Authorities claimed that homosexuality was the result of bourgeois Western and German fascist influence, and the official Soviet newspaper Pravda published an article which ended with the slogan: “Destroy homosexuality and fascism will disappear!”
From the beginning of 1934, gay men began to be arrested in large numbers in major Russian cities and sent to the gulags. One prisoner, Valery Klimov, wrote about the treatment gay detainees received:
“there were about 10 occasions when gays were murdered before my eyes. One was beaten to death in a prison in Sverdlovsk. There were 100 men in our cell; three or four raped him every day and then chucked him under the bunks. It was bestial, a nightmare. Once 10 of them raped him and then jumped on his head. I nearly went mad there; my hair turned grey. That’s how people lose their sanity; many never recover even after they leave.”
While lesbianism was never prohibited, and some masculine lesbians were valued in the military, many lesbians did still suffer persecution such as termination of studies or jobs, bullying, threats to remove custody of their children or being committed to psychiatric facilities.
How do you explain the continued prevalence of gay culture in a country that has so militantly sought to oppress it?
Oscar Wilde was gay, are you trying to suggest Victorian Britain wasn’t homophobic and repressive because gay culture survived?
Gay people exist across time and space, we are biologically driven to be as such. We can’t be killed off, only driven underground or into repression.
Victorian England was phenomenally gay. The English practically invented “cruising in the park”, because so many homosexual men were looking to hook up with one another in the major metro areas. It was the persistent open and free expression of queerness that prompted a reactionary parliament to try and criminalize it.
You’re staring at a five alarm fire and concluding nothing is hot because so many state bureaucrats are spraying water everywhere.
Oscar Wilde’s huge and lasting popularity was clear evidence of queer English culture persevering over the purdish Protestant ethos.
Oscar Wilde did years of hard labour in prison for the crime of being gay. It’s what deteriorated his health leading to his death shortly after release.
You are erasing the suffering of gay people to try to paint the USSR as a paradise. It’s revolting.