Discovered Queer Desires: Rereading Same-Sex Sexuality from Finnish and Estonian Life Stories of the 1990s

I n 1992 a F I n n I s h w o m a n b o r n in 1919 expressed her loss in an autobiography she wrote for a collection of sexual life stories gathered for sociological research. She wrote: “Maria has already passed on to eternity. That was announced in a death notice in the newspaper. Only the dark roses I have sent to the funeral convey the message of our friendship. Do I dare to break the fabric of forgetting?” Although this author had married twice and, as she describes it, experienced her best moments with her spouse, her account begins with Maria, with whom she had worked in an institution that she does not name but describes as a “closed community” after World War II. The affair, which involved kissing and caressing that “made the blood rush in the veins,” needed to be kept secret, and the writer recalls being worried about doing something harmful to herself by engaging in such an affair. This glimpse of the queer desire between two women illustrates the nature of my findings about this collection of autobiographies. The story of Maria was written by a woman who had lived a predominantly heterosexual life, but the text nonetheless offers insight into the nature of same-sex desire during the post–World War II period. While this woman recounted her own secret affair with another woman, many of the writers in the collection remember gays and lesbians they have known. I will argue that the way in which these writers recall their own same-sex desires and those of others reveals the importance of queer desires in constructing their sexual life stories in the 1990s.