Oscar Wilde was gay, are you trying to suggest Victorian Britain wasn’t homophobic and repressive

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.

Kissing as a sign of friendship/goodwill is not a sign of homosexuality or of acceptance of homosexuality.

You are in some deep seated denial if you don’t think homosexuals express affection through kissing.

Your claim about the “prelevance” of gay culture in USSR is based on a link to a lengthy and wordy PDF

Yeah, I’m sorry if the size and depth of the document scared you off.

If you’re arguing against the idea that USSR was the most henious country against LGBT in history

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.

But eVeRyThInG i WrOtE wAs PrAcTiCaLlY wRoNg.

How do you explain the continued prevalence of gay culture in a country that has so militantly sought to oppress it?

1917–1927: Don’t ask, don’t tell.

After the October Revolution of 1917, homosexuality was decriminalised in Soviet Russia with the repeal of the legal code of the Russian Empire

Don’t ask, don’t tell

“Don’t ask, don’t tell” (DADT) was the official United States policy on military service of homosexual people for a period of over 17 years, starting in the mid-1990s.

The policy prohibited military personnel from discriminating against or harassing closeted homosexual or bisexual service members or applicants, while barring openly gay, lesbian, or bisexual persons from military service.

One of these things is not like the other.

And of course, this is just the tip of the iceberg. Practically everything else you wrote is also wrong.

homophobia was always the norm.

LGBTQ history in the Soviet Union

A history of LGBTQ rights in modern Russia: From progress to despair

Seems like it varied wildly.

The early Soviet period made Russia one of the most progressive countries on earth, only for the Stalin era to radically reverse the gains decades later. Then Glasnost reversed the reversal in a period of general liberalization, only for the late-Yeltsin and subsequent Putin governments to snap back the reforms as a means of purging the state of liberal institutions.

Nonetheless, Eastern Europe and Russia has always been super gay. The prevalence of gay culture in the Eastern Bloc has endured in the hard times and flourished in the good times.

the wiki even shows it was used in Imperial Russia and is an Orthodox Christian thing

Cause it was gay back then, too.

In the same way that you can point to the Stonewall Riots in the US and say “They’re not gay, look at what the cops did to the gay community!” you can squeeze your eyes shut and proclaim “Russians weren’t gay, because Stalin and Putin both turned on his gay peers”.

What you reject in the positive is revealed in the negative. This is a culture steeped in gayness. The modern state is chronically at war with its gay population because - despite a generation of homophobic media and state violence and denial at every institutional level - they keep on fighting.

1930s USSR was super gay.

It took decades of reactionary influencing and organizing to turn the Eastern Bloc into a horrifying ultra-nationalist paleoconservative hell hole.

We’ve seen similar patterns in West Africa, Latin America, and the Pacific Rim.

Me: “Just FYI, you’ve got undiagnosed ADHD.”

Friend 1: “Wow, what can I do about this?”

Me: “You’re too poor to access mental health care, and most professionals haven’t accepted this as a diagnosis for your racial/gender cohort. So, unfortunately, there’s nothing to be done.”

Friend 2: “What about me?”

Me: “You’re transgender.”

Friend 2: “What the fuck did you just call me?!”

Maybe aim better next time, Mr. Crooks

Me: “What an excellent project you’ve got going on here. I’d love to help.”

Admin 1: “This is an automated message. Please fill out this form and give us 10,000 details about yourself. Please provide evidence you’re a Type S, Mark 12, Fibonacci Certified, Code Arch-magus. We will get back to you in 6-8 weeks if we notice you, but let’s get real, probably never.”

Admin 2: “Hey, is that a reference to Tuscany in your bio? We don’t serve Italians around here. Fuck off, dipshit.”

Admin 3: “This project hasn’t been worked on in 18 months. I’m actually about to delete the whole codestack. But I hear there’s a guy who only speaks Armenian doing something similar. Try reaching out to him.”

Can’t not read that in his voice.

It always just strikes me as immaturity. People with a physiological demand for sex reaching for what they can’t have in polite society, then letting out their rage and humiliation on people lower than them on the pole, because they never learned how to process their emotions.

In my experience, having grown up in an upper-middle class neighborhood with a mixed bag of people who all went different directions…

It’s not the lack of a conscience that makes you rich. It’s the wealth that degrades your morality.

“I’m going to be an asshole in order to get rich” has not - in my experience - produced my success. I know plenty of shitheads who squandered their family fortunes and ended up doing shit work for shit pay. On the flip side, a few friends and acquaintances who did go on to be successful turned increasingly toxic and miserable as their stars climbed.

I started watching a lot of home-improvement type videos on YouTube, and suddenly since then all the ads now assume my dick is horribly bent and doesn’t work, and that I uncontrollably shit and piss myself.

I will trade all the dumb chuds in the world for another November Kelly podcast. If this is the price we have to pay, I will simply live with the knowledge that these dipshits exist and settle in for another six hours of WTYP.

Yes.

The USS Unpaid Alimony

Had a friend whose dad named his boat The Other Woman.

Housing might, in theory, be guaranteed in your home town.

Idk why you’re trying to couch this as a hypothetical. Imagine trying to talk about Social Security this way - “oh well maybe in theory…” No, brother, the checks are in the mail.

People really do have family housing that really does exist for real in China.

But it’s certainly no Soviet Union

The Chinese Communist system was not organized under the Soviet model. Absolutely true. Maoism-cum-Dengism is not Lenin With Chinese Characteristics.

Yugoslavia, Vietnam, Cuba, and Venezuela also had their own district unique models.

if you go up to local officials and say “I have no job and I want to work”, they’ll find something for you to do pretty quickly.

If you go to your local Chinese jobs office, you’ll get a bureaucratic exam that determines your fitness for entry level positions.

23% of the population works in the public sector. That’s roughly 300M people - China Is Hiring.

But the private sector is also hiring, often with salary and benefits that outcompete public jobs. The idea that you need to be a trash picker to earn an income is flat out wrong.

Now, homeless people collecting rubbish to sell for scrap does also happen in the US, but the US at least doesn’t claim to be a socialist country.

The US doesn’t have guaranteed housing. China does. The major catch is that Chinese guaranteed housing is tied to your municipal “home city” and getting that changed is a pain in the ass. So the homeless people you’ll find in major urban areas are residents who left their rural neighborhoods in pursuit of a better life in the city and fell through the cracks.

That said, the low cost of living in China definitely improves the prospects of even the most desperately poor. What’s more, Chinese policy with respect to “internal migrants” is radically different from the US policy of mass criminalization and imprisonment.

Today, China has one of the highest homeownership rates in the world, surpassing 90 percent, and this includes the millions of migrant workers who rent homes in other cities. This means that when encountering economic troubles, such as unemployment, urban migrant workers can return to their hometowns, where they own a home, can engage in agricultural production, and search for work locally. This structural buffer plays a critical role in absorbing the impacts of major economic and social crises. For example, during the 2008 global financial crisis, China’s export-oriented economy, especially of manufactured goods, was severely hit, causing about 30 million migrant workers to lose their jobs. Similarly, during the COVID-19 pandemic, when service and manufacturing jobs were seriously impacted, many migrant workers returned to their homes and land in the countryside.

The domestic policy around perpetual family ownership of property is critical to limiting poverty in China in a way very few other countries enjoy.

So when you say

China has no functional social safety net

I’m genuinely not clear if you know what you’re talking about.

I walked past a location in Shenzhen which was advertising that they were hiring. Their offer of pay: ¥200 a day, for a 10-hour shift, six days a week. In one of the most expensive cities in the country.

Shocking to hear they hadn’t filled the position.