Queer in Russia: A Story of Sex, Self, and the Other, and: Perevernutyi mir, and: Cracks in the Iron Closet: Travels in Gay and Lesbian Russia (review)

It may come as a surprise to find photographs of 20th-century Russia in the late historian John Boswell's Same-Sex Unions in Pre-Modern Europe. Boswell includes a photograph of Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev kissing East German chancellor Eric Honecker on the lips (see photo opposite)¹ as well as a Soviet postage stamp from 1968, also involving a kiss on the lips, "showing the grateful reception by the peasantry of Russian soldiers returning from World War II."² The stamp, Boswell explains, "was not shocking to Russians, who entertained less horror of homosexual interaction than did their Western contemporaries." While Boswell may be correct in saying that Russians are not shocked by this ritualized greeting, it does not necessarily follow that Russians are more tolerant of homosexual interaction. In fact, Michel Foucault and other scholars have suggested that "homosexuality as a distinct category is historically linked to the disappearance of male friendship."³ The enduring practices of traditional male friendship (i.e., kissing on the lips) would then attest not to a tolerance of homosexual interaction, but rather to the absence in Soviet society of homosexuality as a distinct and visible category.

Figure 1.

Boswell's justification for including photographs of modern Russia in a book about pre-modern Europe comes in the introduction to a book in which he argues that romantic love is a construct of modern [Western] Europe and that its corollary – a horror of homosexuality – is not known in cultures on the other side of this "epistemological divide," that is, by "residents of the Middle East, South-East Asia, Russia, other parts of Asia, and South America."⁴ The only research cited to support this argument when it comes to Russia is, bizarrely enough, Louis Luzbetak's 1951 study Marriage and the Family in Caucasia: A Contribution to the Study of North Caucasian Ethnology and Customary Law. Boswell simply conflates Russia and the peoples of the North Caucasus.

Boswell's treatment of Russia as the sexual other of the West is not unique. David Tuller writes in Cracks in the Iron Closet: "It would have been easy to romanticize the secret pleasures of a divided existence [for gays and lesbians in Russia] had I not also witnessed the damage it wrought" (266). Despite an awareness of the complexities involved in describing the construction of sexuality in another culture, Tuller is not entirely successful in resisting the temptation to "romanticize" the Russian scene. Tuller is described in Frank Browning's preface, with a reference to the San Francisco neighborhood, as a "Castro [Street] resident and partisan." In fact, Tuller recounts how he experienced his own sexual passion differently in Russia and ended up falling in love with a woman, a "lusty, haunted dyke" (7), who inspired in the author "an unexpected longing… somewhere deep within" (8). Tuller's decision to organize his book, which he describes as "part travel memoir, part social history, part journalistic inquiry" (7), as an unlikely love story – never, by the way, consummated sexually – suggests that the will to romanticize the otherness of Russia was not ultimately overcome.

This tendency on the part of Western observers to exoticize the Russian sexual scene, even in the face of personal testimony regarding the difficulties of living a gay or lesbian life there, must be understood in the context of the current Western critique of rigid gay and lesbian identities. While Tuller suggests that "only the growing number...