The View from the Other Side

This article is a response to “Gay Dawn (Lit: Pale-blue dawn)” by journalist Aelita Efimova , which appeared in in the monthly magazine Top Secret (Sovershenno sekretno) in 1994. “View from the Other Side,” by gay journalist, activist, and professional épateur Yaroslav “Slava” Mogutin, was published directly below Efimova’s article in the same issue. The article condemns Efimova’s paranoid fantasies of sinister gay mafias and “brotherhoods,” decrying their use as justification for continued segregation of gay men and their categorical exclusion from public service. Mogutin’s text exposes Efimova’s double-standard treatment of gay men as an exotic category, exploding her justifications for excluding gay men from law enforcement and the military. These include anecdotal accounts of a gay police officer who abused his position to coerce sexual favors from adolescent boys and harass former boyfriends, and of a gay man in the army who “converted” many formerly heterosexual servicemen. Mogutin notes that Efimova’s anxieties about potential abuses of power by gay policemen seem overblown given the documented tendency of heterosexual police to coerce sexual favors from women.

Mogutin bemoans the fact that “homophobia remains a matter of state policy in Russia.” He then sketches a condensed twentieth-century history of the persecution of gay men in which they are shown to be despised from all sides: by the Soviets, by the Nazis and the fascists, and by far-right conservatives in the USA. He likens the plight of gay men to that of the Jews, a topic he also discusses in the article “Homosexuality in Soviet Prisons and Camps ,” which addresses the treatment of gay men in the Nazi camps. He laments the fact that, often, gay men who have achieved positions of power have been quislings who have supported authoritarian regimes hostile to the expression of gay identities.

These ideas appear in a different light against the background of Mogutin’s own prejudices and intolerances, particularly his aggressive nationalism. Mogutin aligned himself with Russian nationalist figures like Vladimir Zhirinovsky and Eduard Limonov, which placed him in an interesting company of virulent nationalists widely perceived to be gay. Widespread rumors of Zhirinovsky’s sexual appetite for very young men occasionally made it into print. In her 1999 book Queer Russia sociologist Laurie Essig cites numerous reports that reached her through word of mouth, as well references in print in 1994 articles “Vlady’s Conquests” in The New Republic, “Bimbo Eruptions, Russian-Style” in Harper’s, and an article in a Russian LGBTQIA periodical Treugol’nik soobshchaet. Limonov was famous for a bisexual literary alter-ego that he abjured as his National Bolshevik Party became increasingly prominent. The same year this piece was published in Top Secret, Mogutin reportedly remarked that Zhirinovsky was a would-be tyrant who would wreak Stalinesque terror on the country if given the chance (Mogutin had almost agreed to be Zhirniovsky’s press secretary around the time of the former’s 1991 presidential bid but ultimately turned down the job). He is also said to have, in the same year this article was published, defended Limonov’s nationalist platform that excluded Jews as “non-Russians.” In 1995, Mogutin published an article called “The Chechen Knot,” which disparaged the Chechen people at a time when, after a long period of brutal oppression by Russian and Soviet imperial power, the post-Soviet Russian army was subjecting them to war crimes in the course of the First Chechen War (1994-1996). After publication of this article Mogutin was charged with inciting racial hatred and, on the advice of his lawyers, sought asylum in the US, a country he had denounced in “The Chechen Knot” article as an ignorant and arrogant critic of Russia’s military action in Chechnya.