https://youtu.be/uvmRDKTwZQ8?t=81
Music video for Boris Moiseev's song "Egoist"
Post-Soviet
1994
This Boris Moiseev music video from 1994 was released during a time in the popular-music performer’s career when he publicly declared a gay identity. One year earlier, Moiseev had been interviewed by openly gay journalist and activist Yaroslav “Slava” Mogutin (featured in “Homosexuality in Soviet Prisons and Camps,” “The View from the Other Side,” “The Chechen Knot”) for the Riga-based “independent erotic magazine” Eshche (Still). In that interview Moiseev talked openly about, among other things, his experiences orally pleasing male Komsomols.
In the 2000s Moiseev distanced himself from the LGBTQ-rights cause (to use current Western nomenclature) and expressed solidarity with conservative religious groups who viewed public expressions of LGBTQ identities and same-sex eroticism as an affront to their sense of morality and decency. He specifically spoke out against same-sex marriage and pride demonstrations, and in many ways came to assume a position consonant with the 2013 law prohibiting “propaganda of non-traditional sexual relationships in the presence of minors.” In essence this position is that, while Russian citizens should be free to pursue these non-traditional relationships in their private lives, these relationships and non-traditional sexual identities have no place in public and social life in Russia. Moiseev indulged in a kind of strategically dissociative aesthetic game also observed with other cultural figures of this period in Russia. In the tentatively transgressive and ideologically and culturally and socially unstable atmosphere of the Russian 1990s, he actively displayed transgressions of broader sexual and gender norms as a cultural figure who had achieved enough notoriety to be celebrated for his eccentricities and extravagances, for bold acts of épatage. When in the 2000s these deviations threaten to become political and/or social liabilities, they are dismissed by the artist as nothing more than elements of their aesthetic play, aspects of a performative persona that is itself an aesthetic construct, an artwork that is not directly representative of the artist’s own sexual identity, behaviors, or desires. This kind of seemingly strategic fluidity between authorial self and artistic persona is something also discussed here regarding Eduard Limonov and Vladimir Veselkin. See “Impossible Love,” and “1991 Glagol Edition of It’s Me, Eddy.”
Russia