Sergei Penkin: "Holiday" Album Cover

The cover image for Sergei Penkin’s debut album Holiday (1993) features 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. Yet the extravagantly gender-variant elements of Penkin’s ensemble are contained in the 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 (faux?) diamonds hangs below a more traditionally gender-appropriate bowtie.

 

The tracks on the album itself follow a similar pattern. On the surface, Penkin’s singing style seems extravagant from the point of view of 1990s Russian gender norms. Deeply influenced by Western pop music, Holiday covers songs in French, Italian, and English (e.g. the final track, “Hey, America”). The album’s upbeat dance songs and intensely sentimental ballads—including versions of the American “Feelings,” the French “Te garder près de moi,” and the Italian operatic “Te voglio bene assai”—involve many moments of breathy sensuality, falsetto singing, and quasi-operatic diva posturing. The repertoire and the lyrics, however, stay well within conventional bounds of gender presentation. As is the case for Boris Moiseev’s “Egoist” and Vladimir Vesyolkin’s Impossible Love, plausible deniability is maintained within the declarative, relatively unambiguous medium of verbal language.  

 

In the early 1990s, Penkin was a popular entertainer with a large national audience. He cast his 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 while 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, was emulating Western performers 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 costumes, 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 British pop star Boy George (born George Alan O'Dowd, 1961-). By the standards of the 1980s and 1990s, Boy George’s onstage persona was emphatically feminine. Yet the artist avoided acknowledging his homosexuality until 1995, when he did so in his autobiography. Curiously, Penkin and Boy George appeared onstage together in St. Petersburg that same year.

 

Holiday telegraphed Penkin’s competing impulses in sartorial form. On the one hand, we see the artist’s audacious desire to express aspects of an inner identity intensely at odds with social conventions. Yet equally evident is the opposite impulse—to contain that expression, hedging the risky bet of that bold expression attracting his broad target audience’s favorable attention and acceptance. The result is an effusive, forceful, yet still tentative presentation of Penkin’s authentic identity (whatever this may have been), potentially distorted by anxieties about audience expectations.