Notes Introduction 1. Venedikt Erofeev, Moscow to the End of the Line, trans. H. William Tjalsma (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1980), 114. 2. S. Repov and A. Fufyrin, “Gei ne pei,” Argumenty i fakty 22 (2007): 2. 3. Mark Popovskii, Tret’ii lishnii: On, ona, i sovetskii rezhim (London: Over- seas Publications Interchange, 1985), 6. 4. The two bisexual women who have sex with the narrator in Vasilii Aksenov’s novel The Burn [Ozheg, 1980], the narrator’s sexual encounter with a homeless Black man in a park in Eduard Limonov’ It’s Me, Eddie [Eto ia—Edichka!] (1979), the homosexual couple who die a tragic death in Evgenii Popov’s short story “The Reservoir [Reservuar]” (1973), and the homosexual inmates portrayed with humanity by the émigré writer Sergei Dovlatov in The Zone [Zona, 1982] would be among the most notable examples. 5. Vitaly Chernetsky, Mapping Postcommunist Cultures: Russia and Ukraine in the Context of Globalization (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2007), 146. 6. Larissa Lissyutkina, “Soviet Women at the Crossroads of Perestroika,” in Gender Politics and Post-Communism: Reflections from Eastern Europe and the Former Soviet Union, ed. Nanette Funk and Madga Mueller (New York: Routledge, 1993), 283, italics mine. Western sociologists have demonstrated that for a variety of reasons Russia’s bumpy transition to a market economy has indeed taken a larger toll on Russian men, as evidenced by, among other things, a falling life expectancy and rising rates of depression, alcoholism, and suicide, but not an increase in homosexu- ality! For more on the state of the post-Soviet male, see Sergei Kukhterin, “Fathers and Patriarchs in Communist and Post-Communist Russia,” Marina Kiblitskaya, “‘Once We Were Kings’: Male Experience of Loss of Status at Work in Post-Communist Russia,” and Elena Meshcherkina, “New Russian Men: Masculinity Regained,” in Gender, State and Society in Soviet and Post-Soviet Russia, ed. Sarah Ashwin (London and New York: Routledge, 2000), 71–89, 90–104, 105–17. 7. Leon Edelman, Homographesis. Essays in Gay Literary and Cultural The- ory (New York, Routledge, 1994), 6. 154 notes 8. Sergei Tikhomirov quoted in Eliot Borenstein, “About That: Deploying and Deploring Sex in Postsoviet Russia,” Studies in Twentieth Century Literature 24.1 (Winter 2000): 76fn. 9. Lisa Rofel, “Qualities of Desire: Imagining Gay Identities in China,” GLQ 5.4 (1999): 453. 10. Anna Wierzbicka, Semantics, Culture, and Cognition. Univeral Human Concepts in Culture-Specific Configurations (New York: Oxford Univer- sity Press, 1992), 21. 11. Edelman, Homographesis, 6. 12. Dan Healey, Homosexual Desire in Revolutionary Russia. The Regula- tion of Sexual and Gender Dissent (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 253. 13. The film also features a pair of “gay” deputies in the Russian Duma, who in the final scene of the film are traveling in a cab with Uliumdzhi’s Uncle Vanya, also a politician. Uncle Vanya suddenly breaks into tears over the fate of his homosexual nephew. He tells the two deputies that he’d always wanted his nephew to be a deputy like them. With the shadow of a smile on their lips, they tell the uncle to have his nephew come and see them when he is released from the army and they’ll make a “deputy” out of him. 14. Of course, this was not always the case. In eighteenth- and nineteenth- century America, homosexuality was associated with the decadence of the European aristocracy, and in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries with the peasant and working class immigrants entering the country at the time. 15. See Dennis Altman, “Global Gaze/Global Gays,” GLQ 3 (1997): 417–36. 16. For more on the patriarchal nature of post-Soviet society, see Kukhterin, “Fathers and Patriarchs.” 17. Igor Kon, Seksual’naia kul’tura v Rossii. Klubnichka na berezke (Mos- cow: O. G. I., 1997), 370–71; Hilary Pilkington, “The Dark Side of the Moon? Global and Local Horizons,” in Looking West? Cultural Global- ization and Russian Youth Cultures, ed. Hilary Pilkington (University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2002), 162. 18. Moya Flynn and Elena Starkova, “Talking Global? Images of the West in the Youth Media,” in Looking West? Cultural Globalization and Russian Youth Cultures, ed. Hilary Pilkington (University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2002), 62–63. 19. Anatoly Vishevsky, “The Other Among Us: Homosexuality in Recent Russian Literature,” Slavic and East European Journal 42.5 (Winter 1998): 729. 20. It should be noted that these terms typically refer not to an openly “gay” lifestyle but to same-sex desire itself. 21. Dilia Enikeeva, Gei i lesbianki (Moscow: Astrel’, 2003), 5. 22. Iurii Longo, “Ne dyshite nam v zad,” Andrei 7 (1995): 56. notes 155 23. The most famous example of the confusion of discourse and reality occurred on a talk show in which a Russian woman in the audience remarked that “[in the Soviet Union] we don’t have sex [u nas seksa net].” Her statement was widely cited as evidence of the sexophobia of Soviet culture, although most commentators were unaware that the audience’s reaction—mostly guffaws—drowned out the second part of her statement: “on television.” For more on the incident, see Andrei Levin, “Rossiiski tainy: seksa net,” http://www.gazeta.ru/comments/ felieton/36890.shtml (accessed June 1, 2005). 24. Pilkington, “Dark Side of the Moon,” 162. 25. Sergeij Dobrotvorskij, “A Tired Death,” in Selbsidentifikation. Positionen St. Petersburger Kunst von 1970s bis heute/Self-Identification. Positions in St. Petersburg Art from 1970 until Today, ed. Kathrin Becker and Barbara Straka (Berlin: DruckVogt GmbH, 1994), 211. 26. Edelman, Homographesis, 12. 27. As the popular writer Mikhail Veller put it in his book Love of Evil [Liubov’ zla], “I’m also indifferent to tender and fruitless passion of sexual minor- ities: we let them enjoy equal rights and modestly turn our eyes to the other side—to the boundless territory where normal people [normal’nye liudi] are piled up one on top of the other” (Liubov’ zla [St. Petersburg: Neva, 2000], 7 [italics mine]). 28. Dilia Enikeeva, Seksual’naia patologiia [Sexual Pathology] (Moscow: Binom, 1997), 93 (italics mine). 29. Repov and Fufyrin, “Gei ne pei,” 2. 30. For a witty discussion of the Russian relationship to political correctness, see Tat’iana Tolstaia, “Politicheskaia korrektnost’ ili gil’otina blagikh namerenii. Ne spi, ne spi, khodozhnik,” Inostrannaia literatura (Sep- tember 9, 1995): 202–11. 31. Kon, Seksual’naia kul’tura, 354–55. 32. Iurii Terapiano, Introduction, in Zinaida Gippius. Izbrannoe, ed. T. Pro- kopov (Moscow: Terra, 1997), 15–16. 33. V. A. Nikitin, “Andre Zhid: Vekhi tvorcheskogo puti,” in Andre Zhid. Uzbrannoe, ed. V. A. Nikitin (Moscow: Terra, 1997), 6. 34. John Malmsted and Nikolay Bogomolov, Mikhail Kuzmin: A Life in Art (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999), xii, xiii. 35. Viktor Pelevin, Chisla, Dialektika perekhodnogo perioda iz niotkuda v nikuda [Numbers, The dialectic of a transitional period from nowhere to nowhere] (Moscow: Eksmo, 2004), 144. 36. Elena Baraban, “Obyknovennaia gomofobiia [Everyday homophobia],” Niprikosvennyi zapas 5.19, http://magazines.russ.ru/nz/2001/5 (accessed December 28, 2001). 37. On the prostitute as embodiment of late Soviet and early post-Soviet eco- nomic anxieties, see Katarina Clark, “Not for Sale: The Russian/Soviet Intelligentsia, Prostitution, and the Paradox of Internal Colonization,” Russian Culture in Transition. Selected Papers of the Working Group for 156 notes the Study of Contemporary Russian Culture, 1990–1991, ed. Gregory Freidin (Stanford: Stanford Department of Slavic Languages and Litera- tures, 1993), 189–205. 38. Catherine Theimer Nepomnyaschny, “Markets, Mirrors, and Mayhem: Aleksandra Marinina and the Rise of the New Russian Detektiv,” in Con- suming Russia: Popular Culture, Sex, and Society since Gorbachev, ed. Adele Marie Barker (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999), 164. The novel Era miloserdiia became the basis for the enormously popular TV movie Mesto vstrechi izmenit’s nel’zia. 39. Russia! “Art: The Degenerates,” Russia! (Winter 2008): 94. Chapter 1 1. Timothy Brennan, “The Cuts of Language: The East/West of North/ South,” Public Culture 13.1 (2001): 39. 2. Ivan Bloch, Sexual Life in England. Past and Present (Royston: Oracle Publishing, 1938), vii. 3. Ibid. 4. Laura Engelstein, “There Is Sex in Russia—and Always Was: Some Recent Contributions to Russian Erotics,” Slavic Review 51 (1992): 786. 5. Quoted in Igor S. Kon, Seksual’naia kul’tura v Rossii: Klubnichka na berezke (Moscow: OGI, 1997), 354. 6. Ibid. 7. For an understanding of the variety of silences surrounding the issue of (homo)sexual desire, see Kevin Moss’s discussion of the “pervasive sexophobia” in Soviet Russia that kept gay/lesbian writing hidden from Western eyes in Out of the Blue: Russia’s Hidden Gay Literature. An Anthology (San Francisco: Gay Sunshine Press, 1997), 9–12. Soviet cen- sors went so far as to remove references to homosexuality in Russian translations of classical literature (See M. L. Gasparov, “Klassicheskaia filologiia i tsenzura nravov,” Literaturnoe obozrenie 11 (1991): 4–7. In the area of sociological research, Igor Kon notes that “not a single Soviet/Russian sexual survey was ever published in the normal scientific way, with all tables, questionnaires, and methodological discussions” (The Sexual Revolution in Russia, trans. James Riordan [New York: The Free Press, 1995], 275). 8. Donovan Hohn, “An American Werewolf in Russia,” Civilization (October–November 1999): 100. 9. The politics implicit in the discussion of homosexuality in the early Soviet period is spelled out by Martin Bauml Duberman, Martha Vici- nus, and George Chauncey Jr., eds. Hidden from History: Reclaiming a Gay and Lesbian Past (New York: New American Library, 1989), 347: “The widespread belief that the Bolsheviks liberated Russia’s homosexu- als has long been a point of pride for gay leftists and a confirmation of notes 157 the worst fears of those on the right who see an intrinsic and subversive link between communism and homosexuality.” 10.