A Man Who Keeps Up with the Times

This piece on David Bowie as a highly impactful and openly bisexual cultural figure, largely or completely translated from an English-language source published in 1989, appears here in an issue of the glossy color magazine Mal’chishnik (Stag Party), a publication that interspersed homoerotic photography with popular-culture and lifestyle pieces. In keeping with the tendency of post-Soviet LGBTQ culture to borrow from Western exemplars, the magazine was a calque of American publications like Out, itself only in print since 1992.

This feature article was likely chosen for its casual mention of indulgence in homosexual activity by a highly impactful cultural figure whose persona (and, seemingly, private life) was predominantly heterosexual. As sociologist Laurie Essig has observed, LGBTQ populations in Russia differed from their Western counterparts in that they distinguished between sexual behavior and sexual identity. In this framing, homosexual behaviors are experiences rather than inherent features of personality. To a broad segment of the Russian audience, Bowie’s casual acknowledgements of his gay experiences were compelling because they held out the promise of engaging in homosexual acts without compromising a masculine or even heterosexual identity—and without endangering a public, image-based career that included the performance of masculinity.

Bowie’s reference to homosexuality in prison life—his statement that, given his ability to enjoy sex with men, he would be able to make the best of a hypothetical prison stint—may have resonated with readers familiar with the Russian penal system. In Russian corrective institutions, many inmates engaged in homosexual behavior without compromising their social status or masculine identities. A subset of inmates, meanwhile, were severely and irreparably stigmatized as a result of these encounters. These men were ostracized, relegated to the lowest rungs of social hierarchy, and victimized by abuse that penal-system administrators left unpunished, or, worse, encouraged.

The English-language piece on Bowie from which this publication derives dates to 1989, a moment when Gorbachev’s policy of glasnost was lifting taboos in many of areas of Russian life. Despite this new openness, the widespread homosexual activity within the Soviet penal system could not be verbalized. It remained especially taboo in the media. This is an example of a Soviet convention of compartmentalizing certain phenomena outside of public, and often even social or private, speech, a system of institutionalized psychological and social duplicity that Russian sociologist Yuri Levada termed “doublethink,” a word he borrowed from George Orwell’s 1984.