There were only so many ways to say “gay.” The Homo Sovieticus survey had traditionally used the phrase “sexual minorities,” but the advisers were adamantly opposed to it: they thought the term was demeaning. Perhaps more to the point, it dated back to a time before gays became a topic of political conversation in Russia, had fallen out of use, and probably was not the best term to measure current attitudes. “LGBT” would be incomprehensible to most Russians. “Nontraditional sexual orientation” was the term the state used, so it would inevitably frame the question and the answer. By equating
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