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4. Corporeal Intentions “Muzhiki ne tantsuiut” (“Muzhiki don’t dance”) —DJ Gruv Of course [Dima Bilan] is gay. You see the way he dances? —Konstantin, 27, St. Petersburg Lazarev, Bilan, Leont’ev, Baskov . . . gay singers are ashamed to come out [stesniaiutsia otkryt’sia]. They invent all sorts of stories about love affairs with women. This is because of the fear of losing the attention of most of the fans.” —Viktor Baturin, Dima Bilan’s former producer It was about 2:00 a.m. when, having earlier flagged a passing car outside of my Moscow apartment and negotiated a fare,1 I arrived at the gay club Dusha i telo (Soul and Body). Located approximately twenty minutes outside of the city center, the entrance on the first floor of a large, severe, Soviet-era building complex, the establishment was packed full of hundreds of people, the spillover visible on the street as I approached. After finally making may way inside, I was glad to be out of the frigid cold, but not so glad to stand in line over half an hour to check my coat; glad to be surrounded by handsome men, but not so glad to be one of the few over forty. This being my inaugural visit, I walked around the massive space, noting that aside from the cavernous room containing the main dance floor (where hard house and other types of then-current electronic dance music styles were being played), there were several other discrete spaces—for example, one area offered pool tables for customers who might be taking a break from dancing. With hundreds of bodies coursing through the various veins of the space that morning, it was by sheer chance that I literally bumped into Kliment, an informant I had met just a few days previously. Knowing that I had not been to the club before, he showed me around the labyrinthine structure, at one point guiding me to a room marked by the sign (in English) “For Men Only.”2 Seeing and hearing light and music emanating from the room, I was 104 chapter 4 fairly certain it was not a temnaia komnata (a “dark room,” a place where men could have sexual encounters in relative darkness and anonymity), and upon entering my presuppositions were confirmed as correct; rather than a place to engage in sexual activity, it was a site for the viewing of the beautiful male body. Customers were seated on padded banquettes around the perimeter of the small room, smoking, drinking, and conversing while, to the sounds of down-tempo, chill-out, and acoustic/new-age–type music, nude men— including some of the go-go dancers from the platforms surrounding the main dance floor—entered and languorously, sinuously moved and posed to the accompaniment of the music, now standing, now draping themselves over any available open seats. More living incarnations of static painted or sculpted artistic representations of the male form than bump-and-grind strippers in G-strings, the men—entirely naked, but hiding their genitals at all times via their poses or their hands—offered themselves as visible and incarnate aesthetic and erotic objects for the male viewers assembled. While the spectacle provided by these men was explicitly intended for the “gay gaze” (“For [Gay] Men Only”), visible male bodies that invite the eyes of the viewer exist, of course, outside of specifically demarcated spaces (a gay club) where spectators are either allowed or refused admission (“For Men Only”) based on their genders and sexual identities.3 Yet even absent the unambiguous markers of either geography or dictum, the sight of the unclothed, splendid male body often remains a site and sign for the production of assumed homoeroticism. Historically speaking, such images are visible in the paintings of one of Russia’s most famous nineteenth-century artists, Alekandr Ivanov, which feature numerous instances of idealized male physicality,4 as do thousands of photographs from the studio of Karl Bulla (active from the 1880s to the 1930s), recently unearthed by photographer Valerii Katsuba (Levy and Scott-Clark 2006).5 Such a veneration of masculine corporeality was to reach an apotheosis of sorts in the near deification of the male form in Socialist Realist art, often with the implication that such muscular forms were synechdochal for the nation (and nation building) itself .6 On a more contemporary front, films such as Aleksandr Sokurov’s 2003 Otets i syn (Father and Son) and Hussein Erkenov’s 1990 100 dnei do prikaza...

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