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 insignificant public impact. In this music video aimed at a much bigger audience, Moiseev is somewhat more circumspect. He does, it’s true, boldly perform 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 staring into the camera lens. The song lyrics accompanying this performance, though, are much more ambiguous and not sexually or gender-transgressive at all. The song lyrics for Egoist are distinctly tame relative to the audacious extravagance of Moiseev’s — a man’s — flamboyant performance of diva femininity. The words sung by Moiseev and his chorus are vague allusions to egotism, sensuality, and decadence, with the occasional, seemingly gratuitous reference to Romeo and Juliette (echoed in a musical motif from Prokofiev’s opera). They do not signal homoeroticism or gender fluidity at all. The text’s vagueness, and the mismatch between it and the visual elements, problematizes those visual elements; it makes it harder to ascribe a stable meaning to them. And this will come in handy for Moiseev after the cultural moment of the 1990s has passed.

In the 2000s Moiseev will distance himself from the LGBTQ-rights cause and express solidarity with conservative religious groups that view public expressions of LGBTQ identities, and same-sex eroticism, as affronts to morality. He specifically speaks 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 the law, Moiseev will contend 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 observable 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.