Impossible Love

The album art from this 1992 release is an example of an impactful popular 1990s performer in Russia using homoerotic and/or gender-trasngressive elements in their art and artistic persona. The front cover features one of Tom of Finland’s homoerotic paintings, and the back cover a photograph of Vesyolkin wearing a long-haired wig and lingerie. The inside sleeve shows a photograph of three nearly naked men sitting on top of one another.

Vesyolkin’s album and its artwork are to some extent representative of a broader trend in mass-consumed art and music: extravagant performance of homoerotism and/or transgression of traditional gender boundaries in performances and artistic expressions, accompanied by greater caution in texts rendered in the more unequivocally declarative medium of verbal language. A number of seemingly cis-gender and heterosexual pop-music artists (the female duo t.A.T.U. is one well-known example) incorporated these elements to give their performances a sort of transgressive edge. Use of these elements by artists who did experience homosexual desire and/or variance of gender identity was more complex. It represented broadcast expression of repressed desires and self-concepts. Artistic creations, including public personas, were a kind of testing ground for these expressions, a zone for intensely public experimentation with such self-presentations at the safe distance afforded by plausible claims that these were no more than artistic devices. Extravant sexual and gender transgressions that are defining elements of performances and personas can be passed off as tropes, as things not subject to literal interpretation, as things that mean something other than they appear to mean. When it comes to verbal language these artists exercise greater caution. The title song of the album “Impossible Love” uses a masculine verb form for the love object (“ty menia obmanul”), but this is as far as verbal suggestion of homoerotism goes. The name of Vesyolkin’s new band “Vova and the Organ of Internal Affairs” is playfully, but still cautiously, suggestive, in a way that is difficult to pin down. Is the “organ of intermal affairs” a bureaucratese name for an official agency? An anatomical organ for penetration? Whose? Vova’s? Someone else’s? Is it an organ that penetrates or one that is penetrated?

Vesyolkin’s social and public self-presentation in the late 1980s and early 1990s was emphatically transgressive in the gender and sexuality categories. While on tour in Paris with the pop-music act Auctyon, he was nicknamed “the faun” in reference to Vaclav Nijinsky’s performance in a piece set to Debussy’s Afternoon of A Faun under the auspices of the Ballets Russes, led by Nijinsky’s then lover Sergei Diaghilev. In performances on that tour Vesyolkin famously performed a dance moving only his exposed buttocks, a dance that scandalized the press in back home in the USSR. He was then featured as “female vocals” on Auktyon’s album “Ass” (“Zhopa”) in 1990. He became and activist for the repeal of the Sodomy Law in Russia’s criminal code, once described himself as bisexual in an interview with the magazine SPID-Info, and made public invitations to “jerk-off parties” at a porno salon. In the Putin era, Vesyolkin will claim that all of the homoerotic and gender-variant aspects of his public persona were part of the larger performance that was that persona, that they were not representative of his own sexual experience or gender identity, and that they were tropes for the defense of freedom of self-determination and self-expression understood in the broadest possible terms.