Gay Dawn (Light-Blue Dawn)

This item, by journalist Aelita Efimova, appeared a year after the repeal of Article 121 of Russia’s criminal code prohibiting sexual activity between men. The female author, whose remarks about family suggest she is heterosexual, represents a curiously fraught moment in post-Soviet society’s reception of gay people. On one hand, Efimova expresses positions that would have been progressive at the time. She condemns the abuse gay people suffer at the hands of homophobic thugs and indifferent law-enforcement officers. She suggests that gay people should enjoy equal protection under the law and freedom to form legally recognized unions. She affirms their right to maintain their own establishments and “subculture” free from harassment, and regrets that some gay people have to resort to clandestine forms of communication and social organization. The rest of the piece, however, is an exercise in exoticizing gay people. Her disoredered and, in places, self-contradictory representation of gay men in early 1990s Russia combines a salacious curiosity and amusement with paranoid fantasies that produce the impression of a fascinating, but bizarre and disquieting, shadow realm. At one point she reductively presents Russian gay men as effeminate, histrionic, artistic, promiscuous, hedonistic, unscrupulous, and unambitious. At others she relays rumors about gay “subspecies” like the gay gangster, the gay police officer, the gay official, the gay presidential candidate, and even a “gay Godfather” who purportedly extorts sexual favors from Russia’s military recruits. Efimova maps categories familiar from heterosexual relationships onto homosexual ones, assuming, for instance, that in gay male relationships one parter is “the man” and the other “the woman.” She substantiates this via illustrative anecdotes, such as one where a group of gay men at a New Year’s Eve party were divided into “girls [devushki]” and “guys [muzhiki],” and an adage, supposedly common in the Russian gay milieu, that claims “a man is only a man until he’s with his first man.” A habit often observed in those who traffic in stereotypes, Efimova presents isolated instances of bad behavior in the population to which she does not belong — gay men — as broadly representative, and assumes the same behaviors among heterosexuals (her own group) to be anomalies. For example, an account of a gay police officer who abuses his position to harass ex-boyfriends and coerce sexual favors from teenage boys leads Efimova to conclude that gay men cannot be permitted to serve in law enforcement. Similar abuses by heterosexual male officers against women and girls are not mentioned even hypothetically. Left unchecked, Efimova worries, male homosexuality will spread, suggesting at once that male heterosexuality is extremely fragile and that gay men desire to “convert” straight ones. Efimova’s only example of “contagious” homosexuality is from the army: reports from a single informant who claimed many heterosexual conquests. The author casts this gay “other” as the agent of corruption, ignoring broader structural factors that may contribute to homosexual activity in the armed forces or prisons—including forced prolonged cohabitation of adult males in the absence of women. Ultimately, Efimova concludes that gay men should remain a peripheral subculture within Russian society, ineligible for posts in law enforcement, the armed forces, civil service, and politics. Her conspiratorial imagination of a “gay mafia” or “gay brotherhood” that has infiltrated the political sphere suggests a profound othering of gay men, an “us or them” mentality that assumes “we” need to monitor and contain “them” if “they” are not ultimately to represent a threat to “us.” The article concludes with the assertion that the heterosexual, child-producing family is the basic unit of society, with bonds between biological parents and children constituting the social fabric. The integration of gay men into society, for Efimova, threatens the integrity of that fabric. Riddled with anxiety and paranoia that transcend her nominal subject—male homosexuality—Efimova’s article seems to react not so much to the repeal of Article 121 as to the general ideological and economic instability that attended Soviet collapse. “Gay Dawn” testifies to the persistence of a sense of mid-air suspension well into the 1990s, revealing the cultural void that receding Soviet ideology had left in its wake, and a kind of panicked grasping for elements of some familiar and stable structure.