Gay-Made Space

This chapter explores the relationships among spatiality, orientation, and corporeality by focusing on the ways in which a post-Soviet, gay social space is engendered, in part, via popular music. It first compares temporality and spatiality in relation to homosexuality in the Soviet and post-Soviet eras before discussing popular music's relationship to sexuality and the post-Soviet experiences of detemporalization and deterritorialization. It then assesses the importance of virtual, mediated, musical spaces in the creation of the self. It also analyzes how geographic spaces, cyberspaces, and media spaces, the material and the virtual, both conform to and act upon the embodiments of homosexuality, and how Russian gay men continually create and re-create salubrious spaces and places, in part via their experience as embodied subjects whose corporeal existence links them to others in shared spaces and places. The chapter shows that seeming binaries—inside/outside, here/there, now/then, us/them, East/West—as experienced via musical spaces do not preclude the formation of a situated, stable, sexual self, one affectively and physically connected to both sound and space.