Still from the television show “About It” with host Elena Khanga, Episode “Homosexuality”, 1998

Elena Khanga’s “About That” was the first post-Soviet television show focused on the subject of sexuality. Premiering in 1997, it explored its subject from a variety of perspectives, mostly well-intentioned, in a way clearly modeled on Western talk shows where provocative speakers engaged with an active studio audience on controversial topics. Khanga’s project was quite progressive for its cultural milieu, opening up the public discourse around sex considerably (in a 2007 Kommersant interview, Angela Boksis, a producer on the show, recalls the audience learning the word “cunnilingus” in the episode “Oral Sex” and shouting it incorrectly as “cunnysusus” in excitement). Episodes like the 1998 “Homophobia” are telling in peculiar choices not quite matching the host’s well-intentioned goals. The first fifteen minutes are given over to a virulently homophobic rant by two figures who are never introduced: one is the unsuccessful far-right musician Taras Chuchman of the band Russian Truth, while the other plays the part of Chuchman’s silent heterosexual companion. This rant is followed by a prolonged and inexplicable dance called a “tango” for no discernable reason, with cigarette smoking and sexual overtones, performed by two men from Club Chance (Shans), a popular gay night club in Moscow., Khanga states that these men are not themselves queer, but want to give the studio audience the broad strokes about what queer aesthetics might look like. Only at the very end, in the last ten minutes, does an actual queer person, identified only as “Vladimir,” appear onstage to come out on national television and answer questions.