Scene from 1993 Russian feature film with gay themes
Post-Soviet
1993
The film The Creation of Adam (Сотворение Адама) was first released in Russia in 1993, the same year that Article 121 of the Russian Federation’s Criminal Code — the law prohibiting sexual relations between men — was repealed. The film’s protagonist Andrei is experiencing a crisis in his marriage. A strange man named Philipp enters the scene and there are somewhat uncanny homoerotic exchanges between Philipp and Andrei that make Andrei very uncomfortable. In the end Philipp, who reveals that he is Andrei’s “guardian angel,” guides Andrei back to his wife (who Philipp reveals is pregnant).
The title of the film is taken from Michelangelo’s famous fresco in the Sistine Chapel, a image of which appears on a vinyl record cover shown in Philipp’s apartment. Michelangelo, whose name contains the Italian word for angel, was a crucial reference point in Russia in the 1990s for claims of еssental LGBTQ (to use the current terminology) elements in world culture (see “Gay Dawn,” “Homosexuality in Soviet Prisons and Camps”).
The more or less overt homoeroticism of the Andrei-Philipp relationship — a daring novelty for Russian cinema of the time — exists in liminal zones of the diegetic reality and is in this way isolated from the quotidian, social dimension of the diegesis. Homosexual desire irrupts into that social dimension in the character of Oleg, featured in this scene with Andrei. In the preceding scene Andrei witnesses a group of men savagely beating Oleg and hurling homophobic slurs at him. Andrei intervenes to defend Oleg and ultimately rescues him, and brings Oleg back to his apartment after the encounter. This scene takes place in the kitchen of the apartment Andrei shares with his wife.
Andrei wears a cross pendant around his neck, and this is part of a larger complex of Christian motifs in the film. A swift resurgence of religiosity was widespread in the broader reaction to the ultimate collapse of the aggressively atheist Soviet order. The character of Oleg is interesting in that it seems in several ways to represent an early 1990s gay experience that is akin to an iteration of the Soviet dissident experience within early post-Soviet reality, a reality in which, to a large extent, dissidents were being lionized and their legacy of suffering revered. Oleg talks about being surveilled by acquaintances and neighbors, dogged by rumor and innuendo, reported on, and fired from his job. These were the experiences of Soviet-era dissidents, many of whom also served sentences in the Soviet penal system. His defiant resolve to express desires and sensibilities so completely at odds with dominant norms, in the face of massive pressure to act otherwise, his courage to choose this rather than to make the ostensibly easier choice to dissemble, behave falsely, and conform, seems to confer on the figure of Oleg the same kind of heroic outcast status within the early post-Soviet Russian world that was the legacy of Soviet dissidents. Oleg is also from a smaller regional center of Saratov, where life for LGBTQ people would have been considerably more challenging than it was for their Moscow or St. Petersburg counterparts. In this scene Oleg tells Andrei that, in order to find his bed for the night, he will visit a local pleshka (плешка) — a word for informal meeting places frequented by gay men, often in parks, train stations, and other public spaces — and go home with a man who can offer him a place to stay for the night. This underscores the precariousness and vulnerability of the existence of this character, who, in the previous scene, was violently attacked by a group of strangers. While the film’s protagonist Andrei indulges in a joke that plays with feminizing Oleg (he specifically uses the feminine version of the word for “nurse” or “orderly” — sanitarka (санитарка) — when he asks whether Oleg is one), ultimately he defends him against violence, welcomes him into his home, and listens calmly and respectfully to Oleg’s honest answers to Andrei’s questions about his sexuality and life.
Russia