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.
You are in some deep seated denial if you don’t think homosexuals express affection through kissing.
Yeah, I’m sorry if the size and depth of the document scared you off.
I’m arguing the homosexual urge is strong and universal. Russia is no exception. And that, when the political moment allows for it, the expressions of queer love flourish.
What we saw in the USSR, early in the revolution, was an instance of that flourishing. One that reactionary strains in future state governments failed to suppress, time and time again.
Liberals want to deny that this golden age of free love and open queer expression occurred, because it flies in the face of their orthodoxy. But it happened repeatedly over the history of the USSR. Soviet peoples openly expressed their queer love and accepted the queer love of their neighbors. Soviet governments bent in the face of it, even as the reactionaries fought against it. And even now, in an outright fascist post-Soviet nation, queer love endures.
You don’t need perfect liberal conditions to enjoy a queer society. Hell, quite a bit of modern western history suggests liberalism is as much a threat to queer expression as any socialist government. What you need are queer people united in purpose and committed to one another’s liberation. Russia and the surrounding states are filled with these people and will continue to be filled with these people, whether you choose to acknowledge them or not.
I expected more than defaulting to disingenuity. Straight men kissing is not the same as gay men kissing. Implying that Soviet politicians expressed their homosexual desires by kissing is an insulting level of trivialising homosexuality.
And - more disingenuity, along with childish pretentiousness. The text doesn’t say anything specific in support of your claims. The “depth” required to prove LGBT culture existed in USSR is miniscule, the general methodological considerations that the PDF discusses are irrelevant here.
I don’t remember anyone claiming otherwise. What was being discussed was how the state deals with that urge and, implied, how we evaluate states with regards to how they dealt with it.
This is pure fantasy. You are free to provide actual documentation from that age and prove me wrong - not meta-methodological pontificating of academics but actual traces of that time period from USSR - but as I’ve studied Russian and had some interest in their culture, as well as spent some time in Russian online queer spaces, all I’ve seen is historical silence or erasure, even during the supposed “golden age”. I would be sincerely glad to be proven otherwise, I’d be glad to see that LGBT history hasn’t been as uniformly bleak as it seems to me now.
Maybe. The point is simply that USSR was very far from a queer(-positive) society either way, with a possible window of greater freedom for a short while that doesn’t seem to have left any serious traces in practice.
And - standard defaulting to “liberal societies are equally bad tho!”. Right after desperately trying to prove socialism created a queer “golden age”, as if you don’t believe your own claims about it yourself.
This has nothing to do with the topic. We’re talking about USSR’s sexual politics, not current LGBT activism in Russia.