Item in Правда about Slava Mogutin’s attempt to register marriage to partner Robert Filipini
Post-Soviet
1994
This is a short, highly opinionated piece on the 1994 attempt by Russian gay activist and journalist Yaroslav (“Slava”) Mogutin and his partner American artist Robert Fillippini to register their marriage, an action widely perceived as a publicity stunt. The title of the item is a well-known Russian adage. It translates in English roughly as “Love is nasty. It can make you fall in love with an asshole.” The Russian word rendered here in English as “asshole” is kozel, which literally means goat. The often-heard locution takes on particular connotations in the context of this piece. Firstly, the phrase’s general meaning that love is a capricious and dangerous force that can cause a person to pursue romantic entanglements with people who will not treat them well or otherwise not make them happy, seems extended to mean that, in particularly extreme cases, a person might do something as bizarre as falling in love with a person of their own sex. Another overtone present in this particular use of the saying is that of bestiality. Read literally, the second clause says a person could even fall in love with a goat. Another document in this collection, “Gay Dawn,” refers to another newspaper’s reaction to this same event: “so now I guess we just sit and wait for a bestialist to show up at the marriage registry office with a frog.” The argument that recognition of marriages between people of the same sex will lead inevitably to people marrying animals of other species is one still presented by some opponents to same-sex marriage in the West.
Once the organ of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, in 1991 Pravda became the organ of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation, which it remains to this day. The Russo-American relations dimension of the event is mentioned likely with some disdain by an outlet representing a contingent of 1990s Russian society for whom the fall of the communist order and Russia’s adoption of capitalism and all associated social ills were catastrophes. Mogutin and other LGBTQ activists in the early post-Soviet period often refer to the paradoxical patriarchal conservatism of the ostensibly ultra-progressive Soviets’ attitudes towards sexual difference which, in their view, were at least as backward as those of the USSR’s declared arch-antagonists — fascists (see “Homosexuality in Soviet Prisons and Camps,” “Soviet Homosexuality Yesterday, Today, Tomorrow”). Here the intensely reactionary rhetoric that sees acceptance of same-sex relationships as a sign of the disintegration of the moral fabric of society; associates same-sex relations with obscenity, illegal drug use and other criminal behavior; and alongside the neutral “lesbians” uses the Russian equivalent of “faggots” to refer to gay men is almost indistinguishable from the inflamed rhetoric of religious fundamentalists and ultra-conservatives in the West.
Homosexuality (https://lccn.loc.gov/sh85061780)--Russia (Federation) (https://lccn.loc.gov/n92056007)
Gay men (https://lccn.loc.gov/sh85061798)--Russia (Federation)
Mogutin, Slava (https://lccn.loc.gov/no94038036)
Mogutin, Slava (http://viaf.org/viaf/10753888)
Slava Mogutin (https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q2094353)
Mogutin, Slava and Filippini, Robert
Russia
Pravda, No. 64, April 16 1994, p.4