Russian Gays/Western Gaze: Mapping (Homo)Sexual Desire in Post-Soviet Russia

When the first English edition of Ivan Bloch's Sexual Life in England, Past and Present appeared in 1938, the publisher seemed to feel obliged to explain why a book on England written by a German should be translated at all: "Readers might justifiably wonder why any publisher in this country should issue a history of English morals written by a foreign author." The answer, he continued, "is as simple as it is surprising. No comprehensive history of English morals in the English language has ever been published." ¹

Until the late 1980s the same could be said of sexual life—in particular, homosexual life—in Russia, where the Soviet regime "repressed sex as a cultural language and commercial practice." ² Widespread "sexophobia," if not explicit homophobia, created conditions both institutional (homosexual activity was illegal from 1934 to 1993) and attitudinal that were adverse to public discussions and representations of same-sex desire. In 1989 the mother of a homosexual boy complained in a letter to Literaturnaia Gazeta that she could find little information on the subject in the medical literature. "Why," she lamented, "is science silent?" ³ This broad repression of sexual discourse produced a variety of silences that complicates any attempt to map the landscape of male (homo)sexual desire in the Soviet period. ⁴

This task has been further complicated by the rarefied Cold War climate that made discussions of sexual life in Russia especially susceptible to Western fears and fantasies. "During 74 years of Soviet rule," writes Donovan Hohn in a review of contemporary Russian fiction, "Russia became a fantastic landscape in the American imagination, home simultaneously to Pasternak's snow-covered dachas and Solzhenitsyn's gulags, to gray-suited apparatchiks and gray-haired babushkas, to ballerinas and beautiful, murderous spies." ⁵ The few Western scholars who took on the topic of homosexuality in Russia during the Soviet period often found their work evaluated through the lens of political ideology as either an apology for the Soviet Union or anticommunist propaganda. The treatment of homosexuals was seen to gauge the modernity of the Soviet experiment. ⁶

The politically charged atmosphere surrounding the issue was evident in a now famous exchange that took place in the journal Gay Sunshine in the late 1970s. The "controversy" began with a charge leveled by Simon Karlinsky at John Lauritsen and David Thorstad, authors of The Early Homosexual Rights Movement (1864-1935). ⁷ According to Karlinsky, the authors had exaggerated Soviet tolerance of homosexuality in the 1920s through "ignorance or willful disregard of the historical facts," basing their conclusions almost exclusively on official documents. ⁸ Karlinsky's criticism, alongside his belief that Stalinist practices were "the logical outgrowth and extension of Bolshevism" and his interpretation of the last two decades of czarist rule as a golden age for homosexuals and lesbians (reflecting the attitude that "gay is good"), led Lauritsen and Thorstad to brand the Berkeley professor a "cold warrior" and his thesis "anti-communist." ⁹

Several years later, in an article subtitled "Revisionism Revised," Karlinsky stated unequivocally that, "viewed from a Russian perspective rather than through the prism of Western gullibility, the October Revolution of 1917 emerges as the event that halted the gradual dawning of gay visibility and acceptance of homosexuality in Russian society." However, that conclusion, Dan Healey remarks, is "necessarily. . . founded on a limited base of published sources." ¹⁰

The end of the Cold War led to the opening of Russian archives, permitting unprecedented access to official and unofficial accounts (legal documents and medical studies; diaries, letters, and samizdat literature) of homosexuality in Russia. The availability of archival materials and the influence of 1970s "revisionist," social-historical interpretations of the Soviet period generated a number of excellent scholarly works, such as Laura Engelstein's Keys to Happiness (1992), Eric Naiman's Sex in Public (1997), and Healey's Homosexual...