Argumenty i fakty, 1990 No. 50, pp. 6-7
An article from Argumenty i fakty from 1990 in which w journalists seek comment from Igor Kon on the topic of homosexuality
Post-Soviet
1990
The expert consulted for this article, Igor Kon (1928-2011), was a prominent sociologist and psychologist specializing in the sociological dimensions of sex and sexual relationships. His influence and visibility extended well beyond his professional sphere. He was very much a part of the public sphere and popular culture. He was widely published and read in the journalistic press and visible in the media sphere of the 1990s.
In this piece published at the beginning of the 1990s, and so toward the end of perestroika and of the Soviet era, there is an open, matter-of-fact espousal of democratic values, certainly at least implicitly counterposed to political systems like the Soviet one, in which the individual life is subordinated to the state. Tolerance of and respect for the “sexual minorities” of gays and lesbians is presented here as representative of the more enlightened democratic balance between the needs of a society as a whole and the needs and rights of individual citizens to self-actualize and self-express in ways that may be in tension with mores and conventions shared by the majority. In another document in this collection the authors address the disadvantage that the phrase “sexual minorities” conferred in a Soviet society centered around the submission of the individual to the collective, a society engendered by a revolution whose very name connoted a triumph of the majority; the word “Bolshevik” is derived from the Russian word for majority — большинство (see “Homosexuality in Soviet Prisons and Camps”).
In the course of discussing the balance between broader societal and individual interests, Kon carefully disaggregates homosexuality from legitimately abhorrent forms of sexual deviance, such as those involving violence or the exposure of minors to sexual experience. In 2013 the imperative to protect minors from potentially damaging sexual information or experience will be the pretext for what will come to be known as Russia’s “anti gay propaganda law,” a law against “propaganda of non-traditional sexual relationships in the presence of minors” that effectively prohibits the expression of LGBTQ identities. In this article Kon mentions that homosexual acts between males is still a criminal offence (Article 121 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic which would be repealed in 1993). The 2013 law does not prohibit private sexual acts between consenting adults, but its prohibitions can be understood to extend to any and all forms of LGBTQ identity expression in public spaces.
The title of the article is interesting, in that the association between homosexuality and left-handedness is something of a trope that runs through many different Russian contemplations of sexual difference, contemplations suggesting innate and intrinsic difference from the majority, a difference that confers a valuable alterity of perspective on the world. See, for example, the document ““Gays” and the left-handed — comrades in misfortune” in this collection. See also the chapter “The Left-hander” in Olga Bakich’s monograph on the gay Russian émigré poet Valerii Pereleshin Valerii Pereleshin: Life of a Silkworm (University of Toronto Press, 2015). Pereleshin is the subject of another document in this collection: “Valerii Pereleshin.”
Homosexuality (https://lccn.loc.gov/sh85061780)--Russia (Federation) (https://lccn.loc.gov/n92056007)
Left- and right-handedness (https://lccn.loc.gov/sh85075706)
left-handeness (https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q789447)
Kon, I. S. (Igorʹ Semenovich), 1928-2011 (https://lccn.loc.gov/n81056808)
Igor Kon (https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q1657795)
Kon, I. S. (Igorʹ Semenovich), 1928-2011 (http://viaf.org/viaf/76637925)
Kon, Igor
USSR
Argumenty i fakty, 1990 No. 50, pp. 6-7