You Can't Teach the Lefthanded to Be Righthanded

The expert cited in this article, Igor Kon (1928-2011), was a prominent sociologist and psychologist specializing in the sociological dimensions of sexual relationships. An influential public intellectual, he was widely read in the press and very visible in 1990s Russian media in general.

Published almost exactly one year before the collapse of the Soviet Union, this piece offers an open, matter-of-fact view of democratic values and seems to implicitly claim some broader right to a private sphere free from Soviet-style state interference. The authors present tolerance and respect toward “sexual minorities” (meaning gays and lesbians) as representing an enlightened democratic balance between societal and individual needs.

In discussing the balance between societal and individual interests, Kon disaggregates homosexuality from legitimately abhorrent forms of sexual deviance like those involving violence or minors. In 2013, the imperative to protect minors from potentially damaging sexual information or experience would become the pretext for Russia’s so-called “anti-gay propaganda law,” whose letter prohibits “propaganda of non-traditional sexual relationships in the presence of minors.” In practice, however, it criminalizes any public expression of LGBTQ identity. In the 1990 article, Kon mentions that homosexual acts between males are still proscribed by Article 121 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic. That law would be repealed in 1993. Unlike its predecessor, the 2013 law does not specifically prohibit private sexual acts between consenting adults, but it is written in deliberately broad language to encompass any form of public expression of LGBTQ identity.

Like many other contemplations of sexual difference in Russia, the article’s title associates homosexuality with left-handedness. In this framing, homosexuality is an innate and intrinsic difference from the majority that confers a valuable alterity of perspective on the world. Kon moved from a career focused on the history of philosophy, later on sociology, to focusing specifically on sexuality in the 1980s. His first monograph on the subject was published in Hungary in 1985 and circulated in Samizdat editions in Russia until the first Russian edition was finally published in 1988. He was among if the first if not the first of Soviet scientists to speak out against the criminalization and pathologizing of homosexuality. Kon became a prominent media figure in the later 1980s as glasnost gave rise to a certain amount of open discourse about sex in the media (a novelty in the Soviet Union). The newspaper Argumenty i fakty, whose circulation exploded during perestroika, was one of the outlets that engaged with some regularity with questions related homosexuality. In August 1991 it would publish, with some hesitation, a public opinion survey where 30 percent of respondents approved of imprisonment of homosexuals, another 30 of the death penalty, another 30 of medical treatment, and only 10 thought homosexuals should be free to live their lives. At the beginning of the post-Soviet era, some high-circulation media were contending very openly with attitudes, beliefs, and phobias around homosexuality inside Russia, including publishing the opinions of an expert like Kon, who advocated for acceptance of homosexuality as a normal part of life.