Смена, № 274, November 28 1992
Interview of gay activist
1992
The interviewee in this item was one of the founding members of the P. I. Tchaikovsky Fund, a community not-for-profit organization defending the rights and interests of LGBTQ people in Russia. He — Yuri — opts to use an assumed surname for the article (Eremeev), presumably to shield himself from some serious risks associated with publicly declaring a gay identity. In the 1980s he served three-years in prison after being convicted on article 121 of Russia’s criminal code, the “sodomy” (мужеложство) law still in force in 1992, and in the interview he enumerates a variety of other social liabilities facing post-Soviet Russians who openly assume a gay identity: damage to family and social relationships, jeopardy of career and employment prospects.
The organization’s name bespeaks an impulse to project an identity connected to a prerevolutionary Russian gay cultural history; it is named after a revered figure from the Russian cultural canon whose homosexuality was broadly accepted as historical fact. At the same time, the interview reveals a distinctly Western orientation, with Russian LGBTQ events modeled on Western (American) LGBTQ history: “Christopher Street Day” commemorating the watershed event at the Stonewall Inn in New York in 1969. This double referentiality — pre-Soviet Russian LGBTQ cultural history and more contemporary Western post-Stonewall models of sexual identities — is a persistent pattern in LGBTQ identity formation in 1990s Russia. Another aspect of 1990s Russian discussion around gay men and lesbians was that of the specific nature and extent of their difference from other people. In opposition to a perception of gays and lesbians simply as sexual deviants, some early 1990s Russian exponents of LGBTQ identities insisted that they were valid, distinct human categories having their own unique perspective on the world and their own distinct intellectual and aesthetic sensibilities, and that all of this had made them integral contributors to world culture. Here “Eremeev” suggests that gay men may be more inclined towards the arts and/or more apt to be productive artists because both the “masculine and feminine principles” are more fully expressed in them (than, by implication, in heterosexual men). The gayness-left-handedness analogy is something of a trope in Russian discourse on homosexuality, with both representing an innate essential difference conferring a difference of perception and perspective that in turn confers a cognitive or aesthetic advantage in aesthetic modes of perception and creation (poetry, art, music, philosophy). See the commentary on the document “You Can’t Retrain the Left Handed” included in this collection.
Interestingly, Vladimir Veselkin, a performer associated with the highly popular band “Auction” (Аукцыон), is listed here as a non-gay supporter of the nascent gay-rights movement in Russia. This is consistent with Veselkin’s retrospective characterization of himself and his artistic output at this time from the vantage point of the 2010s. The year this article was published (1992) Veselkin released an album with a title song (“Impossible Love”) and accompanying imagery (also included in this collection) which were intensely homoerotically suggestive.
Homosexuality (https://lccn.loc.gov/sh85061780)--Russia (Federation) (https://lccn.loc.gov/n92056007)
Gay men (https://lccn.loc.gov/sh85061798)--Russia (Federation)
Gay rights (https://lccn.loc.gov/sh94009215)--Russia (Federation) (https://lccn.loc.gov/n92056007)
LGBT rights in Russia (https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q2300774)
Tchaikovsky, Peter Ilich, 1840-1893 (https://lccn.loc.gov/n79072979)
Tchaikovsky, Peter Ilich, 1840-1893 (http://viaf.org/viaf/99258155)
Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky (https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q7315)
Left- and right-handedness (https://lccn.loc.gov/sh85075706)
left-handeness (https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q789447)
Tver'
Tchaikovsky, Pyotr Ilyich
Russia
Smena, November 28 1992