Gays and Lefties: Comrades in Misfortune

The subject of this item, published in 1992 in the monthly Smena, was a founding member of the P. I. Tchaikovsky Fund, 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 on Article 121 of Russia’s criminal code, which prohibited “sodomy [muzhelozhestvo]” and was still in force in 1992. 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 signals an identity connected to prerevolutionary Russian gay cultural history; it 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—is broadly typical of LGBTQ identity formation in 1990s Russia.

The interview also exhibits another feature of discussions around gay men and lesbians in 1990s Russia: 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 recalls similar tropes in the Russian discourse on homosexuality. For many Russian commentators, both traits represent an innate, essential difference that confers a difference of perception and perspective. These differences, in turn, putatively offer advantages in poetry, art, music, or philosophy.

Yuri signals, in a number of ways, membership in a category of Western-oriented LGBTQ post-Soviet Russians in the early 1990s. The defining characteristics of this group were adoption of Western-styled LGBTQ identities, claiming a Western cultural identity for pre-Soviet Russia and using that as justification for 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 point serves a dual purpose here. He is a cardinal figure of Russian culture and at the same time a cardinal figure of the Western musical canon. He is also a figure whose homosexuality was, during his lifetime and after, an open secret, and so he serves as an index of a homosexual dimension of pre-Soviet Russian culture. Yuri signals all of this from the perspective of someone who has served time in Russian prison after conviction on a sodomy law that is still in force at the time of the interview.