David Tuller provides the first look into the emotional and sexual lives of Russian lesbians and gays and the pervasive influence of the state on gay life. Part travelogue, part social history, and part journalistic inquiry, the book challenges our assumptions about what it means to be gay. The book also explores key issues in Russia and Soviet life, including concepts of friendship, community, gender, love, fate, and the relationship between the public and private spheres.
"Tuller's observant reporting and personal experiences make for absorbing reading: the human comedy rendered in unexpected ways."—New Yorker
"Anyone who thinks San Francisco is the world capital of sexual polymorphism should read this book."—Adam Goodheart, Washington Post
"[This book is] is profoundly moving."—Jim Van Buskirk, San Francisco Chronicle
David Tuller traveled to the former Soviet Union expecting to find a still grimly repressive and closeted gay world; he found something quite different: a gay scene certainly unlike its western counterpart in many respects, and yet by no means the iron closet of the Stalinist era. There is plenty going on. Tuller's book serves as a travel guide to gay Russia, full of exotic stories that challenge American notions of sexuality. Find out, for example, the difference between heterosexual women and lesbians who sleep with gay men.
