An inconspicuous sexual dissident in the Georgian Soviet republic: Subjectification, social classes and the culture of suspicion in the late Soviet period

Abstract

Drawing on a three-hour interview conducted in 2016, this case study sheds light on how the professional identity and career path of a Georgian man born at the beginning of the 1950s, who negotiated the challenges associated with expressing his homosexual desire as an adult in the 1970s-1980s, was informed by his perception of the risk associated with stigmatization and repression. This case study reconstructs a process of subjectification from the tactics of avoidance and survival strategies which were internalized in response to the milieu of repression shaped by antisodomy laws and the medicalization of male homosexuality. It also illustrates how the interviewee’s social identity as a medical doctor and therefore as a member of the intelligentsia protected him, while at the same time precluding the possibility of solidarity with men outside his own social class. Ever suspicious of the possibility that they might be informers, the interviewee internalized social stratification, a dynamic which on a larger scale, we may infer, facilitated the regulation of sexual dissidents by the Soviet regime. We thus chart the landscape wrought by the repression of homosexuality and the disappearance of homosexual social identities and visible communities after 1934, from Stalinism to Perestroika.