Gay, Slavs! (Gay, славяне!) on the past, present, and future of gay men in Russia.
Essay by gay former Soviet inmate published in journal Gay, славяне!
Post-Soviet
1993
In this essay by Gennadii Trifonov from the 1993 no. 1 issue of Gay, Slavs! (Gay, славяне!) questions of media, publishing, historiography, and different orders of identity (national identity, sexual identity) combine in ways that are very illustrative of this historical and cultural moment.
Trifonov was an inmate of the Soviet penal system convicted on the Soviet Union’s sodomy law (article 121 of the USSR criminal code, repealed the same year this article was published). He was one of the first (if not the first) to try to commit his experiences as a persecuted gay man in the Soviet penal system to the historical record and the public sphere. In 1977 he sent an open letter to the editors of the Literary Newspaper (Литературная газета) in which he described horrific abuses and gruesome ends suffered by gay prisoners in the latter years of the Soviet era. Trifonov’s letter (reproduced in its entirety in the article “Homosexuality in Soviet Prisons and Camps” included in this collection) was not published by the Literary Newspaper. Deeply troubled by the exclusion of gay people from the historical record and the mass-communication sphere, in this text from 1993 Trifonov registers concern about the emergent gay press in Russia and calls out, but avoids naming, the Libertarian Party of Russia’s gay candidate for the 1991 presidential election and the editor of the gay periodical Theme (Tема) — Roman Kalinin. His chief objection is against a conspicuous hedonism, a preoccupation with sex itself (nude photographs), and a dearth of original intellectually, culturally, socially, aesthetically substantive material. To Trifonov these publications appeared aimed at a readership envisioned as one defined entirely by the specificities of sexual desire and practice, and not by any larger interests: intellectual, cultural, aesthetic, historiographical, or political. This is where larger questions of identity come in. Trifonov insists on the belief that the distinctiveness of gay people is not limited to specificities of sexual experience and behavior, that their “exceptionality” has intellectual and aesthetic dimensions, and that it manifests in their cultural (intellectual and aesthetic) sensibilities and production, a creative productivity responsible for some of the most impactful contrubtions to Western culutral canons. Trifonov advocates for an integration of gay men into social and cultural spheres in a way that recognizes and respects their difference and their unique contributions to society and culture. Preventing this, in his view, is a destructive Russian chauvinism, a misguided sense of Russian exceptionalism for the sake of which Russia insists on isolating itself from Western culture. This view is fundamentally at odds with notions around LGTBQ sexuality, Russianness, and identity widely represented among Russians experiencing and indulging same-sex attraction in the 1990s. In chapter six, “Patriots and Perverts: The Intersection of National and Sexual Identities,” of her book Queer in Russia: A Story of Sex, Self, and the Other (Duke University Press, 1999), sociologist Laurie Essig has sections titled “Nationalist Queers” and “Queer Nationalists” where she looks at the copresence of nationalist sentiment and expressions of homosexuality in a number of early post-Soviet Russia’s most visible “queer” (Essig’s term) figures. For some of these people nationalist impulses do not seem to inhibit expression of LGBTQ sexual identities. For others, however, a Russian national identity that was the primary, master identity precluded adoption of the Western concept of LGBTQ identities and dictated a view of same-sex desire and its pursuit as events or behvaiors incidental to and in no way definitive of a person’s identity. The idea that post-Soviet Russian society had to develop its own distinct response to sexual pluralism, that Western models were not applicable to the unique Russian case, were, per Essig, widely observable among the broader population as well. Many of Essig’s interviewees seemed to prefer a more fluid model in which experience and pursuit of same-sex desire and/or difference of gender expression could be experimented with in ways that did not affect a person’s public or social identity, in ways that did not foreclose possibilities of projecting more conventionally acceptable personalities, including ultimately marrying a person of the opposite sex and raising children within a traditional heterosexual family unit. It is easy to imagine a reticence on the part of people in Russia at that time to assume identities that represented major political and social liabilities comporting serious risks, merely because they had indulged some long-repressed impulses and might continue to indulge them in the future. Trifonov, though, seems to recognize that this Russian exceptionalist and isolationist insistence on the casual nature of same-sex desire renders the subjects of those desires invisible and their cohesion into a collective subject of rights entitliements impossible. He promotes a more essentialist Western concept of sexual identity, which includes a view of “sexually exceptional” people as having a distinctive collective identity and distinctive perspective on the world, its own distinctive cognitive properties and aesthetic sensibilities, and a rich distinguished history of distinctive, and in some cases foundational, contributions to Western culture. It seems that in Trifonov’s model of history prerevolutionary Russia partook of a pan-European or pan-Western cultural evolution in which gay figures were integral contributors to the intellectual and cultural canons, an evolution that was truncated in Russia by the Soviet experiment. Like some other LGBTQ writers in early post-Soviet Russia, Trifonov emphasizes the hypocrisy of the purportedly ultra-progressive Soviet order’s de facto patriarchal conservatism and the consistency of many of its positions with those of its ostensible arch-antagonists — the Fascists and the Nazis. The Fascist and Nazi regimes represent another disruptive aberration of European cultural evolution involving an attempt to exterminate LGBTQ elements. Trifonov points, for example, to the absurdity of the Soviets blaming the Nazis for the homosexuality of Nikolai Ezhov, head of the NKVD from 1936 to 1938. The Nazis were ferociously homophobic and gay men were a category actively targeted for imprisonment and extermination under the Third Reich.
Homosexuality (https://lccn.loc.gov/sh85061780)--Russia (Federation) (https://lccn.loc.gov/n92056007)--Periodicals (https://lccn.loc.gov/gf2014026139)
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)
LGBT history in Russia (https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q4204645)
Trifonov, Gennadii, 1945- (https://lccn.loc.gov/no2005064384)
Trifonov, Gennadii, 1945- (http://viaf.org/viaf/67572076)
St. Petersburg
Trifonov, Gennady and Kalinin, Roman
Russia
Gay slaviane No. 1, pp. 9-15