Evgenia Debryanskaya: "I Don't Give a Damn about Public Opinion"

The interviewee in this piece — Evgenia Debryanskaya — embodies a complex of seemingly irreconcilable tensions common in the burgeoning collective LGBTQ consciousness in 1990s Russia. She declared an erotic orientation toward women from her earliest memory and vigorously advocated for LGBTQ people even in Soviet Russia. She also married Alexander Dugin, the “Eurasianist” philosopher who became one of post-Soviet Russia’s most radical nationalist (and virulently anti-LGBTQ) ideologues.

Debryanskaya loudly decried the abuses LGBTQ people had endured in Russia by comparison with many Western countries. At the same time, she expressed Russian nationalist views, defending the country’s right to develop its own “native” version of LGBTQ acceptance. Russia’s uniqueness, she argued, made it undesirable, if not impossible, to apply Western standards to local LGBTQ communities.

In “I Couldn’t Care Less About Public Opinion,” Debryanskaya’s remarks about Russia being behind Western norms on LGBTQ rights are curiously at odds with her nationalist and isolationist tendencies. Just a few years earlier, in 1991, Debryanskaya refused to join a “Soviet Stonewall” event organized by, among others, Russian-American journalist and activist Masha Gessen and gay activist Roman Kalinin, later a presidential candidate for Russia’s Libertarian Party—of which he, along with Debryanskaya, was a founding member. The reason for Debryanskaya’s resistance was the the event’s excessive American referentiality (i.e. its modeling of itself on the Stonewall Riots in New York City in 1969).

Debryanskaya’s values—a passionate LGBTQ advocacy combined with insular Russian nationalism—become less contradictory in the context of late-Soviet dissidence. While many contemporary critics view the Soviet experiment as an extension of “great Russian” imperialism, nationalism was officially anathema in Marxist-Leninist ideology. Assertive nationalism of the type Debryanskaya expressed was thus a subversive position in late-Soviet Russia.

In the 1990s, Russian nationalism served yet another function. As Russia’s new leaders looked to its former capitalist-democratic antagonists for guidance, some observers grew anxious about the possibility of Russia “dissolving” in Western hegemony. Nationalist-conservative currents flourished, expressing a desire to reconnect with pre-Soviet Russian history and culture as a basis for a non-Soviet Russian national identity. In early post-Soviet Russia, vehement Russian nationalism continued to function as “anti-establishment”—not unlike post-Soviet LGBTQ activism.

Because a declared LGBTQ identity could spell a precarious existence on the margins of Russian society, many of those experimenting with homosexuality were wary of committing to a Western-styled sexual identity (LGBTQ). A possible alternative was to view the expression of same-sex erotic desire as an incidental behavior, an of-the-moment choice that did not determine a more permanent identity. In this interview Debryanskaya underscores that her lifelong orientation toward other women, and even her aggressive and highly visible LGBTQ activism, did not prevent her from marrying men twice (including a far-right ultranationalist like Dugin), or from having and raising heterosexual children. Debryanskaya, to whom this 1997 article referred as Russia’s “main lesbian,” said to sociologist Laurie Essig in 1989: “I'm not heterosexual, no. Nor am I bisexual, but I'm not a lesbian. I don't want to be what I do in bed.”