, some of the people she interviewed had served criminal sentences for homosexuality, while others experienced forced psychiatric treatment. In 2004, Franeta published the edited transcripts of these interviews in Russia, and later translated them to English in a book called Pink Flamingos: 10 Siberian Interviews (Dacha Books, 2017). These in-depth conversations allow us to learn her subjects’ life stories, as well as to understand the way they evaluated their experiences and conceptualized questions of identity and belonging.
In her second book, My Pink Road to Russia: Tales of Amazons, Peasants and Queers (Dacha Books, 2015), Franeta collected her essays on a wide range of topics. They include her childhood in the Bronx with a Croat mother and Serb father, her coming out story, her experiences as a female machinist and labor activist, and studying Russian literature, becoming a writer, and extensive travels across the former Soviet Union and the deep friendships she has formed there. Franeta’s writing is often very personal, exceptionally frank, and deeply insightful. Coming from a working-class background, she studied at NYU and UC Berkeley before rejecting the traditional academic path. In the 1990s, she taught English in Moscow and spent several years in Novosibirsk, working on a project for people with disabilities.
Reading Franeta’s personal essays together with her interviews allows us to better understand her own difficult path to coming out, and her commentary on her experiences as a lesbian in the US and Russia illuminates the nuanced subtext of her questions and provides additional information about the answers, which, as she guides us to understand, cannot always be taken at face value. These books are a true gift to any reader interested in better understanding the USSR and Russia’s queer community, as well as problems facing any queer person situating themselves across cultural borders. This interview was conducted on Zoom and through email, and I’m delighted to share this conversation with our readers.
Olga Zilberbourg: You grew up speaking Serbo-Croatian at home and English at school, and then studied Russian at NYU and Comparative Literature at UC Berkeley. How did you first become interested in Russian language and literature?
Sonja Franeta: My family were immigrant, working-class people but they all worked at New York University, Bronx campus! My grandfather was a carpenter there. My mother worked in the library. My father worked as a maintenance mechanic. NYU was near where I lived, and I got a partial scholarship to attend. I ended up meeting my husband there—in my other life, I was married to a man, and he was very good to me. He was a physics professor. I was able to finish my studies at NYU without having to pay fees because he taught there.
I’d started learning Russian in the uptown campus in the Bronx. At the time, I was majoring in English. I wanted to study Serbo-Croatian, which was my native language. They may have had first-level classes in the downtown campus, but they offered intensive Russian at the Bronx campus and I had a great teacher. I just fell in love with Russian. I loved Russian poetry and wanted to read Marina Tsvetaeva and Anna Akhmatova and other writers in the original.
So then, I went to the downtown campus to do more Russian because the department was bigger there. Professor Andrej Kodjak, the Chair, was very encouraging and said I could go for a master’s degree even though I had minored in Russian. They welcomed me with open arms. One of the professors was Leonid Rzhevsky. He was an émigré writer and was published in samizdat before he left the Soviet Union. He got me started on translation. I translated his book on Solzhenitsyn… I was in my 20s when it was published.
I liked translating. I don’t know how he figured out that I might like translating. But he coaxed me into doing it, and then I did it, and I loved it. This project got me more involved with Russian. Since then, I’ve done all kinds of translating and even interpreting. I enjoy all of it.
Olga Zilberbourg: Then, you moved to Berkeley and you started in the Ph.D. program in Comparative Literature there. Was that a very different experience?
Sonja Franeta: It was quite different. There was something very homey and warm about the NYU Russian department. But Berkeley was stiff and academic. It wasn’t only for me. I’d met someone else from NYU who was in the math department at Berkeley and who was having a very hard time there.
I didn’t do well at Berkeley. Part of it was that I was married and living near Stanford. I had a very long commute. After passing the written exam, I could not pass the oral “permission to proceed” exam. The committee was too intimidating, and I froze. They said I wasn’t “academia material.” Right now, I’m perfectly fine with not being academia material. At the time, however, I became very depressed.
I did make some lifelong friends during that time. I met Simon Karlinsky there. When I first got to Berkeley, Karlinsky was on sabbatical, and when he came back, he tried to help me. Years later he’d say, “Why don’t you appeal?” He suggested going to talk to a women’s affirmative action and recruitment office on campus. There was a mandate to help women Ph.D. candidates advance. I really didn’t want to get back into academia. Since I wasn’t in the Russian department, but in Comparative Literature, he couldn’t help me much anyway. When I was doing the LGBTQ activism in the 1990s, we connected and became good friends. I’m really glad things turned out the way they did and I left the academic track.
My time at Berkeley was a turning point. After that, I came out as a lesbian.
Olga Zilberbourg: In an unexpected irony of fate, you came out as a lesbian in 1977 on your first trip to the Soviet Union. You were still married at the time and living in England. What was that time like?
Sonja Franeta: This was the real turning point. After leaving Berkeley, my husband at the time and I were living in Birmingham, England, because he was in the physics lab at the University of Birmingham. I would take the train into London, walk around, go to a show or museum. One time I was literally walking down the street and stopped to read a card in the window of a small bookstore. It said, “We’re looking for a few more people for our trip to the Soviet Union.” So I called them.
That trip was organized by a group of communists from different parts of the UK. It wasn’t a tourist trip. They took us to Moscow, Leningrad, and Narva, Estonia, and we visited different people and places of interest in the USSR. The group valued my interpreting abilities. I helped with that. And that’s where I met my first love. She had been backpacking all over Europe and she decided to take that trip to the Soviet Union. She just happened to be in the same place at the same time. And she asked me a question that put me over the edge, a question I will never forget: “Did you ever think about relating to a woman?” I was married to a man. It was with her I came out—in Narva and in Moscow. It was very romantic.
Olga Zilberbourg: Your essays are often very sexually explicit. I was very grateful to you for breaking the taboos about sharing intimate moments in writing. I assume this was a very deliberate decision on your part. Were these scenes difficult to write or did that come naturally?
Sonja Franeta: It wasn’t hard. I like shocking people. In my essay “The Rest is Poetry” in My Pink Road to Russia, I write about the discussion I had with my friend Lena. She was questioning my explicitness in my poetry. As I say in that essay, it took her a little time, but later, as she became an activist and the head of the LGBT archives, she basically started doing the same thing. She became more open, even in her speech.
It’s incredible what came to pass in the 1990s in Russia. There were so many public conversations, even on TV, so many interviews with gay rights activists. These interviews were fearless. For example, with Evgenia Debryanskaya. She was one of the organizers of the 1991 Russian Lesbian and Gay Symposium and Film Festival. She did a lot of activist work for a long time. Then she opened a few lesbian bars in Moscow. Definitely a longtime leader for lesbians. One organization that was important in the nineties that she helped form was called Треугольник [Triangle], after the pink triangle.
The opening of the LGBT archives in Moscow, the collecting and digitizing of these archives, was another incredible thing that happened during that era. Elena Gusyatinskaya and others, including the Triangle organization, all helped. It was a lot of work, but it was a collective effort. The archives also provided a place where people could come regularly and talk about books, about LGBT events, in the comfort of an apartment surrounded by the books and clippings of their history. It was a meeting place that continued after so many other organizations had to close. Today, none of this can continue. Activists are hiding all the materials they’d been able to gather. This is such a tragedy.
Olga Zilberbourg: You conducted the interviews collected in Pink Flamingos throughout the 1990s. How did you select the pieces that ended up in the book?
Sonja Franeta: The editors from the LGBT archives and I very quickly decided to focus on Siberia for my book. I had heard a lot of prejudice from Muscovites about Novosibirsk and Siberia in general. People in Moscow would say, “the provinces.” Siberians were marginalized. So, hearing from Siberians was a pretty big deal. My friends in Moscow at the LGBT archives helped me to transcribe and edit these interviews. It was just such a joy working on this together. There were eight interviews that were on video and most of those were included in the book. That video project was supposed to be a film, but the film idea was cancelled. We didn’t get funding for it. I was happy to include the interviews in Pink Flamingos.
I named my book Pink Flamingos after the 1996 Tomsk LGBT Film Festival that I helped organize with Sergey Kuzmin, one of my interviewees, who had an LGBTQ support group there called Астарта [Astarta]. The festival was very successful in terms of organizing, media coverage, and even local government support.
When I interviewed in Siberia, I learned a lot about how non-lesbian and gay people thought about queers at that time. All very stereotypical. Often, they associated lesbians and gays with prison. Several of the journalists who worked for the Tomsk TV station were gay and they interviewed passersby during the film festival for the TV news. They captured some of the things that people said on the streets. “Oh, there’s nothing wrong with people loving each other.” “It’s so wonderful to have the Americans coming here with these films because we never had those films before.” I was so surprised at how positive their responses were.
On the other hand, behind the scenes, in the film booth one day, I heard the most homophobic comments. I had a conversation with two women workers, and they said, “These people are sick.” And I said, “But this is what the film festival is all about. Opinions like yours are the opinions that we’re trying to change.” And they repeated, “This is perverted.” And I said, “But I’m one of these people.” And they went, “No, no, no, you’re not.”
It was very odd, what people knew about lesbian and gay people. Sometimes it was just some personal experience that clued people in. I remember one woman who was a cook in Tomsk. She told me a story about her friend, who was writing letters to her and then he stopped. He was gay and he took his life. She knew that he took his life because he was gay. And she told us, “I want more films, more events like this festival, so that people will understand what happened to my friend.”
Her friend took his life because he felt so alone and hopeless. I was very happy that people like her were grateful that we brought the festival. She knew about gay people because she had a personal experience. But generally the stories of lesbian and gay people were not part of the culture, and what people knew was very skewed.
Olga Zilberbourg: When did you start coming to Russia regularly?
Sonja Franeta: The first trip for the Lesbian and Gay Symposium organized by IGLHRC was in 1991 and then it was every year after that.
I worked with the San Francisco Wheeled Mobility Center as a facilitator for a project to help women with disabilities have more access and make more connections. In Novosibirsk, I was to help Siberians learn to build their own wheelchairs. The Novosibirsk project for people with disabilities was really wonderful. I even got my gay and lesbian friends involved. Everyone really wanted to help, and there was a lot of work for everyone.
Olga Zilberbourg: The law that criminalized homosexuality in Russia was repealed only in 1993, but you started interviewing people before that. Did you notice a difference in the way people approached these interviews in the early 90s versus the mid-90s?
Sonja Franeta: I didn’t really. I think even in 1996 people were still dealing with being open. Many people wanted to be open. When I was interviewing one of my friends in Novosibirsk, he suddenly mentioned Oleg Kuzmich, a man who spent 18 years in prison for being gay. And my friend said, “Well, you know, he might be interested in doing an interview.”
Some people were becoming more willing to talk about each other as being gay, which was not the case in the beginning. People were trained to be very cautious and not “out” anybody else. I made sure to get permissions from people. My subjects included many clauses in the permissions they gave me. They were very protective of how their information was going to be used.
Olga Zilberbourg: One of the points you make in both My Pink Road to Russia and Pink Flamingos is that people you talked to in Russia resisted the Western terminology, including the very labels “gay” and “lesbian” and the idea of “coming out.” The people you talked to insisted on the notion of identity being more fluid than these labels afforded. To others, the question of identity was a very personal one and they resisted any labels. In your essay, “Siberians: Two Interviews,” you write that, “If I learned anything from Russian gays and lesbians, it was how deeply sexuality was situated in the context of a culture. It was not something you could generalize about across cultures.” And yet it seems that you found difficult to avoid labels altogether?
Sonja Franeta: The pre-existing culture was quite hidden and coded in Russia. When I got there, the people I met talked in terms of roles. They used words like “active” and “passive” to describe relationships. To me it seemed a lot like our US butch/femme culture. In addition, there was a lot of transgender talk. This came from the Soviet psychologists, who often pushed those who identified as queer to change genders—because they were attracted to the same sex. I heard this quite a bit in interviews. Some did not want to transition, of course. When I came to Russia with IGLHRC the first time in 1991, I felt we brought so many positive images, so many possible ways of being, and it was a great eye-opening experience for the queers of the former Soviet Union.
Doing my interviews, I had to really learn to listen. There were times when I maybe put words into the mouths of the people I interviewed, but they turned around and said, “No, no.” They’d correct me.
One of the couples I interviewed, for instance, corrected me as we began the interview. “I don’t know how to tell you this but we are not lesbians,” Masha said. “You see, I’m bisexual. I was married. I could be with either a man or a woman . . . And Katya is what we call transsexual. This is a person who wants to be the opposite sex, a person who dresses like and plays the role of the opposite sex in the relationship.” They had thought a lot about this.
My interview with this couple and a separate interview years later with the trans partner, Katya, are in Pink Flamingos. The couple separated mainly because of the children but they were still friends. In the second interview, Katya told me she looked into transitioning further, but decided not to. She was satisfied that the psychologist understood her, and she wanted to live her life simply. I asked Katya if she wanted to be called “he” in the second interview but no, she didn’t. Even her name hadn’t changed. It was a bit confusing to me, but Katya didn’t want to be tied to one gender. She presented as male. She had a short haircut, wore masculine clothes, and loved riding her motorcycle. She simply decided it was too much trouble to transition. I think she would have wanted to be nonbinary today. We just didn’t have a word for it at that time.
People in Russia changed their identities in order to pass sometimes. I met one young couple who told me very openly that one of them was going to transition to male so that they could avoid harassment as a couple. This is not something that I ran into in the US, when we were coming out during the women’s movement in the 1970s.
In the early 2000s, I participated in a research project called “Leaving the Herd: The Lingering Threat of Difference for Same-Sex Desires in Postcommunist Russia,” examining the way Russian gay and lesbian people didn’t want to stick out from the crowd. I think there wasn’t as much compulsion to identify in Russia at the time as there was in the United States, simply because they wanted to be part of society, not outside of it.
Olga Zilberbourg: I was very impressed by the range of the ethnic and religious backgrounds of the people you interviewed. Among them were people of Tatar background, Ukrainian, Polish, Volga Germans, and so on. Did you pursue this diversity intentionally?
Sonja Franeta: I did not. It happened naturally. And I, too, was surprised with the mixture. It may have to do with the cultural makeup of Siberian cities, because it was where many people settled after they’d been exiled to labor camps.
Olga Zilberbourg: Was there a difference between the way people of different generations responded to your questions?
Sonja Franeta: I had a hard time finding older people who wanted to talk. I mention Sofia Polyakova in My Pink Road to Russia. I did an interview with her about Sofia Parnok’s and Marina Tsvetaeva’s relationship. She researched and wrote about them in a book called Закатные оны дни: Цветаева и Парнок [Sunset Days: Tsvetaeva and Parnok], the first scholar to take up this subject. The book was published by Ardis in 1983 and she had published her great collection of Parnok’s poetry a few years earlier, also with Ardis. These books were never published in Russia in her lifetime.
When I came to her house, she and her partner were so flirtatious with me. Polyakova kept using the word “Sapphic.” Everything was “Sapphic.” It’s funny that now more and more lesbians in the US seem to be using the word “Sapphic” for their books. At the time, it was a kind of a code word.
Polyakova was a wonderful, a very warm person. She died a year or so after I did that interview. I was really glad I had the chance to meet and speak with her. She gave me some of my favorite photographs of Sofia Parnok and some of Tsvetaeva, too.
I was very close to interviewing a woman in Siberia who was older. She almost consented to an interview about her experiences as a lesbian professor. We brought our cameras and filming equipment and got everything set up, and then she thought about it again, and said, “No. Your subject is too narrow.”
Later, when I spoke to my friend who knew her, he said she was too afraid. She had gotten fired from her job as a professor probably because someone found out she had a woman partner. So, she didn’t want to take a risk. It was sad. She must have been at a difficult point in her life when we came. But what she’d said to us was that our subject was too narrow, and she tried to convince us not to do these LGBTQ interviews.
Olga Zilberbourg: At the time in the US, much of LGBT organizing revolved around the AIDS epidemic. How did that affect the people in Russia that you talked to?
Sonja Franeta: My very good friends in Novosibirsk started an organization called Humanitarian Project in the 1990s. At that time in Russia, AIDS was associated primarily with IV drug users. There were stories about Russian women getting HIV from having sex with men from another country, too. The narrative around it didn’t develop in the same ways as it did in the US. Though, in Russia, gay and lesbian people were very much at the forefront of organizing around AIDS and trying to spread the word about it. A lot of funding came with that work—until politicians decided that it was too much influence from the West. However, they couldn’t stop the AIDS/HIV education work because Russia had a high rate of infection.
Olga Zilberbourg: You publishedPink Flamingos in Russia, in the Russian language, in 2004. How was it received?
Sonja Franeta: The book was very welcome and celebrated in Russia. Gay.ru, an important website at the time, sponsored my presentation in their headquarters. They sold my book. They helped to get it into Russian bookstores, for instance, one called Indigo. The book was sold out in the first year.
Throughout the 2000s, I was able to publish in Russia. I published several interviews and essays in a magazine founded by a friend of mine called Остров [Island]. My friend did a wonderful job with this journal. I published my interview with Sofia Polyakova there, among other pieces. It felt great to know that my pieces in Russian were being read in Moscow.
Now Gay.ru no longer exists and I could be considered “a foreign agent” by the Russian government. I have now made both of my Russian-language books available on my website for free, so that people could access them.
Olga Zilberbourg: Did you start working on the essays in My Pink Road to Russia in English after Pink Flamingos came out in Russia?
Sonja Franeta: The writings in My Pink Road were written over a long period of time. I translated the interviews from Pink Flamingos to English and I wanted to publish them in the United States but a literary agent told me there wasn’t much interest. I don’t know what it is, but people here are not interested in Russia. It might be the old anti-Communist prejudice. Whatever it was, I could not get it published, but I was happy with the Russian audience and I translated Pink Flamingos and self-published it.
A few essays from My Pink Road to Russia appeared in various English-language anthologies and magazines. During COVID, I had it translated to Russian by a wonderful translator, Ilya Davydov, and published it on Ridero.ru [Russian equivalent of Amazon Publishing—PL]. I have since taken it back and published it on my website for Russian readers. Ridero wanted me to take out all the LGBT content, “according to the law.” That would be the whole book!
Olga Zilberbourg: Since the first law “against propaganda of homosexuality” in 2013, and increasingly in the last three years, Russia has been restoring the Soviet practice of criminalizing all mentions of homosexuality. How did this affect your work?
Sonja Franeta: First, in 2020 Ridero.ru asked me to take out the pages mentioning Oleg Kuzmich, who in his 20s was accused of pedophilia and as a result spent 18 years in the Gulag. The part where he talks about his first sexual experience with another boy, which they deemed inappropriate for print. Okay, I took that out. That was just a few pages. Then, recently, they told me that they wanted more out of the book.
I said, “Forget it! I’m not doing it.” I took the book out of there. This was all in preparation for what censorship was to come. Here’s what I noticed about Russian sexual minorities of today. The people who were in the closet for so long in the USSR, and then lived through the 1990s, through the period of openness, did not go back in the closet. The last ten years of Putin’s repressions also didn’t make them go back in the closet. Some have emigrated but people are still living openly. And even considering how short their history of openness was, things today are not the way they were before, in the USSR. The Internet, too, has changed a lot of things for many people. Literature, media are still accessible to a lot of people in Russia. Activists are definitely being harassed and jailed. Books are being banned, as are any rainbows or other queer signs. There are no more public events.
Olga Zilberbourg: Can you share what you are working on now?
Sonja Franeta: I just finished a novel. It’s about three women expats living in Russia in the 1990s. They are queer and they meet lots of interesting people there, which gives me the opportunity to explore all kinds of different issues. My first readers said it’s good. I’ll try to get it published.
I’m also continuing to write poetry, and I’m reading a lot and reviewing books. I love books. I love finding out what people are writing about in this country and other countries. I’m very concerned about the world right now. All the wars that are going on. Very sad.
I just have to say that those years in Russia were definitely a highlight of my life, the excitement about the new openness, interviewing people, meeting people. It was a fabulous time. And I keep in touch with some who are still there and with those who have been able to leave.
I worry about my friends who are still in Russia. I was thinking about a very good friend of mine. He was talking about leaving with his partner but now he has stopped talking about that. I’m worried about him. I’m worried about all of my friends there.
Olga Zilberbourg: The latest ruling of Russia’s Supreme Court from November 30, 2023 means that any person who as much as displays a rainbow flag can be labeled an extremist, a step away from an accusation of terrorism.
Sonja Franeta: It’s absurd—extremists? LGBTQ people are just trying to live their lives. I don’t know how Russian people are letting Putin get away with any of this.
Sonja Franeta was born in New York to a Yugoslav immigrant family and went to New York University, where she became interested in literature and in writing. She received her Master’s Degree in Russian Literature at NYU and then in Comparative Literature at U.C. Berkeley. She came out as a lesbian in 1977 on a trip to Russia and became a political activist in San Francisco. In 1991, she joined the first LGBT delegation to Russia and continued to travel and work in Russia during the 1990s in its transformative period. In 1996, she helped organize the first queer film festival in Tomsk, Siberia. She has published her poems, prose, translations, and articles in both the U.S. and Russian alternative presses. In 2004, Розовые фламинго (Pink Flamingos: 10 Siberian Interviews), a book of queer interviews, was published in Russian, with the help of her friends at the Moscow Lesbian and Gay Archives. Her book My Pink Road to Russia: Tales of Amazons, Peasants and Queers (2015), including essays, stories, and memoir, was translated to Russian by Ilya Davydov. In 2017, Sonja translated Pink Flamingos into English. Both books are available in Russian on her website www.sfraneta.com.
Punctured Lines 