Sovershenno Sekretno, 1994, no. 11, pp. 27-28
A piece in the monthly magazine Совершенно секретно in which a (presumably) heterosexual female journalist responds to the emergence of a gay subculture in early post-Soviet Russia
Post-Soviet
1994
This item appeared a year after the repeal of article 121 of Russia’s criminal code, the law prohibiting “sodomy” or sexual activity between men. The author, a presumably (based on her remarks about family) heterosexual woman, seems representative of a curiously fraught moment in the broader immediately post-Soviet Russian society’s response to the novelty of gay people. She expresses positions that, at the time, were likely quite progressive. There is condemnation of the abuse gay people suffer at the hands of homophobic thugs and indifferent law-enforcement officers. There is the suggestion that gay people should enjoy protection under the law and freedom to form legally-recognized unions. There are suggestions that they should be entitled to maintain their own establishments and “subculture” free from harassment. There is some seemingly genuine regret that gay people have to resort to clandestine “gay mail.” The rest of the piece, however, is an exercise in the othering (orientalizing or exoticizing) of gay people.
The picture of the post-article 121 Russian gay milieu presented in this article is a disordered and, a moments, self-contradictory one. It combines a salacious curiosity and amusement at quaint oddities with paranoid fantasies that together conspire to form a vision of a sort of fascinating if somewhat bizarre and disquieting shadow realm. The author’s preoccupation here is with gay men. She does not address lesbians at all. The piece indulges in some unfortunate reductive stereotyping, broad generalizations from the author’s own limited experience. Gay men are effeminate, delicate, histrionic, sensitive, artistic, sex-obsessed and sexually promiscuous, flighty, hedonistic, unscrupulous, and without serious ambitions of any sort. These generalizations are undercut by references to multiple, seemingly not interchangeable terms (педераст, голубой, петух) and by generally unsubstantiated hearsay regarding seemingly improbable gay subspecies, such as the gay gangster, the gay police officer, the gay official, even the gay presidential candidate, and a “gay godfather” who successfully extorts sexual favors from a huge number of Russia’s military recruits. Efimova also assumes categories used by her own group (heterosexuals) are applicable to the group she is profiling. She assumes that in gay male relationships one parter is “the man” and the other “the woman,” and includes quotes from gay men that model homosexual relations on the male-female paradigm. There’s a story that divides a group of gay men at a New Year’s Eve party into “girls” and “men” (“девушки” and “мужики”), and an adage from the Russian gay milieu that “a man is only a man until he’s with his first man.” Another typical othering pattern at work in the article is that of assuming isolated instances of bad behavior are broadly representative of the observed group, while deemphasizing or ignoring the same behaviors in exponents of groups to which the observer themselves belongs (in this case heterosexuals). Efimova adduces an anecdotal account of a gay police officer who abuses his position to harass ex-boyfriends and coerce sexual favors from teenage boys as justification for a categorical ineligibility of gay men for service in law enforcement. Similar abuses perpetrated by heterosexual male officers against women and girls is not mentioned even hypothetically. There is a paranoia that, left unchecked, male homosexuality will spread, an anxiety seemingly predicated on an assumption of an extreme fragility of male heterosexuality and a desire on the part of gay men to convert other men. The only example given is the army, where one of Efimova’s interviewees assured her he had had many conquests who started their service as heterosexuals. The other (the gay man) is cast as the agent of corruption, and there is no mention of broader structural factors that contribute to wider-spread homosexual activity in the armed forces or prisons, such as the forced prolonged cohabitation of adult males in the absence of women.
Ultimately Efimova concludes that gay men should remain a subculture existing outside an implied mainstream Russian society, and that they should be ineligible for posts in law enforcement, the armed forces, civil service, and politics. In addition to her conspiratorial suggestions of a “gay mafia” or “gay brotherhood” that has infiltrated the political sphere, this includes some very strange remarks about loneliness, isolation, and the health of the state; assertions that the heterosexual, child-producing family is the basic constituent unit of society and that it is the bonds between biological parents and children that constitute the social fabric; and the suggestion that integration of gay men into society will threaten the integrity of that fabric. To some extent this might be read as symptomatic of broader contemporary anxieties and a sense of a need for some kind of structural stability and continuity in this moment of mid-air suspension, when one ideology and set of social mores had dematerialized and a new ones had not yet established themselves.
For a contemporary reaction to this article by a Russian gay man, see Yaroslav Mogutin’s article “View from the Other Side,” published alongside Efimova’s in the same issue of Top Secret, and included in this collection.
Mogutin, Slava
Russia
Sovershenno sekretno, No. 11, 1994, pp.. 27-28