Dear Reader

This document is an editor’s letter addressed to readers of a local LGBTQ newspaper in Russia’s Ural region. The author, the newspaper’s Editor-in-Chief Valerii Klimov, was convicted and sentenced in 1983 on violations of RSFSR Criminal Code Article 120 prohibiting the “corruption of minors” for sexual relationships with adolescent males when he himself was twenty years of age. While serving his sentence, Klimov witnessed heinous abuse of Article 121 of the Soviet Criminal Code, which was used to persecute inmates who were victims of sexual violence. Aritlce 121 prohibited “sodomy” among men and remained in force until 1993, the year before this issue of Gay Dialogue appeared.

According to Klimov, the Soviet penal system defined homosexuality arbitrarily and assigned homosexual status selectively in an environment where the vast majority engaged in homosexual activity. Inmates who were perpetrators of sexual violence were regarded as dominant and masculine. Victims, on the contrary, lost status. Article 121 was often deployed against the victims—a perversion of the law, which required especially severe penalties for acts involving violence, coercion, or abuse of power. Inmates who were victims of acts of sexual violence witnessed by camp or prison administrators often received additional convictions on Article 121. These convictions extended their sentences and prolonged the time these prisoners, already consigned to the lowest rung of inmate hierarchy, remained vulnerable to sexual and other violence.

Once free, Klimov became an advocate for victims of Article 121 and dedicated himself to supporting LGBTQ people in Russia more generally. In this letter, he announces to the readership that he and the Gay Dialogue team are prepared to defend LGBTQ people against abuse in the penal system by mobilizing support from the academic, medical, and legal professions, and even from among the clergy. This expression of support would have been especially meaningful to regional readers distant from the metropolitan centers of Moscow and St. Petersburg. As isolated as many LGBTQ people in Moscow or St. Petersburg might have felt, they enjoyed greater access to communities and legal and medical services than their counterparts in smaller Russian cities.

Published at the beginning of the twenty-year period that saw the Russian government jettison anti-LGBTQ legislation, Klimov’s letter addresses the legal strategy, well-known from Article 121 itself, of associating homosexual relations with legitimately abhorrent and destructive sexual behaviors—like those involving minors or elements of violence or coercion. It also unwittingly anticipates the associative strategies and pretexts, and even the language, of the law that would be enacted in 2013. Nominally put in place to protect minors from “propaganda of non-traditional sexual relationships,” the law effectively prohibited the social expression of LGBTQ identity.

Klimov explicitly declares that the conversion of people who do not self-identify as gay or lesbian and/or “propaganda” of the gay “way of life” was not part of Gay Dialogue’s agenda. He also unequivocally excludes perpetrators of sexual violence from the population the publication has been established to serve. Finally, having himself, at the age of twenty, been convicted for sexual relationships with adolescents, the now thirty-one-year-old Klimov expressly distances the newspaper and its target audience from sexual relations with minors. In Russia, as elsewhere, male homosexuality had historically been associated with pedophilia, with many Russian homophobic slurs (such as pederast, pedik, and pidor) deriving from the word “pederast.” The 2013 law against “propaganda of non-traditional sexual relationships in the presence of minors” seems designed to reinvigorate these associations. Here, almost 20 years before, Klimov addresses an audience of LGBTQIA people living in the Russian provinces, which tended to be more conservative than the capitals, and carves out an identity for them unassociated with violence or abuse.