Soviet Homosexuals: Yesterday, Today, Tomorrow

Gay, Slavs! (whose punning title references a nineteenth-century Pan-Slavic anthem “Hey, Slavs!”) is an early 1990s journal with a mandate to represent a gay identity having rich and distinct intellectual and artistic dimensions. It and others like it, such as 1/10 and its literary supplement 9/10, Risk, and Tema, distinguished themselves from glossier titles presenting a more hedonistic version of early 1990s gay life in Russia.

Gennady Trifonov was one of a number of gay men brutally punished for their sexuality in the Soviet penal system who, in the early post-Soviet years, presented themselves as “sexual dissidents.” Soviet-era dissidents were a category enjoying a certain prestige in the 1990s. Part of the “sexual dissident” identity was the idea that gayness was a difference not only of sexuality, but also a cognitive and perceptive difference, an exceptionalism having valuable intellectual and aesthetic dimensions. Trifonov gives voice here to a vision of a pre-Soviet Russia that was an organic part of Western culture, from which it was artificually isolated by the Soviet experiment. It views the mid-twentieth century antidemocratic regimes of Nazism, Fascism, and Soviet Communism as a set of deviations from Western culture. After decades of violent oppression at the hands of the Soviet state, Trifonov envisions a return to a cultural model in which gay men play a distinct yet integral role, an august Western canon in which Socrates, DaVinci, Michelangelo, Oscar Wilde, Marcel Proust, André Gide, Thomas Mann, and Pier Paolo Pasolini are cardinal figures. To some extent this is an idealized view of Western culture and its inclusiveness of gay elements, one that glosses over many moments of violent intolerance.

In this essay Trifonov expresses disappointment and pessimism vis-à-vis a post-Soviet culture that is failing to materialize. While still an inmate in a Soviet prison, in 1977 Trifonov had tried to correct a Soviet public record that completely omitted gay experience. He sent an open letter to the editors of the newspaper Literary Gazette (Literaturnaia gazeta) that described the horrific abuses and gruesome ends gay prisoners suffered in the late Soviet period. The Gazette did not publish the letter. Addressing readers here in an openly published and circulated gay periodical, he seems disillusioned by the encounter with contemporary Western culture and a Western-influenced post-Soviet Russian gay culture. He describes a dominant post-Soviet gay culture of frivolous sensuality devoid of any serious intellectual or aesthetic depth or ambition, a culture emulating a hedonistic post-Stonewall Zeitgeist in the West. After the imposed silence of the Soviet era, he seems to feel remarginalized in a new media landscape characterized by broad discursive silence on sexual difference, largely the product of self-censorship of a vast LGBTQIA population unaccustomed to public expression of the sexually different aspects of their lives and comfortable with isolating those aspects of their experience from their social and public self presentations. The most visible exception to this seems to be a demonstrative reveling in a gay sensuality unencumbered by preoccupations with legacies of suffering and oppression, or by any serious intellectual or cultural ambitions. The essay appears to be imbued with an anxious pessimism that efforts to cultivate a gay discourse and aesthetics worthy of the Western-canon legacy, and the Soviet legacy of gay suffering — represented in publications such as Gay, Slavs!, 1/10, and Risk — will remain on the margins of the new post-Soviet public sphere.