Investigating the History of Homosexuality in Soviet Lithuania: Deconstructing Court Verdicts

Abstract

This article examines the Soviet court verdicts under Article 122 of the Criminal Code of the Soviet Lithuania, which tried men for homosexual relations, as historical sources. The author argues that the documents stored in the contemporary archives remain programmed according to Soviet logic. The 20 verdicts examined reveal that in practice, men in Vilnius Lenin District were mainly tried for having relations with minors or for sexual coercion rather than consensual sexual relations. The testimonies in which the convicted men’s traces of subjectivity can be detected are proposed to be defined as ‘post-voice’. In some cases, these ‘post-voices’ reveal how the ‘weak’ resorted to their own tactics when they found themselves in the judicial and political power field.