Sonja Franeta
Sonja Franeta is a writer, translator, educator, and activist born in the Bronx, New York, in 1952 to an immigrant Yugoslav family. She earned a master’s degree in Russian from New York University, and another master’s degree in comparative literature from the University of California, Berkeley.
Sonja Franeta came out as a lesbian while on a trip to the Soviet Union in 1977. When she returned to the San Francisco Bay Area, she joined the Socialist Workers Party. She became an activist in the women’s movement, as well as other movements for social change.
Sonja moved to Birmingham, Alabama, in 1980 to work in the industrial trades and to engage in union activism. She worked as a journeyman machinist. She ran for mayor of Birmingham as a socialist candidate in 1983. After living in Birmingham for five years, she moved to New York City to translate and to edit for Pathfinder Press in the Socialist Workers Party offices at West Street. She eventually moved back to the San Francisco Bay Area, continuing to work as a machinist, always an activist in the labor unions.
Sonja Franeta left the Socialist Workers Party in 1990. She went to Russia to work with LGBT people. She served as a coordinator for Wheeled Mobility Center’s wheelchair project in Novosibirsk. Using her Russian language and her organizing skills, she worked on a project to help people with disabilities to advocate for their needs.
Sonja began interviewing LGBTQ people while in Russia during the perestroika era of the 1990s. She used these interviews for her book, Pink Flamingos: 10 Siberian Interviews, first published in Russian in 2004. She then translated it herself into English, published in 2017.
Sonja Franeta’s second book is My Pink Road to Russia (2015). It is also available in a Russian translation by Ilya Davydov. Sonja has published poetry, stories, and essays in lesbian journals in the United States, Moscow, and Buenos Aires. She has completed a novel about Russian queer life. She continues to translate from Russian, recently for a book called The Communist Women’s Movement, 1920 to 1922.
Sonja retired from community college in Oakland, California, where she was teaching in English and English to Speakers of Other Languages. She now devotes herself to writing, reading, and traveling. She enjoys gathering writers in groups, working with several writing groups, such as Lesbians WriteOn, of which she is an organizer. She continues to support Russian and Ukrainian LGBT people in their struggles. After retirement, she and her partner Sue and their cats have been spending half the year in Spain to relax as respite from the heavy hand of U.S. culture and capitalism.