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5. Gay-Made Space “Space can never be that completed simultaneity in which all interconnections have been established, and in which everywhere is already linked to everywhere else. A space, then, which is neither a container for always-already constituted identities nor a completed closure of holism. This is a space of loose ends and missing links. For the future to be open, space must be open too.” —Doreen Massey (2005: 11–12) In the space of musical experience, we foment transformation. —D. Robert DeChaine (2002: 95) It was only in 2012 when St. Petersburg and Moscow, two of the largest cities in Eastern Europe, joined the ranks of the “virtually visible”; in February of that year, the Google Maps street view feature was finally enabled, allowing internet visitors to view some of the world’s most famous sites and sights, architectural and otherwise. From the Krasnyi ploshad’ (Red Square), to the Èrmitazh (State Hermitage Museum), to Petergof (the “Russian Versailles”), hard-core Slavophiles and the generally curious alike now had the ability to move beyond the flatness and circumscription of the still photo, to experience 360 degree views of buildings and boulevards, to “walk” (or glide, with the click of a mouse) down Nevskii prospekt or Tverskaia ulitsa, perhaps even “encountering ” virtual natives along the way. Of course, even the verisimilitude offered by the latest satellite and digital technologies cannot truly replicate all that is associated with physical location within a specific space. The panoramic pictures on my laptop screen, for example, do not conjure up in me the same experiential affects as when I walked down Moskovskii prospekt in St. Petersburg the first time, feeling entirely dwarfed by the massive scale of the architecture, hearing the sounds of the Russian language around me, struggling to read the signs written in the Cyrillic alphabet, fearful of getting lost and being unable to ask for directions back to my apartment. A city is not simply buildings, of course, a bounded and stable location aligning neatly with a two-dimensional depiction on a two-dimensional map 136 chapter 5 (even if, with a click, it can become three-dimensional) or a linguistic signifier ; rather, a city is a place comprising manifold spaces. These spaces should likewise not be considered objective, material sites into which people enter, or from which they exit; rather, space, as numerous theorists have posited, is a construction, one reliant upon relationships between and among both objects and subjects. Tuan (1977), Löw (2008), and Massey (2005) (among many others) have highlighted this constructedness to varying degrees of explicitness, rooting such constructions in the realm of lived experience.1 Löw, for example, noting the importance of both structure and action, sees space as constituted via “performative action by synthesizing and relationally ordering objects and people,” something that occurs “in day-to-day activities with recourse to institutionalized orderings and spatial structures” (43). Foregrounding the experiential, she suggests that actions are tied to perceptions that “are grounded both in the external effect of social goods and other people and in the perceptual activity of the constituting agent” (41). Moreover, Löw is highly cognizant of the affective power of space and finds that “atmospheres” of either inclusion or exclusion may be enacted via “simultaneous acts of interpretation/perception and external effects of objects in their spatial ordering” (46). For gay men in post-Soviet Russia, the finding of spaces with amicable atmospheres is often dependent upon interpersonal relationships, word of mouth, serendipity, and even the media. In this last regard, magazines such as Afisha and Kalendar’ (in both St. Petersburg and Moscow), with their listings of “cultural” happenings and sites, play a part in rendering such spaces visible, just as the publication TimeOut has done in such major urban centers as New York, Paris, Barcelona, and Amsterdam, among others. In fact, indicating a growing internationalism in Russia’s largest cities, TimeOut appeared in 2004 in both cities, gradually taking over Kalendar.’2 The style, graphics, and layout mirrored those of all other TimeOuts, with listings published every two weeks, arranged under such rubrics as “film,” “exhibitions,” “theater,” “music,” “sports,” “children,” and “clubs.” Notably missing from St. Petersburg’s contents, in contrast with those of other cities, was a “gay and lesbian” section; after the first few issues, however, a very small group of such listings appeared not under its own heading, but tucked away near the back of the magazine in the section devoted to “vzroslye igry” (“adult...

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