What Is the History of Sexuality?

Why Do We Study History?

It is natural for human beings to be curious about themselves and about others. When we turn to history, we try to see more clearly who we have become and why — what we have inherited, what we have lost, what we keep repeating. Past eras help us describe the present with greater precision — to notice what seems self-evident but is, in fact, the result of historical formation. History is not only the preservation of memory: it gives us tools for understanding today’s conflicts, habits, and assumptions, and for looking toward the future with greater awareness.

New Approaches in Historical Scholarship

Until the early twentieth century, historical knowledge was most often organized around major political events: wars, revolutions, reforms, the rise and fall of rulers. From the second half of the century — especially from the 1960s onward — the lens widened. Historians increasingly drew on the methods of neighboring humanities disciplines and more often asked how a society’s everyday life is structured — not only the life of its “upper” strata, but that of the majority as well.

New fields emerged: the history of mentalities, gender history, the history of emotions, and others. A special place was taken by the history of everyday life — the study of private life, relationships, and domestic existence. It focuses on desires and values, norms of behavior, family and social rituals, food and clothing, habits of communication — everything that shapes the experience of “ordinary” life.

One of the most renowned historians of everyday life, Fernand Braudel, argued that to understand Europe from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries, long material processes — such as grain prices and patterns of consumption — matter more than political ruptures, which can sometimes prove to be brief flashes across a long historical span.

The History of Sexuality

Over time, scholarly attention extended to the intimate sphere as well: how a society talks about sexuality, how it regulates it, which forms of relationships it recognizes as acceptable, and which it treats as dangerous or “wrong.” Within this field, a particular place is occupied by the study of the experience of sexual minorities; it is sometimes called queer history.

First, the history of sexuality helps us see that intimate life does not exist in a vacuum. It is tied to upbringing, language, medicine, religion, law, and morality — and therefore it can tell us a great deal about individuals and societies. Learning about the practices and ideas of past generations does not yield “spicy details,” but an understanding of how norms changed and how those norms shaped people’s lives.

Second, private life is as crucial a key to the past as the economy or social structure. The relationship between authority, society, and homosexual behavior — as well as debates about sex and gender roles — reveals the architecture of morality, the mechanisms of control, and the boundaries of what is permissible. Attitudes toward sexual minorities in different eras are comparable in significance to attitudes toward religious and political dissenters: they show what a given culture considered “proper” behavior — and by what means that standard was enforced.

Sexuality in Russian History

In Russia, the systematic study of sexuality as a historical topic began to take shape only in the 1990s. Few scholars examined sexual behavior across different periods, and the experience of sexual minorities rarely entered the field of attention. Meanwhile, in Western European and American academic traditions, such research has been underway for decades.

The long silence surrounding sexuality reinforced the myth of an allegedly universal heterosexuality in Russia’s past. Contemporary scholarship, however, paints a more complicated picture: people’s practices and experiences did not fit a single “normative” template, and the boundaries of the permissible shifted depending on the era, the social milieu, and the political course.

In practice, the degree to which homosexuality was persecuted in Russia varied: it was shaped by legal norms, cultural assumptions, state interests, and local traditions. One can speak of a wave-like dynamic — from comparatively mild attitudes and limited public censure to harsh punishments, including death sentences. Compared to some European countries, Russia did, in certain periods, display greater tolerance. A radical turning point is in many ways associated with Soviet policy, which deliberately constructed a new moral framework and закрепляла it institutionally — the consequences of which remain visible today.

Urania

The mission of the media project “Urania” is to show that Russian sexuality has a rich and diverse history. This matters not for the sake of “rewriting the past,” but for a more precise understanding of cultural memory and one’s own identity.

Even where laws existed that prohibited male same-sex relations, Russian history preserves numerous testimonies of same-sex relationships — from the practices and narratives of medieval Rus’ and the family histories of the Romanovs to pre-revolutionary literature, where themes of homosexuality and lesbian love appear openly or indirectly.

The history of sexuality is a reminder: diversity in relationships and identities did not appear suddenly — it has always been present in society, though it was named differently and judged differently. Knowing this shifts our perspective: it helps us look more attentively at the present and understand more clearly where our ideas of “normality” come from.

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