Born in New York to Yugoslav parents, Sonja Franeta is a writer, educator, translator, and activist. In 1991, she was a delegate to the first Russian Lesbian and Gay Symposium, organized by International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission (IGLHRC), and she helped facilitate LGBTQ film festivals in Russia.

From 1992 until 1996, Franeta collected video interviews with Russian gay, lesbian, and transgender people. Before Russia repealed its sodomy laws in 1993, some of the people she interviewed had served criminal sentences for homosexuality, while others experienced forced psychiatric treatment. In 2004, Franeta published the edited transcripts of these interviews in Russia, and later translated them to English in a book called Pink Flamingos: 10 Siberian Interviews (Dacha Books, 2017). These in-depth conversations allow us to learn her subjects’ life stories, as well as to understand the way they evaluated their experiences and conceptualized questions of identity and belonging.

In her second book, My Pink Road to Russia: Tales of Amazons, Peasants and Queers (Dacha Books, 2015), Franeta collected her essays on a wide range of topics. They include her childhood in the Bronx with a Croat mother and Serb father, her coming out story, her experiences as a female machinist and labor activist, and studying Russian literature, becoming a writer, and extensive travels across the former Soviet Union and the deep friendships she has formed there. Franeta’s writing is often very personal, exceptionally frank, and deeply insightful. Coming from a working-class background, she studied at NYU and UC Berkeley before rejecting the traditional academic path. In the 1990s, she taught English in Moscow and spent several years in Novosibirsk, working on a project for people with disabilities.