The Birch, Fall 2005

Homophobia in Russia
A dangerous cultural epidemic

Emily Laskin

During St. Petersburg's famous White Nights Festival last June, Nevsky Prospect teemed with a genial melee of rollicking Europeans on holiday and mostly young, sometimes outlandishly dressed, but otherwise unremarkable Russians. The atmosphere was relaxed and liberal. Alcohol, drugs, sex - every proverbially Western vice unabashedly asserted its presence. But bring up the very charged issue of homosexuality - even in such a crowd - and the response would reflect the disturbingly homophobic bent of mind of an otherwise liberal generation.

Although I knew that homosexuality had been repressed and outlawed in the Soviet Union and was aware that homophobic prejudices had not entirely disappeared, I was, nevertheless, wholly unprepared for the degree to which Russians were intolerant of homosexuals. I had assumed that, just as with so many other stigmatized social issues - legacies of the prudish Soviet past - the Russian youth of today would turn if not a blind eye, then at least uninterested one on the issue of homosexuality. In a youth culture that appears at a first glance to be liberal and tolerant, the vehemence with which homosexuality is condemned to be disgusting, wrong, or sinful is shocking and seemingly quite unprecedented. Why this issue in particular? And why is it so pronounced among the Russian youth?

I stayed all summer in St. Petersburg with Zhenya, a single female artist and St. Petersburg native. The day I arrived at her apartment she politely and quite matter-of-factly informed me that her best friend, who spoke English perfectly and was a lesbian, was coming over for dinner. It struck me as somewhat odd for Zhenya to have mentioned Zina's sexuality before, say, her profession. Upon further consideration, it seemed odd that I would be meeting an "out" lesbian on my first day in Russia, so I consulted the dictionary for another word I might have mistaken for lesbiyanka. I didn't find much. Zina did, in fact, speak beautiful English, and so I worked up the confidence to ask her about her sexuality. After she told me that she split her time working in Russia and the United States, I asked if she encountered a lot of prejudice in Russia. She responded that in the America no one mistakes her for a little boy just because of her cropped haircut, and dropped the issue. Thinking about her response later on I realized she had really told me nothing- plenty of Russian women of Zina's age have cropped hair. I assumed I had been too forward for a stranger, and so, after a few weeks passed and I had settled in, I consulted Zhenya.

Zhenya generally fit into the category of the creative liberal type, both in the Russian and American sense. She worked as a freelance artist, interior designer, and set designer for a local theater troupe. She kept company with other artists, most of whom were women and all of whom were outspoken about feminist issues. Several of them asked me if sexism (another taboo subject) was as bad in America as it was in Russia. I had my suspicions that Zhenya was a lesbian, but, after asking nearly all the Russians I knew for their opinions on homosexuality and receiving, unfailingly, less than tolerant responses, I was reluctant to broach the subject. When I finally did inquire, her only comment was, "I was married when I was younger, and after we were divorced I got allergies from stress."

Zhenya and Zina were not the only people to sidestep my queries. I asked another middleaged woman if she thought, as her daughter did, that homosexuality was a sin. She replied first that she didn't believe in God. She then proceeded to ask why she, an upstanding and respectable woman, should care about gay people. I pushed a little further, saying that sex education, including education about homosexuality, was important in dealing with Russia's AIDS crisis. She then politely informed me that AIDS would never leave the community of drug users where it started, so all drug-free people were safe. Her response, though more dramatic than most, seemed typical of the people of her generation. This I could write off as fear, lingering Soviet-era denial, lack of education, or even simply as a cultural bias, but I could not treat with equanimity the opinion that America is not only burdened by black people, but by homosexuals as well, and that, thankfully, Russia does not suffer from such woes.

The adults with whom I spoke seemed to treat gay and lesbian issues with a mixture of indifference and fear, but none of their responses matched the outright malice of college and high school students. When questioned about African Americans, Jews, drugs, sex, and all the other topics about which their parents remained tightlipped, they gave more or less informed, unprejudiced, and sometimes downright politically correct answers. One boy said that although he wasn't used to seeing African Americans, he loved their music-the prevalence of rap in Russia is another unexplained cultural phenomenon-and wished he knew some. He also said, nearly in the same breath, that God did not create people to be gay. Many young people offered unprovoked their opinions of homosexuals, but never mentioned race or religion unless questioned further.

I found Russian youths' intolerance of homosexuals to be somewhat paradoxical. In Russia, deviations from the white, Christian, and heterosexual norm have historically never been tolerated. Some Russians -namely the woman who claimed that AIDS was not a threat to "normal" Russians - equate racial "abnormalities" with sexual ones and consider them to be two similar problems peculiar to the societies of Western Europe and America. But youth culture in Russia's big cities has apparently moved past this history of intolerance - with exception of homophobia.

This problem does not get as much international attention as it deserves, especially when contrasted with mounting international worry over Russia's AIDS crisis. Perhaps this is because gay culture in Russia has not yet progressed to the stage of demanding rights-it is still fighting the battle for even mild acceptance. Ludmila Alexeeva, chairwoman of the Moscow Helsinki Group, said at a recent forum at New York's Open Society Institute that Russian society generally treats "unusual individuals" poorly, but even from the point of view of a champion of human and civil rights, the only examples of "unusual individuals" were intravenous drug users and HIV-positive individuals.

On the other hand, although there is virtually no political support for issues of homosexuality in Russia -- domestically or abroad -- there has been some foreign journalistic interest in the subject. Notable is David Tuller's book Cracks in the Iron Closet (1996). Tuller details Russia's lack of a unified gay and lesbian movement, which is both due to outside hindrances and a severely divided homosexual community. Recent evidence suggests that the situation within the homosexual community may have improved in the last ten years: St. Petersburg boasts both a gay and a lesbian organization, a part-time drag nightclub, and Russia's only fulltime lesbian nightclub, all of which have existed for some time without major problems. But, as with most questions concerning civil liberties in Russia, St. Petersburg and Moscow are far more liberal than the rest of the country, and cohesion among homosexual organizations elsewhere in the country has yet to emerge.

Ludmila Alexeeva noted that in Russia today far more young people are joining nationalist groups than human rights groups. Youth culture, however, is undoubtedly becoming increasingly Western and less Russian. Despite persistent bureaucratic resistance to liberal reforms, many of Russia's urban youth have adopted generally liberal attitudes and lifestyles. This is not so true of older generations, who still harbor vivid memories of the Soviet Union. Russian youths' vehement homophobia seems to be in keeping with increasing interest in nationalism. With the invasion of McDonald's, Britney Spears and, soon, Starbucks, many Russians, both adults and teenagers alike, are searching for areas of cultural differentiation. Homophobia, unfortunately, may serve as one of these areas. Perhaps it is simply a prejudice left over from Soviet times; Judaism and environmentalism were at least allowed, equality for women was nominally encouraged, but homosexuality was strictly outlawed. Or, perhaps, in the midst of all the many social changes that have happened in Russia, it is one of the last bastions anti-Western sentiment. Whatever the sociological explanation may be, if the homophobic tendencies in Russian youth culture are not duly addressed both by the Russian government and by international organizations, then dangerous tendency will soon become incorrigible social habit of the kind that would take decades to allay.