A letter to readers from the editor of a regional newspaper (from the Ural region of Russia), Гей диалог
Post-Soviet
1994
This document is an editor’s letter addressed to readers of a local regional newspaper for LGBTQ readers (to use current terminology) in the Ural region of Russia. The author, the newspaper’s chief editor Valerii Klimov, is featured in another document in this collection “Homosexuality in Soviet Prisons and Camps.” He was convicted and sentenced in 1983 on violations of RSFSR Criminal Code Article 120 prohibiting the “depraving of minors” for sexual relationships he had with adolescent males when he himself was twenty years of age. In the course of serving his own sentence, Klimov witnessed heinous abuse of Article 121 of the RSFSR criminal code, which remained active in the Russian Federation’s criminal code until 1993 or the year before this issue was published, a law prohibiting “sodomy” or sexual relations between males (мужеложство). Per Klimov, in the Soviet penal system homosexuality was arbitrarily defined and homosexual status selectively assigned in an environment where nearly all if not all of the population was in some way involved in homosexual activity. Article 121 was often unfairly deployed against inmates who were the victims of sexual violence and not against the perpetrators, a fact which seems acutely perverse, given that the law provided for especially severe penalties for homosexual acts involving violence, coercion, or abuse of power over a victim. Convictions on Article 121 in these cases would come with additional sentences, prolonging by several years the time these prisoners, who were consigned to the lowest and most vulnerable category of the inmate hierarchy, would be subjected to horrific acts of sexual violence and other forms of abuse.
Once out of the penal system, Klimov became an advocate and devoted himself to providing support to victims of the persecutory misapplication of Article 121, and supporing LGBTQ people in Russia more generally. In this letter he announces to the readership that he and the team responsible for publishing the newspaper Gay Dialogue are prepared to defend LGBTQ people (again, to use current terminology) against these kinds of abuses and to mobilize their supporters from the academic, medical, and legal professions, and even from among the clergy, to do so. These offers were likely addressing the especially urgent needs of regional readers living far from the metropolitan centers of Moscow and St. Petersburg. Throughout the history of the LGBTQ liberation movements beginning in the latter part of the twentieth century, the metropolitan urban centers of intellectual and cultural capitals were also the centers of burgeoning LGBTQ culture and community, where LGBTQ people from less populous locales flocked. As isolated and clandestine as many LGBTQ people in Moscow or St. Petersburg might have felt, they likely enjoyed far greater opportunities for accessing community and critical services (legal, medical, psychological) than did their counterparts in smaller centers across Russia.
It is noteworthy that, published at the beginning of the twenty-year window free of anti-LGBTQ legislation, Klimov’s letter addresses the legal strategy of associating homosexual relations with legitimately abhorrent and destructive sexual behaviors, such as those involving minors and those involving violence or coercion, a strategy used in Article 121. It also unwittingly anticipates the associative strategies and pretexts and even the language of the law that will be enacted nineteen years later in 2013, a law that will be used effectively to prohibit expression of LGBTQ identities (the law prohibiting “propaganda of non-traditional sexual relationships in the presence of minors”). Klimov explicitly declares that conversion of people who do not self-identify as gay or lesbian and/or “propaganda” of the “way of life” represented by Gay Dialogue is on no way part of the publication’s agenda. He also unequivocally excludes perpetrators of sexual violence from the population the publication has been established to serve. Finally, having himself at the age of twenty been convicted for sexual relationships with adolescents, now at the age of thirty-one Klimov (who is reported as recognizing the justice of his conviction in another document in this collection “Homosexuality in Soviet Prisons and Camps”) expressly distances the newspaper and its target audience from anyone and anything involving sexual relations with minors. In Russia, as elsewhere, male homosexuality has historically been associated with pedophilia. Many Russian homophobic slurs (such as педераст, педик, пидор) are derived from the word “pederast.” The 2013 law against “propaganda of non-traditional sexual relationships in the presence of minors” seems designed to reinvigorate these unfortunate and unjustified associations.
Klimov, Valery
Russia
Gay Dialogue, 1994 No. 1