It is just amazing to me how many parallels we are discovering between civil rights issues in the U.S. and Russia.  Your Oct. 28 post about using psych camps to silence dissidents struck a chord, because I just finished a couple of lectures about sexual identity and sexual practice during the Harlem Renaissance/New Negro Movement.  To set the stage for the attitudes towards homosexuality and other non-conforming expressions of a gender or sexual identity, I presented a brief summary of emerging laws and attitudes towards homosexuality in the U.S.  One thing that I learned that I had not known previously: in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, women faced significant dangers if they tried to live an "out" life as lesbians.  The decision apparently was enough to prove psychological instability: these women were subject to imprisonment in insane asylums, where rape would sometimes be "prescribed" to "treat" them under the assumption that they could simply be taught to be straight/"normal."