“About That” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RD52dLZEhs8&t=494s
A clip from the talk show "Pro Eto" with Elena Khanga, episode on male prostitution.
Post-Soviet
1997-2000
The show “About That” (“Про это”) ran from 1997 to 2000. Its format is patently derivative of the genre of American talk shows hosted by Phil Donahue and Oprah Winfrey in the 1980s and 1990s: discussion of often sensitive or taboo subjects (the theme of “About That” was “love and sex”) with a panel of guests and a live audience that asked questions and interacted with the host and the guests. It seems likely that, to some extent, the show’s theme and format are implicitly referencing the 1986 Leningrad-Boston telebridge hosted by the Russian-American journalist and media personality Vladimir Pozner in Leningrad and Donahue in Boston. During that event, titled “Women talk to Women,” one of the Soviet participants famously said “there is no sex in the Soviet Union.” Pozner and Donahue would go on to co-host the American show “Pozner and Donahue” from 1992-1995. An added resonance with the Oprah Winfrey show was that “About That’s” host Elena Khanga was of part African descent and was dark-skinned, something far less commonly seen in the Russian media than in the American media of the time. There was something of a running joke that Khanga was “the only TV host who won’t blush talking about that,” the “that” being sex and the remark about not blushing being a double entendre referring both to her aplomb and her skin tone.
This episode documents an interesting juncture in the evolution of attitudes towards gender roles and male homosexual relations seven years into the post-Soviet era. From the opening of the episode, with the addition of the qualifier “male” to the word “prostitution,” a traditional economy of sexual power and monetized sexual accommodation has been upset. The supposition that “prostitution” is a women’s occupation is voiced very early on: “prostitution is not a man’s activity” (“проституция — не мужское дело”). The role of the person who submits to the sexual desires of others in exchange for payment, a passive or submissive role by definition, and so antithetical to the aggressive independence and strong agency associated with masculinity in the Soviet and early post-Soviet eras. The trade is often regarded as a degrading one traditionally plied by members of the “weaker” or more submissive sex in the service of members of the stronger one, and by people of lesser means for people of greater means. The stigma of prostitution is most often borne by the purveyor rather than the beneficiary of sexual services.
Here the guests and audience of Elena Khanga’s show take a second look at those assumptions in the socially and culturally experimental, and one might say somewhat tentatively transgressive, atmosphere of fluid mores, coupled with widespread dire economic distress, in the late 1990s in Russia. Two of the show’s male guests and one male audience member report that financial hardship drove them to consider selling sexual services to make ends meet. Both of the guests, each in their own manner, present sex work as a job more or less like any other and talk about specific skills or techniques for maintaining professional distance in their work with clients, and both suggest that they are in some sense in charge in these encounters. Their response to questions about their own sexual preferences are symptomatic of a social climate with seriousl taboos around male homosexuality, and especially “passive” male homosexuality. It was very typical at the time for men who engaged in sexual activity with other men and were willing to talk about it to self-identify as bisexual, or not to view these sexual behaviors as identity-defining criteria at all, to treat them as something far more incidental. Men could be particularly protective of their masculinity and especially careful to insulate their masculine identity from any sexual information or forms of self-expression that might compromise it. One of the two male guests, “Vlad,” who presents as more delicate and genteel, and who also says he is in a romantic relationship with a man, also tells the audience that he has a son and that he is attracted to people of both sexes. He communicates that he maintains control in his work by disclosing that in his sex work he agrees to perform acts causing pain if requested by clients, but does not submit to such acts himself. He makes no statements about “active” or “passive” roles, meaning the giving and receiving ends of penetrative sex acts. The other male guest, “Mark,” who is more aggressively and stereotypically masculine in his presentation and posture, emphatically declares that, in his work and in his non-professional sexual encounters, he draws the line at assuming the “passive” role in sex with other men, and defines himself as an “active gay.” He also identifies as bisexual, but says that, through a complex of circumstances, most of the sex he has is with other men. Both guests appear to be wearing wigs and/or false facial hair in order to disguise their identities.
Something interesting happens when a female audience member remarks that “Mark” seems too masculine and questions whether he really is gay, and Khanga asks how he started having sex with men. He replies that he was “led astray” or “corrupted” and Khanga’s immediate assumption is that he’s talking about experiences from military service. The fact is that there are reference points in the Russian collective consciousness at this time for sexual activity between men: the army and the penal system. In these contexts, stigma tended to be attached only to the “passive” participants, whose humiliation could lower them to the level of “untouchables” (neprikasaemye or opushchennye) in these environments. It turns out, however, that Mark’s initial gay encounters happened when he arrived in Moscow and experienced financial hardship. There is more material on male homosexuality in the penal system and armed forces in “Homosexuality in Soviet Prisons and Camps,” “To the Reader,” “Gay Dawn.”
The second part of the episode is devoted to women using the sexual services of male prostitutes.
Khanga, Yelena
Russia