Authors

Discussion

Since 2022, the Russian LGBTQ+ landscape has faced challenges due to the full-scale war in Ukraine, intensified state repression, and the official designation of the “LGBT movement” as extremist and terrorist. Legal change of gender markers became strictly prohibited in 2023, forcing many trans and nonbinary people seek emigration. 

Given this political environment, queer emigration has notably surged, creating a diasporic context where the idea of "community" has become both critically destabilized and urgently mobilized. While “community” is often associated with territorial proximity or shared locality (Anderson, 1983; Cohen, 1985), for Russophone queer activists, community is increasingly deterritorialised, dispersed across national borders, and mediated through digital infrastructures.

By engaging with scholarship on queer diaspora (Gopinath, 2005; Manalansan, 2003) and the mediatization of activism (Couldry & Hepp, 2017), I conceptualise these Russophone LGBTQ+ networks through the creation of community. Such formations are sustained through shared narratives, mediatized interaction, and flexible yet guarded boundaries.

Drawing on 13 anonymous in-depth interviews and digital ethnography (Varis, 2015) conducted during 2023–24, I examine the structure of Centre-T, the largest trans- and non-binary-focused grassroots network in the RuNet. This case study spans Eastern Europe and the Baltics, focusing on overlapping contexts of diaspora and queerness.

Centre-T has a unique structure, which will be analysed in this paper. It includes regional and thematic chats, the role of volunteers, help centres (legal and mental support), social media platforms, queer digital zines, practices of allyship, and the importance of physical space and presence in situations of forced emigration. Equally important is the people-led moderation and the boundary maintained between the informative (public) part and the inner (community) part. Complex relationships with Russia and between “diasporas” are structured by the mediascape and by the unique phenomenon of mediatized networks, which will be introduced in this paper.

By analysing how Centre-T navigates questions of access, geography, and mediated presence, this paper contributes to broader discussions of how diasporic queer formations reimagine the very conditions of belonging in an era of forced migration and intensified repression.