"Show Me a Happy Homosexual and I'll Show You a Gay Corpse"

This pseudoscientific interview with a spurious expert—the interviewer states that Yan Genrikovich Holand has “no academic degrees or designations”— appeared in a mainstream Russian newspaper, Komsomol’skaia pravda, the year following the repeal of article 121 of the Russian criminal code, which had prohibited “sodomy [muzhelozhestvo] throughout most of the Soviet era.” Intentionally or not, the article’s title recalls a line from the 1970 American film The Boys in the Band, a psychological exploration of the self-loathing and self-destructive behavior of American gay men in the late 1960s: “Show me a happy homosexual, and I’ll show you a gay corpse.” The idea that gay men are socially “unviable” and incapable of leading satisfying, productive lives is a through line of this piece.

At no point does the interviewer, billed as Nikolai Efimovich , question how this uncredentialed “expert” achieved the position of “head of the department of sexual perversions of the Nizhegorodsky clinical psychoneurological hospital” and “pre-eminent psychotherapist of the Nizhny Novogord region.” Nikolai Efimovich does not interrogate Holand’s generalizations about the “tragic nature” of the gay “passion;” the supposedly sordid nature of gay courtship (which Holand claims is centered around public toilets); and the nature of “real” or “normal” masculinity. In the one case where Nikolai Efimovich registers an objection, he himself misrepresents accepted scientific wisdom by suggesting that Freud ultimately concluded that homosexuality was an incurable pathology (in fact, Freud determined the opposite). By repeating that homosexuality is incompatible with broader Russian society and reiterating that the procreative heterosexual family is the only possible model of “normal” existence for the Russian citizen, both Holand and Nikolai Efimovich frame existing mores as permanent and objectively correct. Neither wonders whether post-Soviet society might be in flux, or asks if the possibility of organic social change could mean that gay men might be more integrated into society—able to live fulfilling lives without shame or fear of persecution.