"Pro Eto." Male Prostitution

The talk show “About That [Pro eto],” hosted by journalist Yelena Khanga, ran from 1997 to 2000 on NTV. Borrowing its format from American talk shows, especially those hosted by Phil Donahue and Oprah Winfrey in the 1980s and 1990s, Pro eto often featured discussions of sensitive or taboo subjects on the theme of “love and sex.” Also like its American counterparts, Pro eto was structured around a panel of guests and a live audience that would interact with both host and guests. An added resonance with the Oprah Winfrey show was that, like Oprah, Yelena Khanga was a dark-skinned woman of African descent—a unique occurrence in Russian media at the time.

The show’s themes and format also recalled the 1986 Leningrad-Boston telebridge co-hosted by Russian-American journalist and media personality Vladimir Pozner in Leningrad, with Phil Donahue joining from Boston. During that event, titled “Women talk to Women,” one of the Soviet participants famously said that “there is no sex in the Soviet Union.” The two television personalities would go on to co-host Pozner/ Donahue, a weekly news roundtable that aired on CNBC from 1991 to 1994.

Pro eto, meanwhile, remained dedicated to its original remit of explaining, even domesticating, previously taboo topics. In 1998 the show aired two episodes — one on homophobia and another on male prostitution — that document an interesting juncture in the evolution of attitudes toward gender roles and male homosexual relations seven years into the post-Soviet era. In the opening of the episode on male prostitution the qualifier “male” upsets the traditional economy of sexual power and monetized sexual accommodation. At one point Khanga herself voices the assumption — without subscribing to the view herself — that many among her audience would say that prostitution is not a male occupation. The role of the person who submits to the sexual desires of others in exchange for payment, a passive or submissive role by definition, was antithetical to the aggressive independence and strong agency associated with masculinity in the Soviet and early post-Soviet eras.

With Yelena Khanga as guide, the guests and audience of this episode of Pro eto are called to reexamine their assumptions in the socially and culturally experimental, tentatively transgressive, Russian late 1990s—a time not only of fluid mores, but of widespread economic distress of the type that might push someone toward sex work. Two of the show’s male guests, and one male audience member, report that financial hardship drove them to consider selling sexual services to make ends meet. Both guests present sex work as a job like any other and discuss specific skills or techniques for maintaining professional distance with clients. Both men also suggest that they remain in charge in these encounters. Their response to questions about their own sexual preferences are symptomatic of a social climate with serious taboos around male homosexuality, especially its “passive” variety. “Vlad” says he is in a romantic relationship with a man, then tells the audience that he has a son and is attracted to people of both sexes. He never reveals whether his role in sex—whether paid or not— is “active” or “passive” or both, thus leaving open the possibility that he occupies a “traditional” masculine identity. “Mark” presents as more aggressively and stereotypically masculine and emphatically declares that, both in his work and in his personal life, he draws the line at assuming the “passive” role in sex with other men, instead defining himself as an “active gay.” “Mark,” like “Vlad,” identifies as bisexual, but says that most of the sex he has is with other men. Both guests appear to be wearing wigs and/or false facial hair in order to disguise their identities.

When a female audience member remarks that “Mark” seems “too masculine” to be gay, Khanga responds by asking how he started having sex with men. He replies that he was “led astray” or “corrupted,” and Khanga immediately infers that he is referring to experiences during military service. The readiness of this assumption points to the army and the penal system as crucial reference points for sexual activity between men in the Russian collective consciousness. In those settings, stigma was typically attached only to the “passive” participants, whose humiliation could “lower” them to the level of “untouchables (neprikasaemye or opushchennye).” It turns out, however, that Mark’s initial gay encounters happened when he arrived in Moscow and experienced financial hardship.