Mal’chishnik, 1990s (undated), no. 1
A piece on David Bowie, focusing on the star’s bisexuality, in the glossy color gay magazine Мальчишник
Post-Soviet
1990s
This piece on David Bowie, largely or completely translated from an English-language source published six years earlier in 1989, is an interesting choice for an issue of the glossy color magazine Мальчишник (Boy), a publication that intersperses homoerotic photography with popular-culture and lifestyle pieces. The magazine was a sort of a calque of American LGBTQ magazines like Out, which began publication three years earlier in 1992.
This feature article was likely chosen for its casual mention of indulgence in homosexual activity by a highly impactful cultural figure who is widely perceived as not gay. In her monograph on LGBTQ people (to use the current terminology) in Russia in the 1990s Queer in Russia : A Story of Sex, Self, and the Other (Duke University Press, 1999), sociologist Laurie Essig observed that, by and large, these populations in Russia differed from their counterparts in America and Western Europe in that they resisted viewing sexual desire and behavior as a basis for identity formation or definition. The Russians, per Essig, tended to prefer to regard homosexual desires and behaviors as experiences or events rather than as properties of one’s personality, as incidental to rather than definitive of one’s identity. Bowie’s public, casual acknowledgements here were likely additionally compelling because they seemed to promise the option of not only of having these experiences without compromising a masculine, and even primarily heterosexual, identity, but also integrating them into a public-facing masculine personality. There is an interesting domestic, or perhaps it would be more accurate to say recently reimported or repatriated version of this cultural phenomenon in Eduard Limonov. Limonov himself returned to Russia from France in 1991, the same year Masha Gessen would return to Russia from the US and work on launching an LGBTQ movement there. From the time of his arrival back in Russia, Limonov projected a an aggressively traditionally masculine public persona. At the same time, editions of his literary works were being issued by a Moscow-based publisher of LGBTQ-related titles of called “Glagol.” In 1990 Glagol published the first Russian edition of Limonov’s “It’s Me, Edichka” — an apparently quasi-autobiographical work whose protagonist, a Russian émigré living in New York City, has numerous sexual relationships with men (as well as with women). Glagol would publish many more editions of Limonov’s works in the first half of the 1990s.
The reference to homosexuality in prison life (Bowie’s statement that, given his ability to enjoy sex with men, if he ever found himself in prison he would be able to make the best of it) has interesting resonances, given what can be gleaned about homosexual relations in the Russian penal system from other documents in this collection (“Homosexuality in Soviet Prisons and Camps,” “To the Reader,” “Gay Dawn,”). These suggest that many, even a majority, of Russian inmates engaged in homosexual behavior and did so without compromising their social status or masculine identities. A subset, though, were severely and irreparably stigmatized as a result of these encounters. These men were ostracized, relegated to the lowest category of the social hierarchy, and became the helpless victims of horrible acts of abuse that went unpunished, or, worse, were even encouraged by administrators of the penal facilities. Curiously, the original English-language publication dates to 1989, a moment when Gorbachev’s policy of glasnost was resulting in the lifting of taboos in many of areas of Russian life. The mass-scale homosexual activity in the Soviet penal system belonged unequivocally to the category of phenomena that could not be verbalized, especially in the mass communication sphere, in the Soviet system of an institutionalized psychological and social duplicity, a phenomenon Russian sociologist Yuri Levada, in his profile of “Homo Sovieticus,” termed “doublethink,” a word he borrowed from George Orwell’s 1984.
Moscow
Bowie, David
Russia
Mal'chishnik, No. 1, 1990s (undated)