Navigating ‘the closet’ as a queer parent: Displaying family in authoritarian Russia

Parents are particularly vulnerable to Russia’s anti-LGBTQ+ legislation, yet there is little research on their lives while they have and raise children in a hostile and authoritarian context. This article is concerned with the question: how do queer parents negotiate visibility and risk in a context of state hostility? Based on a mixed-method qualitative study on how migrant LGBTQ+ parents from Russia made sense of their parental journeys with in-depth interviews of 25 LGBTQ+ Russian parents at the centre, this article utilises the theoretical framework of family display to examine how Russian queer parents navigate risk and disclosure. The article examines how family display (or lack thereof) is situational and depends on the setting and audience, as queer families navigate finding a balance between intimacy and safety: some settings allowed for more flexibility and ambiguity, other settings were too dangerous to even hint at the family’s real story. The article finds that it is the privilege of access to private services including healthcare facilities, kindergartens and schools that allow for a safer space for greater visibility. Using the framework of family display showed that the decision to disclose not only changes spatially and temporally, but also includes other family members (primary the children themselves). The focus on families provides a unique contribution to literature on queer (in)visibility, going beyond the binary of the closet and instead highlighting the collective nature of disclosure which is added to the individual disclosure of each parent.