Sergei Penkin: "Holiday" Album Cover

The cover image for Sergei Penkin’s 1991 album Holiday features a photograph of the pop-music star draped in an outsize lamé garment adorned with feathers and pearls, a wardrobe choice that, in the Russia of the time, signaled a distinctly feminine glamor. The extravagantly gender-variant elements of Penkin’s ensemble are in a sense contained in a vaguely, barely coherent, traditionally gender-appropriate (i.e. masculine) structure of the costume as a whole. The pearled and feathered lamé fabric more typical of evening gowns for women is cut into a shape vaguely recalling a men’s shirt or dinner jacket. The sparkly brooch with its strands of diamonds (or faux-diamonds) hangs below a more traditionally gender-appropriate bow-tie.

The songs themsevles follow a similar model. In its style the singing is often extravagant from a 1990s gender-norm standpoint. An assortment of upbeat dance tracks and intensely sentimental ballads (including covers of the American “Feelings,” the French “Te garder pres de moi,” the Italian operatic “Te voglio bene assai”), the recordings have many moments of breathy sensuality, a lot of falsetto singing, and a lot of quasi-operatic diva posturing. The repertoire and the lyrics, however, stay well within conventional bounds at the level of gender-presentation expectations. A much greater caution is evident in the more declarative, less ambiguous medium of verbal language.

In the early 1990s, Penkin was a popular entertainer with a large national audience. He cast his distinctly gender-transgressive, gay-camp, or even drag presentation as a boundary-pushing performative persona that in no way represented the real-life Penkin’s “true” sexuality or gender expression. He invoked the transgressive license afforded to performing artists, at the same time vigilantly guarding his presumptive heterosexuality. According to sociologist Laurie Essig, Penkin was a fixture at Moscow’s gay nightclubs in the 1990s, but sued journalists for suggesting he was gay.

Perhaps Penkin, consciously or not, imitated Western models like Liberace (born Władziu Valentino Liberace, 1919-1987). The American pianist-showman was famous for his outrageous flamboyance and his extravagant, bejeweled, fur- and feather-lined accoutrements, but, like Penkin, insisted he was heterosexual and sued journalists who suggested he was gay (after his death from AIDS in 1987, spokespeople confirmed that he was, in fact, gay). Another possible model for Penkin is Boy George, the British pop star of the 1980s and 1990s whose onstage persona was emphatically feminine (by the standards of the time), but who avoided acknowledging his homosexuality until he did so in a 1995 autobiography. Curiously, Penkin and Boy George appeared onstage together in St. Petersburg that same year. The album overall is deeply Western-influenced; over half of the tracks are covers of songs in English, French, or Italian, and the last song is titled “Hey, America.”

This was Penkin’s debut album, and the visual dimension of this self-announcement to a wide public is something of a sartorial expression of competing impulses: an impulse towards audacious expression of aspects of an inner identity intensely at odds with social conventions, and the converse impulse to contain that expression, to hedge the risky bet that that bold expression will be compelling for, and favorably received by, his broad target audience. The result looks something like an effusive, forceful, yet to some degree still tentative presentation of Penkin’s authentic identity, distorted by his anxieties around audience expectations.