Sovershenno sekretno, 1994, no. 11, p. 28
LGBTQ activist Yaroslav “Slava” Mogutin’s response to another article on gay men in post-Soviet Russia (by Aelita Efimova) in the magazine Совершенно секретно.
Post-Soviet
1995
This article is a response to another included in this collection: “Gay Dawn” by one Aelita Efimova. “View from the Other Side,” written by gay journalist, activist and professional épateur Yaroslav “Slava” Mogutin, was published directly below Efimova’s article in the same issue of Top Secret (Совершенно секретно). In it Mogutin vituperates Efimova’s paranoid fantasties of sinister gay mafias and “brotherhoods” and her use of them as a justification for continued segregation of gay men and their categorical exclusion from public service (government, law enforcement, the military). Mogutin’s text exposes Efimova’s bigoted double-standard treatment of gay men as an exotic category, exploding her feeble justifications for excluding gay men from law enforcement and the military — anecdotal accounts of a gay police officer who abused his position to coerce sexual favors from adolescent boys and to harass former boyfriends, and of a gay man in the army who converted many formerly heterosexual servicemen. Mogutin points, for example, to Efimova’s anxieties about potential abuses of power by gay policemen and her seemingly willful ignorance of the fact that some heterosexual police officers abuse their positions to harass and coerce sexual favors from women.
Mogutin bemoans the fact that “homophobia remains a matter of state policy in Russia” and goes on to sketch a condensed twentieth-century history of the persecution of gay men in which they are shown to be despised from all sides: by the Soviets, by the Nazis and the Fascists, and by far-right conservatives in the USA. He likens the plight of gay men in the twentieth century to that of the Jews (another article co-authored by Mogutin and included in this collection — “Homosexuality in Soviet Prisons and Camps” — talks about the treatment of gay men in Nazi camps). He laments the fact that, often, gay men who have achieved positions of power have been quislings who have supported authoritarian regimes hostile to the expression of gay identities. All of this appears in a different, and strange, light when considered in the context of Mogutin’s own prejudices and intolerances and his own aggressive nationalism. Mogutin aligned himself with Russian nationalist figures such as Vladimir Zhirinovsky (rumored to have had a sexual appetite for very young men carefully hidden from the public) and Eduard Limonov (famous for, among other things, a bisexual literary alter-ego which he abjured when he became involved in nationalist politics in Russia). The same year this piece was published in Top Secret Mogutin is reported to have remarked that Zhirinovsky was a would-be tyrant who would wreak a Stalinesque terror (or worse) on the country if given the chance, and to have defended Limonov’s nationalist platform that excluded Jews as “non-Russians.” The following year (in 1995) he will publish an article (“The Chechen Knot,” included in this collection) about the first Chechen War, in which he writes extremely disparagingly about the Chechen people in a way that displays a total absence of empathy for them as an abused minority in Russia. Ostensibly because of this article, Mogutin is forced to emigrate to the United States to avoid prosecution (the “Chechen Knot” article also spoke disparagingly about “the West”).
It is curious that in this piece Mogutin refers to Masha Gessen — a Moscow-born Russian-American Jewish journalist and activist (featured in a number of documents in this collection: “Masha Gessen Interview with Elena Bonner,” “Lesbian Masha Attacks Bureaucrats”) as an “American lesbian journalist,” and that he quotes the section of Gessen’s interview with Zhirinovsky in which the latter cites US President Clinton’s involvement of LGTBQ people in politics as a precedent for his own. Zhirinovsky’s “hidden jewishness” was discussed in a book from this same year by Limonov entitled “Limonov against Zhirinovsky,” a book which, according to sociologist Laurie Essig, Mogutin defended.
Mogutin, Slava, Zhirinovsky, Vladimir, and Gessen, Masha
Russia
Sovershenno sekretno, 1994, no. 11, p. 28