Masha Gessen interview with Elena Bonner, published in the LGBTQ magazine Тема
Post-Soviet
1992
The interviewer in this piece — Masha Gessen — is a lesbian Russian-American journalist. They were born in Moscow in 1967 and lived there until 1981 when they emigrated to the United States (to Boston) with their parents and siblings. In 1991 they moved back to Russia, pursued a career in journalism there, and became one of the country’s most visible LGBTQ figures. They returned to the United States in 2013 after the introduction of what came to be known as the Anti Gay Propaganda Law — an addition to the Russian Federation’s criminal code providing severe penalties for “propaganda of non-traditional sexual relationships in the presence of minors” (“Пропаганда нетрадиционных сексуальных отношений среди несовершеннолетних”). This was an amendment or addendum to an existing law in the criminal code intended to “defend children from information harmful to their health and development” ("О защите детей от информации, причиняющей вред их здоровью и развитию"). By Gessen’s own account they decided to leave Russia with their family because they feared the new legislation could be used by the state as a pretext for removing their children from their custody. A year earlier Gessen, still living in Russia, had published a profoundly unflattering book about Vladimir Putin and his rise to power (The Man without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin. New York: Riverhead Books, 2012). The book, written in English, was never translated into Russian.
This interview is conducted in Boston the same year that Gessen would return to Moscow where she would live and work for the next twelve years. They are identified here as an editor for The Advocate — an American LGBTQ magazine that began publication in 1967 and is still published now. Here Gessen talks to Elena Bonner, a well-known Soviet dissident and activist and the second wife and widow of the celebrated Soviet dissident and activist Andrei Sakharov. In this exchange between Gessen and Bonner — herself a longtime dissident and activist lauded for extraordinary courage in defense of the abused rights of Soviet citizens — what comes to the fore is Bonner’s almost active disinterest in the rights and challenges of post-Soviet Russians in the LGBTQ categories. While no active antipathy towards LGTBQ people registers in the piece, Bonner’s assertive indifference is to some extent representative of the predicament of LGBTQ Russians in the early years of the post-Soviet era. In these heady years of new-won freedoms and enfranchisement and celebration of dissidents and victims of oppression, freedom from stigma, shame, and fear of repression is still slow to come for Russians in the LGBTQ categories. They are all too often a group overlooked or actively passed over by collectives and individuals championing the plights of other subaltern groups (Bonner here speicifically asserts that LGBTQ rights and abuses thereof are of less urgent concern in Russia than those of the country’s national/ethnic minorities). Bonner was a truly heroic opposer of rights abuses in the Soviet era, and on its face her statement that she cannot fight every battle and that this one is better fought by others seems entirely defensible. It is nonetheless unfortunately representative of a wider trend among early post-Soviet advocates for marginalized and disenfranchised groups to exlcude or remain aloof from the LGBTQ cause. Often homosexuality and sexual or gender fluidity proved too transgressive for energetic transgressors of Soviet legal and cultural boundaries. Again, in the piece no active animus against LGBTQ people is in evidence on the part of Bonner or the unidentified male interlocutor (“Alesha”). It is nonetheless clear that for them as Russian rights activists, LGBTQ people in Russia are at best a secondary consideration. They are unaware, and initially incredulous, of the then still in-force article 121 of the Russian criminal code providing for prison sentences for consensual homosexual relations between male adults (it is ultimately conceded that this law should be repealed). There is a note of hesitation in the statement that they would probably offer assistance to an LGBTQ Russian who came to them for help or guidance as a victim of discrimination. The attitude that AIDS is a problem affecting only a marginal subset of the population and not one to which the population at large should devote too much attention is a sad echo of the attitude of the Reagan administration (which ended two years before this interview) which resulted in enormous loss of life in the United States. In the Perestroika and early post-Soviet years the mainstream media in Russia often expressed the perception that AIDS was not, and would not become, a widespread problem in Russia as it had in the West because the conditions for its extensive transmission — widespread intravenous drug use and tolerance of homosexuality as a normal practice — did not, and would not, exist there. Many such aritlces published before the law was repealed with the introduction of the new constitution in 1993 explicitly adduced article 121 of Russia’s criminal code as a measure safeguarding the Russian population from the disease.
Gessen, Masha and Bonner, Elena
Russia
Tema, No. 2-3, 1992, p. 9