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In this talk, Olga Petri invites you to join her on a narrated tour of late imperial St. Petersburg and its male queer milieu. In dredging and contextualizing the archival stories of certain queer spaces, she will describe otherwise obscure features of urban modernity that – often unintentionally – facilitated queer encounters. Olga Petri will takeÌýus through shopping arcades, bathhouses, and public urinals to show how queer men routinely met, socialized, and navigate a city full of risk and opportunity. The emphasis of this talk is as much on the routine behaviors or queer men ranging from informal socialization to outright sexual transgression, as it is about the efforts of constables, administrators, government officials and sanitary inspectors to maintain moral order. By changing the question from one about the tsarist regime’s failures and techniques of repression vis-à-vis detected breaches of law to one concerning a range of formal and informal practices of spatial governance, Petri describes a surprisingly stable entente between illicit communion and municipal authorities’ paternalistic ambitions.

Image credit:ÌýTsGAKFD Spb, Г18514, Konka na Nevskom Prospekte, unknown author, 1906 – 1907. Courtesy of TsGAKFD SPb. (TsGAKFD SPb = Tsentral’nyî Gosudarstvennyî Archiv Kinofotodocumentov Sankt-Petersburga [Central State Archive of Documentary Films, Photographs, and Sound Recordings of St. Petersburg].)