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About the Author
Sonja Franeta is a writer, educator and activist born in the Bronx, New York to an immigrant Yugoslav family. She went to St. Nicholas of Tolentine High School and then attended New York University, where she pursued her love of literature and writing. Captivated by the Russian language and its literary masters, she received a Master’s in Russian Literature. Sonja continued her studies in Comparative Literature at U.C. Berkeley. Her life changed irrevocably during this period when she came out as a lesbian and became a socialist. Her interest in Russia crystallized after perestroika when she joined the first queer delegation to Russia in 1991. Sonja continued to find ways to be in Russia during the 1990s in its transformative period. She taught English in Moscow, managed a project for wheelchair activists in Central Siberia, and organized the first queer film festival in Tomsk. Her translations and articles about Russian queers, her poems and her memoir essays have appeared in the U.S. and internationally. In 2004 she published Rozovye Flamingo (Pink Flamingos: 10 Siberian Interviews), a book of queer interviews in Russian, in collaboration with friends at the LGBT Archives in Moscow. Sonja plans to translate that book into English. She currently lives in California with her spouse, Sue, and their two cats and loves to write, read, and travel.
Praise for My Pink Road to Russia
Sonja Franeta’s My Pink Road to Russia is a beguiling and heartfelt book—a fascinating pastiche of memoir, poetry, history and cultural studies that opens a window onto the once-hidden world of Russia’s queer community. What makes Franeta’s work so valuable and haunting is not only her observant and touching portraits of the people she meets—Siberian lesbians, transsexual train conductors, gay men who survived the gulag, and a host of others—but also the reader’s awareness that the remarkable flowering of post-Soviet LGBT life and culture, portrayed so eloquently by Franeta in these pages, appears to be disappearing quickly in the current Putin era.
What an inspiration when the American activists came to Russia in 1991! After Sonja Franeta entered the Russian LGBT community, she traveled to Siberia and Moscow, Saint Petersburg and Kaliningrad, capturing the stories and her own impressions of our queer culture. In interviews collected by Sonja for her previous book Pink Flamingos we heard the voices of real people. This voice of honesty rings through Sonja’s present book of stories. It is particularly valuable in Russia at this time, when we have been forbidden to talk about LGBT issues.
Sonja Franeta’s latest book, Pink Road to Russia: Tales of Amazons, Peasants, and Queers, takes readers on a journey of awakening love from the Bronx to Moscow, through Croatia, South Africa, San Francisco, to Siberia and many other lands in between. True to her teaching profession, Franeta reveals in richly detailed stories how war, family violence, politics and borders are no match for same-sex desire. Allowing readers a rare and poetic glimpse into ’70s and ’80s U.S., and later post-Soviet, sexuality, she proves that there are no limitations when it comes to expressions of the heart.
Copyright
© Copyright 2015 Sonja Franeta
ISBN: 978-0-9904928-0-1