Filed Under: Video > Entertainment > Boris Moiseev: "Egoist"

Boris Moiseev: "Egoist"

One year before the release of this 1994 music video, Boris Moiseev had been interviewed by openly gay journalist and activist Yaroslav “Slava” Mogutin for the Riga-based “independent erotic magazine” Eshche (Still). In that interview, Moiseev talked openly about his experiences orally pleasing male Komsomols (members of the Communist Youth League). Eshche, however, had a small circulation and an insignificant public impact. In this music video, aimed at a much bigger audience, Moiseev is somewhat more circumspect. True, he boldly performs an emphatically feminine glamor and sexuality: bound up in a bustier; wearing elaborate eighteenth-century wigs and heavy makeup; posing with puckered, slightly open, painted lips while staring into the camera lens. 
 
The song lyrics accompanying this performance, meanwhile, are ambiguous and neither sexually nor gender-transgressive—in fact, they are quite tame relative to the audacious extravagance of Moiseev’s flamboyant performance of diva femininity. Throughout the song, Moiseev and his chorus allude vaguely to egotism, sensuality, and decadence, with a single, gratuitous reference to Romeo and Juliet, echoed in a musical motif sampled from Sergei Prokofiev’s eponymous 1935 ballet. As a whole, the song thus signals neither homoeroticism or gender fluidity, instead appealing to a kind of generalized “European imperial” aesthetic of a type re-popularized by the 1988 American film Dangerous Liaisons. The vagueness of the lyrics, and their mismatch with the video’s visuals, makes it harder to ascribe the song a stable, unitary meaning. 
 
Moiseev would exploit this vagueness after the cultural moment of the 1990s had passed. In the 2000s, he distanced himself from the LGBTQ cause, instead aligning himself with conservative religious groups that view public expressions of LGBTQ identities, and same-sex eroticism, as affronts to morality. He specifically spoke out against same-sex marriage and Pride demonstrations, ultimately assuming a position consonant with the 2013 law prohibiting “propaganda of non-traditional sexual relationships in the presence of minors.” Like many supporters of that law, Moiseev contended that, while Russian citizens should be free to pursue “non-traditional” relationships in their private lives, these relationships and non-traditional sexual identities have no place in public and social life in Russia. 
 
Moiseev indulged in a strategically dissociative aesthetic game obserrvable among some other post-Soviet LGBTQIA cultural figures. In the ideologically, culturally, and socially unstable atmosphere of the Russian 1990s, he had transgressed sexual and gender norms in a performative, but still strategically noncommittal way. He took advantage of his status as a cultural figure with enough notoriety to be celebrated for his eccentricities and extravagances, for bold acts of épatage. When, in the 2000s, these deviations threatened to become political or social liabilities, the artist dismissed them as mere aesthetic play, aspects of a performative persona that is itself an aesthetic construct not representative of the artist’s own sexual identity.
 
In the 1990s themselves Moiseev was in good company among mass-audience popular performers who felt much more freedom to express homosexual desire and/or gender-expression variance visually in their performances than they did in verbal language, where they exercised more caution. These artists seem to feel much more constrained in the verbal medium with its capacity for unequivocal, definitive statement. The plausible deniability afforded by their caution with words in the 1990s mass-media sphere serves them well in the Putin era.