Argumenty i fakty, November 19, 1997, p. 20
Interview with LGBTQ activist Evgenia Debryanskaya in the newspaper Аргументы и факты
Post-Soviet
1997
The interviewee in this piece — Evgenia Debryanskaya — embodies a complex of seemingly irreconcilable tensions and contradictions evidently widely observed in the burgeoning collective LGBTQ consciousness in the 1990s in Russia. Debryanskaya had projected a resolute lesbian identity beginning in the late-Soviet period. She declared an erotic orientation towards women from her earliest memory and was a vigorous advocate for LGBTQ people in Russia, while also having married Alexander Dugin, one of post-Soviet Russia’s most conservative nationalist ideologues. Debrianskaia was a loud decrier of the abuses endured by LGBTQ people in Russia and of Russia’s backwardness in this respect vis-à-vis many Western countries. At the same time she expressed Russian nationalist views and defended rights of the Russian nation itself to develop its own indigenous version of integration of LGBTQ elements into society, postulating a uniqueness of the Russian nation that made application of Western standards (which were, it is worth observing, themselves a relatively recent development) undesirable if not impossible. Her remarks here about Russia being behind the West in terms of LGBTQ rights are curious when considered in the context of her nationalist and isolationist tendencies. Sociologist Laurie Essig in her book Queer in Russia: A Story of Sex, Self, and the Other (Duke University Press, 1999) writes about Debryanskaya’s resistance to a 1991 “Soviet Stonewall” event organized by, among others, Roman Kalinin (a late-Soviet and early post-Soviet gay activist and presidential candidate for Russia’s Libertarian Party of which he, along with Debryanskaya, was a founding member – see “Soviet Homosexuals: Yesterday, Today, Tomorrow”) and Masha Gessen (Russian-American LGBTQ activist, journalist, and author “Masha Gessen. Interview with Elena Bonner,” “Homosexuality in Soviet Prisons and Camps,” “Lesbian Masha Attacks the Bureaucrats”) because of the event’s excessive American referentiality. A couple of years later, per Essig, Debryanskaya moved to sideline Gessen in another event on the grounds that Gessen was too American or not Russian enough. Gesssen at that time would have been 27 years old and had spent 17 of those years in Russia, including the first 15 years of her life. As a late-Soviet dissident Debryanskaya was, in addition to being an advocate for LGBTQ (to use the current Western terminology) people, an avowed Russian nationalist. While the Soviet experiment is widely viewed as a form of Russian imperialism, nationalism was officially anathema in Marxist-Leninist ideology (the basis for Soviet ideology), and assertive nationalism of the type Debryanskaya expressed was a subversive position in the Soviet context. In the early post-Soviet context Russian nationalism served a different function. In the jarringly disorienting moment when Russia’s new leaders were looking to its erstwhile capitalist-democratic antagonists as exemplars, there were some crises of identity and anxieties about Russia being dissolved into the West. Nationalist-conservative currents were one response to anxieties that Russia could forfeit a kind of cultural sovereignty through this process, and one expression of impulses to reconnect with a pre-Soviet Russian history and culture as a basis for a non-Soviet Russian national identity. In the late-Soviet and early post-Soviet contexts vehement Russian nationalism was seen as anti-establishment often as compatible with post-Soviet LGBTQ activism. See on this Debryanskaya’s associate Yaroslav (“Slava”) Mogutin featured in “Homosexuality in Soviet Prisons and Camps,” “The Chechen Knot,” “Love Is Nasty, It Can Make You Fall in Love with an Asshole.” This interview also documents a fluidity or indeterminacy that, according to Essig, many Russians experimenting with sexual or gender pluralism in the 1990s liked to maintain between sexual desire, sexual behavior, and identity. Likely at least in part because a declared LGBTQ identity could mean a precarious existence on the margins of society, it seems that many people in Russia in this period who were experimenting with homosexuality were loath to foreclose avenues by committing to a Western-styled sexual identity (LGBTQ). These people preferred instead (again, per Essig) to look on the entertainment of same-sex erotic desire as an incidental behavior, an of-the-moment choice that did not in any way determine a person’s identity. Debryanskaya’s life-long erotic orientation towards other women, and even her aggressive and highly visible LGBTQ activism, did not prevent her from marrying men twice, even from marrying an arch-conservative ideologue, or from having and raising heterosexual children. Debryanskaya, who is in this 1997 article referred to as Russia’s “main lesbian,” reportedly once said to Essig in 1989 “I'm not heterosexual, no. Nor am I bisexual, but I'm not a lesbian. I don't want to be what I do in bed.”
Debryanskaya, Evgenia and Dugin, Alexander (Aleksandr)
Russia
Argumenty i fakty, November 19, 1997