Love is Nasty, It Can Make you Fall in Love with An Asshole

This is a short, opinionated piece on the 1994 attempt by Russian gay activist and journalist Yaroslav (“Slava”) Mogutin and his partner, American artist Robert Fillippini, to register their marriage at a Moscow marriage registry office. Mogutin was something of a professional épateur known for publicity stunts. In this case, the attempt to register a same-sex marriage in Moscow, not expected to result in registration of the marriage, was designed to draw media attention to the plight of gays in Russia, and to the system’s homophobia. This Pravda piece is written decidedly from an establishment position. The title of the item is a well-known Russian adage that means, roughly, “Love is nasty. It can make you fall in love with an asshole.” The Russian word rendered in English as “asshole” is kozël, which literally means “goat.” In Russian criminal slang the word also has the meanings of (passive) homosexual and “rat” or informer.

This common locution takes on particular connotations in the context of the Pravda piece. First, the phrase’s general meaning — that love is a capricious and dangerous force that can cause a person to pursue romantic entanglements with people who will not treat them well or otherwise not make them happy — is extended to mean that, in particularly “extreme” cases, a person might do something as “bizarre” as falling in love with a person of their own sex. Another overtone is that of bestiality—since, read literally, the second clause says a person could even fall in love with a goat. The article “Gay Dawn,” published in the monthly magazine Sovershenno sekretno (Top Secret) in 1994, refers to another reaction to this same event: “So now I guess we just sit and wait for a zoophile to show up at the marriage registry office with a frog.”

Once the organ of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, in 1991 Pravda became the organ of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation, which it remains to this day. The paper’s continued loyalty to communist ideals—and attendant suspicion of the West, even in the wake of Soviet collapse—may account for the article’s disdain toward the event’s Russo-American dimension. The Western origins of the homosexual scourge are emphasized in the piece’s last paragraph.

Mogutin and other post-Soviet LGBTQ activists often pointed to the paradoxical, patriarchal conservatism toward sexual difference among the ostensibly ultra-progressive Soviet authorities. In their view, the Soviet stance on homosexuality was at least as backward as that of the USSR’s declared arch-antagonists—fascists. Like the historical Nazis, as well as the religious fundamentalists and ultra-conservatives in the West, Soviet discourse—and its post-Soviet remnants—framed acceptance of same-sex relationships as a sign of societal degeneracy and associated same-sex relations with obscenity, illegal drug use, and other criminal behavior. The 1994 Pravda article, alongside the neutral “lesbians,” even uses the Russian equivalent of “faggots” (“pederasty”) to refer to gay men.