Abstract
Although the repeal of Article 121 of the Russian Criminal Code received a good deal of international press attention, the criminalization of homosexual activity was not what distinguished the treatment of homosexuality in Russia from its treatment in the West. After all, legal restrictions on homosexual activity, such as sodomy laws and a higher age of consent, existed in many Western nations for much of the twentieth century. “The special trait of the Soviet regime in this respect,” Anna Rotkirch observes, “was not so much repression as the gradual silencing of public discourse, with censorship in the arts, literature and science.”3 As A. A. Zven’evaia puts it, “the policy of the Soviet government in relation to homosexuals was simple and effective—the silencing of any information related to homosexual themes.”4 While the repression of sexual activity in the West, according to Foucault’s “repressive hypothesis,” produced “a veritable discursive explosion,” repression in Soviet Russia virtually put an end to public discourse on the subject.5
All the same, there are some nuances that allow us to determine if someone is gay. Even if he looks like a man, nonetheless he has a certain gaze [vzgliad].
—Dilia Enikeeva1
When the male body is objectivized and made available to the gaze [vzgliad], it loses its phallic armor and becomes vulnerable.
—Igor Kon2
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Notes
Igor Kon, Muzhskoe telo v istorii kul’tury (Moscow: Slovo, 2003), 400
Anna Rotkirch, “‘What Kind of Sex Can You Talk about?’: Acquiring Sexual Knowledge in Three Soviet Generations,” in On Living through Soviet Russia, ed. Daniel Bertaux, Paul Thompson, and Anna Rotkirch (London and New York: Routledge, 2004), 99.
Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality. Volume I. An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage Books, 1990), 17.
Ralph Slovenko, “Homosexuality and the Law,” in Homosexual Behavior: A Modern Reappraisal, ed. Judd Marmor (New York: Basic, 1980), 198.
Suzanna Danuta Walters, All the Rage. The Story of Gay Visibility in America (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 12.
Beaudoin, “Masculine Utopia in Russian Pornography,” in Eros and Pornography in Russian Culture, ed. Marcus Levitt and Andrei L. Toporkov (Moscow: Ladomir, 1999), 624.
Igor’ Larkevich, “Kak menia ne iznasilovali,” in Kak ia i kak menia (Moscow: IMA-Press, 1991), 30–31, italics mine.
Nina Sadur, “Nemets,” in Chudesnye znaki. Romany, povest’, rasskazy (Moscow: Vagrius, 2000), 187, italics mine.
The notion that sexual desire is more intense and reproduction more successful when gender difference is most pronounced was already been put forward in the early twentieth century by Vasilii Rozanov in People of the Moonlight (1911). This promotion of sexual difference fueled in turn Rozanov’s condemnation of “spiritual homosexuality.”
Ibid., 247. One should be cautious about assuming any direct relationship between Sadur’s homophobic narrator and the author herself. Sadur was in fact a staunch supporter of the openly gay writer Evge-nii Kharitonov. See Sadur, “Zhivaia dliashchaiasia zhizn’,” in Slezy na tvetakh. Sochineniia Evgeniia Kharitonova, ed. Iaroslav Mogutin (Moscow: Glagol, 1993), 2:148–51.
Edelman, Homographesis, 4. Enikeeva offers a similar psychological interpretation, according to which such humiliation must be violently avenged in order to reestablish one’s masculine standing. This defensive formation is described in the chapter of her book Gays and Lesbians dedicated to “gay murderers,” in which she argues that the experience of homosexual rape—that is, the rape of a heterosexual man by a homosexual—is one of the chief factors leading to the creation of homosexual murderers: they must avenge this ultimate humiliation. She writes, “For the second group of ‘gay murderers’—the avengers—there is a slang expression: remodeler [remontnih]. These men, who were raped in a homosexual fashion in places of incarceration, then descended to the lowest and most despised caste, that of roosters [petukhi] or untouchables [opushchennye]” (353). Such psychological readings of male humiliation are common in the boeviki, or action thrillers, by Viktor Dontsenko, in which actual physical violation, that is, male-male rape, is a common byproduct of the brutal and almost exclusively male world inhabited by the hero Savelii, known as Beshenyi (Mad Dog). See, in particular, Okhoto Beshenogo (Hunting for Mad Dog) and Srok dlia Beshenego (A Sentence for Mad Dog). For more on the meaning of sex in the Russian thriller, see Eliot Borenstein, Overkill: Sex and Violence in Contemporary Russian Popular Culture (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2008), 159–94.
Literary analysis of this kind was pioneered by Vasilii Rozanov in People of the Moonlight. In fact, he discusses some of the same literary characters as Kulikova does, and, like her, suggests that an aversion to marriage— and to women in general—points to latent, or what he referred to as spiritual, homosexuality. As evidence, he presents the two eponymous heroes of Gogol’s “How Ivan Ivanovich Quarrelled with Ivan Nikiforo-vich”—also mentioned by Kulikova—as well as various characters from Turgenev, Tolstoy, and Dostoevsky (V. V. Rozanov, Selected Writings, trans. Spencer E. Roberts [New York: Philosophy Library, 1978], 91).
He also offers in support of his theory the celibacy of Saint Moses of Hungary. The validity of such analysis and the assumptions on which it is based was supported by Kostia Rotikov in his gay history of Saint Petersburg, Orugoi Peterburg, published in 1998: “V. V. Rozanov v Liudiakh lunnogo sveta razvival ostroumnuiu i, v sushchnosti, blizkuiu k istine mysl’, chto ideia muzhskogo tselomudriia i vozderzhaniia prinadlezhit gomosek-sualistam [V. V. Rozanov in People of the Moonlight developed the witty idea, which is essentially close to the truth, that the idea of male chastity and abstinence belongs to homosexuals]” (Kostia Rotikov, Drugoi Peterburg [St. Petersburg: Liga-Plius, 1998], 448).
Mariia Cheremisinova, “Goluboi Onegin,” interview by Maiia Kulikova, Ogonek 21. 4696 (May 2001): 44.
Michel Foucault, Discpline and Punish. The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage Books, 1997), 170.
Graham Thompson, Male Sexuality under Surveillance. The Office in American Literature (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2003), xv.
Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasures and Narrative Cinema,” in Visual and Other Pleasures (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989), 19;
John Berger, Ways of Seeing (New York: Penguin, 1977), 47. A number of film theorists have attempted to rethink Mulvey’s theories in order to accommodate the female, and in particular the lesbian, film viewer. While Mulvey’s theorization of gender relations in Hollywood films is adequate for my purposes, I agree with Phillip Brian Harper’s comment that “the power dynamic [Mulvey] observes is specific to a heterosexual context. Much could be said about the unique function of the male gaze in homosexual relations” (Framing the Margins. The Social Logic of Postmodern Culture [New York: Oxford University Press, 1994], 202fn.). Later in this chapter, I will explore alternatively gendered visual economies created by homosexual desire.
Polina Dashkova, Nikto ne zaplachet (Moscow: Astrel’, 2002), 87.
For a reading of Hammer and Sickle as a melodramatic staging of male victimhood, see Susan Larsen, “Melodramatic Masculinity, National Identity, and the Stalinist Past in Postsoviet Cinema,” Studies in Twentieth Century Literature 24.1 (Winter 2001): 85–120.
Michel Foucault, “The Subject and Power,” in Art after Modernism: Rethinking Representation, ed. Brian Wallis (New York: The New Museum of Contemporary Art, 1984), 420.
Lilya Kaganovsky, “Men Wanted: Female Masculinity in Sergei Livnev’s Hammer and Sickle,” Slavic and East European Journal 51.2 (Summer 2007), 233.
Alexander Prokhorov, “‘I Need Some Life-Assertive Character’ or How to Die in the Most Inspiring Pose: Bodies in the Stalinist Museum of Hammer & Sickle,” Studies in Slavic Cultures 1 (2000): 31.
Aleksei Semenenko, Hamlet the Sign: Russian Translations of Hamlet and Literary Canon Formation (Stockholm: Stockholm University, 2007), 130.
Robert J. Corber, Homosexuality in Cold War America. Resistance and the Crisis of Masculinity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997), 14.
This visual anxiety and self-consciousness is brilliantly staged in Richard Greenberg’s play Take Me Out, about a fictional baseball star, Darren Lemming, who publicly announces that he is gay. The narrator, Skippy Sunderstrom, who is the team “intellectual” and Darren’s closest friend, describes the complications this produces in the particular visual economy of the locker room: “Well, look at us now. How we turn from each other. How, when we turn to each other, we maintain eye contact. (Rodriguez and Martinez look away.) Before, this wasn’t necessary. We were men. This meant we could be girlish. We could pat fannies, snap towels; hug. Now …,… We’ve lost a kind of paradise. We see that we are naked” (Richard Greenberg, Take Me Out [New York: Faber & Faber, 2003], 53–54).
Scott Cranin, review of Sokurov’s Father and Son, Tlavideo, http://www.tlavideo.com/product/2–0–206997_father-and-son.html?sn=1 (accessed May 15, 2008).
Birgit Beumers, review of Sokurov’s Father and Son, Kinokultura (July 18, 2003), http://www.kinokultura.com/reviews/R73fatherson.html (accessed May 15,2008).
Viktor Erofeev, Muzhshchiny (Moscow: Podkova, 1999), 81.
Vladimir Makanin, “Captive of the Caucasus,” trans. Arch Tait, in Captives. Contemporary Russian Stories, ed. Natasha Perova and Joanne Turnbull (Moscow: Glas, 2005), 3.
Helena Goscilo, “Casting and Recasting the Caucasian Captive,” in “Pushkin’s Secret”: Russian Writers Reread and Rewrite Pushkin, vol. 1 of Two Hundred Tears of Pushkin, ed. Joe Andrew and Robert Reid (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2003), 199.
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© 2009 Brian James Baer
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Baer, B.J. (2009). Making a Spectacle of Homosexuality. In: Other Russias. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230620384_3
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