Megapolis ekpress, 1994 no. 24, p. 8
An article on the early 1990s LGBTQ activism of Masha Gessen in Russia
Post-Soviet
1994
In this 1994 piece from Мегаполис экспресс (Metropolis express) several aspects of the developing LGBTQ (to use the current terminology) culture in Russia in the early 1990s are on display. Of particular note is the way in which that process appears here as a subcategory of early post-Soviet Russia’s fraught relationship with the US in these years. After a near fifty-year Cold War, Russia had effectively acknowledged the failure of Soviet Communism, which it was abandoning in favor of the economic and political systems championed by its longtime adversary, the United States. Russia’s post-Soviet pursuit of a new model of statehood resting on free-market capitalism and representative democracy was attended by a certain anxiety of influence vis-à-vis the US, and also by a search for indigenous variants of these systems. These same tensions are observable in the emerging LGBTQ culture, where a fascination with the more advanced LGBTQ movement in the West and especially in the US combines interestingly with attempts to access and foster organically and uniquely Russian versions of LGBTQ society and culture, a phenomenon well represented by items in this collection that document efforts to recover a lost Russian LGBTQ history. There were many efforts where these two aspects (the natively Russian and the American or Western) were mutually inextricable — efforts to gather and reinvigorate fragments of a Russian LGBTQ culture scattered beyond Russia’s borders by various historical vicissitudes, including but by no means limited to the Soviet legacy of hostility toward the expression of LGBTQ identities. It is easy to see how Masha Gessen could be a particularly compelling figure in this context. Born in Moscow in 1967, they emigrated to the United States in 1981 at the age of fifteen. In 1991 they moved back to Russia to pursue a career in LGBTQ activism and journalism there. They would return to the US twenty-two years later following the introduction of the 2013 law prohibiting “propaganda of non-traditional sexual relationships in the presence of minors” because they feared that the new legislation could be used by the state as a pretext for removing their children from their custody. In this item from Мегаполис экспресс (Metropolis express) Masha is presented as a carrier of a dual identity: a native Russian who came of age as a lesbian in the US in the 1980s, where they were able to self-actualize in a way that would likely not have been possible in the 1980s in Russia, and who voluntarily returned to Russia just before the beginning of the new post-Soviet era and to foster the development of the an LGBTQ movement in their native country. The article attributes Masha’s self-confidence in their assertion of their lesbian identity, and their effectiveness as a community organizer, to the ten formative years spent in the US.
On another level, there is the reference to Vladmir Zhirinovsky, a nationalist political figure in Russia who was a presidential candidate in the Russian elections of 1991 and 1996 (and would run four more times), agreeing to be interviewed by Gessen for the Треугольник (Triangle) bulletin, and citing the precedent of US President Bill Clinton addressing American LGBTQ communities. Curiously, in January 2022, a few short months before he died, Zhirinovsky, who had always been something of a loose canon on the Russian political scene, suggested that Russia should restore a tsarist or imperial autocracy, buttressed by the Orthodox Church. He said that the very notion of a Russian presidency was absurd, and asked “Where do we think we are? America? France?”
Gessen, Masha and Zhirinovsky, Vladimir
Russia
Megapolis ekpress, No. 24 (213)