Between Gulags and Pride Parades: Sexuality, Nation, and Haunted Speech Acts

The Ghost by the Latrine

Shadow, know thy place!' And your place was, and is, by the latrine."¹ Boris Kamyanov, a Russian-speaking immigrant living in Israel, wrote these words in an article published in September 2002 in one of the many Russian-language newspapers appearing in the country. He was addressing the group of immigrants who identified as gay, lesbian, and bisexual and who spoke out in Vesti, one of the leading newspapers of Russian Israelis, protesting against homophobia and demanding respect for same-sex relations. So what kind of queer migrations—broadly understood as movements of people, meanings, feelings, and names—are at stake here? And what kinds of words are employed to capture queer sexualities that are sometimes, but not always and not necessarily, framed as identities, such as gay or lesbian? How do these words travel, change, or collapse into each other?

"A place by the latrine" is a Russian idiom describing someone's subordinate and voiceless position. Its origins lie in Soviet criminal jargon. Located inside a prison cell but at a distance from the bunk beds, the latrine was not only used for excrement but also marked a place of social subordination. The person at the bottom of the criminal hierarchy had to sleep closest to the latrine. In the men's cells the place by the latrine was reserved for the inmates who were seduced or forced into a passive homosexual role. These men were often called opuschennye, or "those who were put down," sexually and hierarchically. Once put down, they served as slaves and as targets for beating and sexual abuse. Putting down was often accomplished through an act of rape (sometimes real and sometimes symbolic, such as, for example, by touching the victim's lips with the attacker's penis) and accompanied by the exclamation "your place is now by the latrine!"²

Kamyanov's words concluded a series of events that began with a hateful poem that he had written and published in Vesti earlier that year. The poem condemned Pride parades and described the marchers as sinners who destroyed the Israeli nation from within. It caused an outraged reaction among Russian-speaking queer immigrants and led to their first political organizing, which the present article analyzes.³

The queers, as well as Kamyanov himself, were part of a large wave of immigration from the former Soviet Union. Since the late 1980s over one million Jews and their families have migrated to Israel from the former Soviet Union, welcomed by the Israeli "Law of Return." The law conceives Jewish immigration to Israel as a return from diaspora to the national home and grants immediate citizenship to Jewish arrivals. Defined by the state as "homecomers" whose belonging to the nation was unquestioned and automatic, Russian-speaking immigrants were at the same time marginalized as newcomers.⁴ To this day they occupy an ambivalent position of otherness and domination, of entitlement to a home and anxieties of exclusion and alienation.

In the past fifteen years a large body of research has considered how Russian Israelis negotiate their place in Israeli society and how their national belonging is performed in different social arenas.⁵ None of these works, however, deal with issues of queer sexualities, presuming instead the heteronormativity of nationhood and belonging. But the nation's heterosexuality, too, is performed rather than given; it can be threatened, challenged, and disrupted, as this article shows.

My discussion is embedded in feminist and queer scholarship that emphasizes that nations are often imagined and constituted through normative femininities and masculinities, positioning heterosexuality at their core.⁶ Immigration is heterosexualized, too, whether through laws and border controls that refuse entry to queer subjects; or policies and media that presume "the immigrant family" as heterosexual; or the ways diasporic and migrant communities position queers as "impossible subjects."⁷ Israeli immigration law and policy do not officially distinguish individuals by sexual orientation. Nonetheless, both law and policy are based on the concept of the heterosexual family bonded by legal marriage, making queer immigrants invisible at best and discriminated against at...