It was in this climate that the heroes of Vyhod’s recent report came of age. Unlike earlier generations, which had grown up without ever knowing what homosexuality was, those born in the late 1970s (and later) now had access to more information and, with it, the promise of a better future – one in which homosexuality would no longer be a crime or a disease. The decriminalization of male homosexuality took place in 1993, but the normalization of LGBTQ+ people and their lifestyles took far longer. Indeed, the process of societal acceptance of homosexuality as a normal variant of sexuality was uneven and contradictory. For example, even though in 1999 homosexuality was formally removed from the list of mental disorders, in the same year the Russian Ministry of Health issued a clinical manual that defined sexual normativity strictly as heterosexual and labeled all deviations as abnormal. In Russia’s hospitals, many physicians remained reluctant to recognize homosexuality as a normal variant of sexuality, while health authorities failed to identify LGBTQ+ people as a vulnerable population requiring targeted care. An understanding of homosexuality as a pathology continues to prevail among Russian officials to this day, and, as the report documents, LGBTQ+ people are still refused care, including life-saving treatment. They often avoid medical services for fear of discrimination and prosecution, and when they do consult doctors, they deliberately conceal their sexual orientation. 

For this generation, another perestroika-era promise was the hope of liberation from loneliness. The emergence of queer publications, as well as the first tentative forms of a community more broadly, created the expectation that isolation, long driven by fear, would finally give way to connection and belonging. Yet loneliness proved remarkably persistent. Even in the nascent queer press of the late 1980s and early 1990s, a striking number of readers wrote about persisting solitude, difficulty building stable relationships and the absence of supportive networks. Loneliness, of course, has long been recognized as a problem within gay communities (as well as among heterosexual people). But in post-Soviet Russia, it was compounded by many unique factors. The early Russian LGBTQ+ press, while important, was insufficient to connect all queer people across the vast country. The arrival of the internet and, later, dating applications and social media transformed this landscape, facilitating active communication and reducing isolation for many LGBTQ+ people. But still, every fourth person in the Vyhod report mentioned experiencing loneliness regularly, and the majority say they fear using online communication because the government may monitor them. Considering Russia’s series of anti-LGBTQ+ laws, these fears are not unfounded. Meanwhile, the war-related internet blackouts occurring in some regions further limit the options for some LGBTQ+ people.

The problems faced by LGBTQ+ Russians – including those in the cohort examined by Vyhod – did not originate with Putin’s regime, nor were they suddenly produced by the recent wave of repressive legislation. Rather, they represent a long continuity, as the homophobic legacy of the Soviet past has never been properly acknowledged, addressed or repaired. After the collapse of the USSR, there was no serious public reckoning with the decades of persecution and discrimination against LGBTQ+ people. Russian LGBTQ+ activists, who operate with minimal resources, could not compensate for the state’s lack of accountability. As a result, homophobia has remained latent and structurally intact. The current surge in state-sponsored homophobia relies on the weaponization of an unprocessed past, whose consequences now fall most heavily on those who once believed that history was finally moving in their favor.