Lesbian Masha Attacks the Bureaucrats

This 1994 piece from the weekly magazine Megapolis Express displays several aspects of emerging Russian LGBTQ culture in the early 1990s, embodied in the figure of the Russian-American journalist and activist Masha Gessen, whom the article presents as a uniquely audacious agent of progress in the area of sexual pluralism in Russia. One notable theme here is post-Soviet Russia’s fraught relationship with the US. After fifty years of Cold War, Russia had effectively acknowledged the failure of Soviet Communism, abandoning it in favor of the economic and political systems championed by its longtime adversary. In the 1990s, Russia’s pursuit of a model of statehood resting on free-market capitalism and representative democracy was attended by a certain anxiety of influence vis-à-vis the US, and also by a search for local variants of those economic and political novelties.

Analogous tensions existed in the emerging Russian LGBTQ culture, which sought to emulate some aspects of Western LGBTQ movements while recuperating an organically “Russian” version of LGBTQ society and history. The subject of this article, Gessen, presents the perfect occasion to consider this. Born in Moscow in 1967, Gessen emigrated to the United States in 1981. In 1991, they returned to Russia to pursue a career in LGBTQ activism and journalism. Twenty-two years later, Gessen moved back to the US in response to direct threats against their family in a climate of mounting anti-LGBTQ persecution. This item presents Gessen as a carrier of a dual identity: a native Russian who came of age as a lesbian in the US in the 1980s, when they were able to self-actualize in a way that would likely not have been possible in 1980s Russia. At the same time, Gessen is a lesbian who voluntarily returned to Russia at the beginning of the new post-Soviet era to foster the development of a local LGBTQ movement. The article attributes Gessen’s self-confidence in their assertion of lesbian identity, and their effectiveness as a community organizer, to the ten formative years spent in the US.

There is, then, the reference to Vladmir Zhirinovsky and Gessen’s interview with him published in a 1994 issue of the Triangle bulletin. A nationalist presidential candidate in the Russian elections of 1991 and 1996, in this interview he cites American precedent for his new model of Russian politics. He speaks of his openness to LGBTQIA voters as political allies or at least fellow travelers, and his belief that the state should not interfere in the sexual lives of its citizens. He cites here the precedent of US President Bill Clinton addressing American LGBTQIA communities. In January 2022, a few short months before he died, Zhirinovsky, a perennial loose canon, suggested that Russia should restore a tsarist or imperial autocracy buttressed by the Orthodox Church. The very notion of a Russian presidency was absurd, he claimed, adding: “Where do we think we are? America? France?”

Published at a transitional moment when Megapolis ekspress was becoming more of a Western-style tabloid, this piece in an interesting artifact of curiosity and, likely, anxiety about a merging of Russian and American political and social culture as instantiated by public discussions of sexual pluralism, and embodied in the national political figure of Zhirinovsky and the grassroots activist Masha Gessen.