Gays and Lefties: Comrades in Misfortune

The subject of this 1992 item, published in the monthly magazine Smena, was a founding member of the P. I. Tchaikovsky Foundation, a community not-for-profit organization defending the rights and interests of LGBTQ people in Russia. Although he uses his real first name, Yuri, he assumes the surname “Eremeev” to shield himself from the risks associated with publicly declaring a gay identity. He tells the interviewer that he served three years in prison in the 1980s following a conviction under Article 121 of the Soviet criminal code, which prohibited “sodomy [muzhelozhestvo]” and remained in force until 1993. He goes on to enumerate the many social liabilities facing openly gay Russians even following the fall of the Soviet Union, including damage to family and social relationships and endangered career and employment prospects.

 

The name of Yuri’s organization—which he calls a “code name” from a period when they operated underground—signals a connection to prerevolutionary Russian gay cultural history. Specifically, the group is named after a revered figure from the Russian cultural canon whose homosexuality was broadly accepted as historical fact. At the same time, the interview reveals a distinctly Western orientation, with Russian LGBTQ events modeled on Western (American) LGBTQ history, most prominently a “Christopher Street Day” commemorating the watershed event at the Stonewall Inn in New York in 1969. This double reference—to pre-Soviet Russian LGBTQ cultural history and contemporary Western, post-Stonewall models—typifies LGBTQ identity formation in 1990s Russia. 

 

The interview also exhibits another feature of discussions around gay men and lesbians at the time: the nature and extent of their difference from other people. In opposition to a perception of gays and lesbians as sexual “deviants,” some activists insisted that these were valid, distinct human categories with unique perspectives on the world, and specific intellectual and aesthetic sensibilities responsible for integral contributions to world culture. “Eremeev” suggests that gay men may be more inclined towards the arts because both the “masculine and feminine principles” are more fully expressed in them than in heterosexual men. Yuri’s analogy of gayness with left-handedness (and being a “hunchback”) recalls similar tropes in the Russian discourse on homosexuality. For many Russian commentators, both traits represent an innate, essential distinction that confers differences of perception and perspective. These, in turn, putatively offer advantages in poetry, art, music, or philosophy.  

 

Yuri signals membership in a category of Western-oriented LGBTQ Russians in the early 1990s. The defining characteristics of this group were adoption of Western-styled LGBTQ identities and claiming a Western cultural identity for pre-Soviet Russia, which was then used to justify a Western cultural trajectory for post-Soviet Russia. The proposed Western path for post-Soviet Russia included the broad social and cultural incorporation of sexual and gender-identity pluralism that was still a relative novelty in Western societies themselves. The Tchaikovsky reference serves a dual purpose here: he is a cardinal figure in Russian high culture, and, at the same, time a cardinal figure of the Western musical canon. His homosexuality was, during his lifetime and after, an open secret, allowing him to serve as a representative of homosexuality in pre-Soviet Russian culture. That Yuri would adopt this hybrid perspective, with its nationalistic elements, is especially notable given that he served time in Russian prison after conviction under an anti-sodomy law still in force at the time of his Smena interview.