Join Dr Olga Petri in conversation with Olga Doletskaya about her new book, Places of Tenderness and Heat: The Queer Milieu of Fin-de-Siecle St. Petersburg, shortlisted for the Pushkin House Book Prize 2023. Petri reconstructs the urban milieu that enabled queer men to meet, socialise and navigate a city full of risk and opportunity. She uncovers a world of illicit homosexual relationships and friendships that has, until now, remained obscure.
Places of Tenderness and Heat traces the spatial history of queer men in St Petersburg over five decades – through the ebb and flow of liberal and reactionary politics under Russia’s last three tsars, up to the militarisation of 1914 and descent into war and revolution that spelled the end to St Petersburg as a cultural and social centre of the queer milieu.
Autobiographical accounts from the queer community are few and far between; such encounters were purposefully hidden and many stories were lost in the tumult of the twentieth century. Rather than focussing on subjective stories, Petri examines through a topographical lens how the governance of urban space shaped the queer experience in St Petersburg.
The authorities were obsessed with controlling the public sphere of streets, squares and parks yet paid little attention to private or semi-public zones. With this in mind, using archival materials from the police, government officials and sanitary inspectors, Petri charts the “map” of movements, habits and compromises made by queer men as they sought to navigate their city and avoid legal repercussions. Public spaces like tree-lined avenues, shopping arcades, theatres and restaurants were preferred for socialising and friendship, whereas sex was confined to semi-private spaces like bathhouses and public urinals.
This interaction between the legal and the illicit encouraged the visibility and accessibility of the queer community in the face of those charged with “maintaining moral order”, creating a method of non-confrontational dissent and – remarkably – a stable entente with the authorities.
About the speakers
Dr Olga Petri is an urban historical geographer and a Leverhulme Trust Early Career Research Fellow in the Department of Geography, University of Cambridge. Her work draws from and contributes to inter-related discussions in historical and cultural urban geography, historical queer studies, and the history of late imperial Russia. Born in St Petersburg, Olga received a Bachelor and Master degree in Geography from St Petersburg State University, Russia. She subsequently left Russia for Serbia, where she lived and worked for three years, and later graduated from the MSc Urban Studies program at University College London, working under the supervision of Professor Richard Dennis. In 2017, Olga completed her doctoral research under the supervision of Dr Philip Howell at the Geography Department in the University of Cambridge. She is currently undertaking postdoctoral research funded by the Leverhulme Trust and the Isaac Newton Trust, and working on the project entitled Beastly St Petersburg: Humans and Other Animals in Imperial Russia.
Olga Doletskaya is a PhD student at SSEES UCL. Her research investigates the realities of queer family building in Russia and the consequences of anti-queer legislation on parenthood. Olga holds an MSc in Social Anthropology from the University of Edinburgh and her research interests include assisted reproduction, queer parenthood, motherhood and post-Soviet sociality. She has done research on surrogacy in Russia and the personal experiences of surrogates and the ways in which they normalise their experiences.