The Dictionary of Homophobia (127 page)

Angenot, Marc.
La Parole pamphlétaire
. Paris: Payot, 1982.

Delor, François.
Homosexualité, ordre symbolique, injure et discrimination: Impasses et destins des expériences érotiques minoritaires dans l’espace social et politique
. Brussels: Labor, 2003.

Eribon, Didier.
Réflexions sur la question gay
. Paris: Fayard. 1999. [Published in the US as
Insult and the Making of the Gay Self
. Durham, NC: Duke Univ. Press, 2004.]

Goffman, Erving.
Stigmate
. Paris: Minuit, 1975. [Published in the US as
Stigma
. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1963.]

Grahn, Judy.
Another Mother Tongue: Gay Words, Gay Worlds
. Boston: Beacon Press, 1990.

Hirschman, Albert O.
Deux Siècles de rhétorique réactionnaire
. Paris: Fayard, 1991. [Published in the US as
The Rhetoric of Reaction
. Cambridge: Belknap Press, 1991.]

Larguèche, Evelyne.
Injure et sexualité
. Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1997.

Mackinnon, Catharine.
Only Words
. Cambridge/London: Harvard Univ. Press, 1996.

Reboul, Olivier.
Langage et idéologie
. Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1980

———.
La Rhétorique
. Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1983.

—Abnormal; Anthropology; Caricature; Heterosexism; Humor; Insult; Literature; Otherness; Proselytism; Psychoanalysis; Symbolic Order; Violence; Vocabulary.

RIGHT WING.
See
Far Right

RUSSIA

Starting in 988 CE, Christianization had the effect of introducing Byzantine sexual morality into Russia. Both
Orthodox
canonic law (
nomokanon
) and the
Bible
forbid
muzhelozhestvo
(“the position of man on man”) and
sodomsky grekh
(“the
sin
of
Sodom
”), giving Russian homophobia its Christian foundations: the first Russian
nomokanon
refers to
Justinian
. The sexual morality of Eastern pagan Slavs, according to erotic folklore (assembled in the nineteenth century by Afanassiev and
censored
), illustrates a great freedom and acceptance of homosexual practices that the former civil laws had never penalized. Russian princes referred sexual issues—sins that are a matter of penitence—to the Church and its tribunals. Absent from the accounts, but largely practiced and tolerated (albeit with resignation), homosexuality was rarely reprimanded, except when it was linked to
heresy
, or when an ecclesiastic dignitary’s homosexuality became public knowledge. But the first penitential in Russia in the thirteenth century, based on the beliefs of Archbishop Nifont of Novgorod in the twelfth century, was rather lenient on the subject of sodomy.

The notion of sodomy includes all perversions of
marriage
, attesting to the interpretation of the story of Sodom as punishment for lustfulness and shamelessness. Ordained first of all for purposes of procreation, sex must be limited to face-to-face penetration between a man and a woman, lest it violate “nature” and the Divine order. The homosexual act is doubly sinful, according to orthodoxy. Male
perversion
(
muzhebloudiye)
can encompass masturbation (
rukobloudiye
), also referred to as perversion by the hand (in Greek,
malakid
). Penitence depends on the age and marital status of the sinner, being more severe for older, married men, but more lenient for youth, who are excused on the basis of lacking self-control over sexual urges. From this perspective, debauchery between young women could be nothing more than masturbation and seemed minor in relation to heterosexual non-procreative fornication, which was a threat to marriage and potential offspring.

Homosexual practices bothered the upper clergy especially as a form of commonplace sexual license involving monks, who until the seventeenth century were suspected of engaging in unnatural relations with young male servants, beggars, prostitutes, and “hairless” visitors, despite divine interdicts and monastic vows. The troubling beauty of these young men was considered the ultimate ruse of the Devil to corrupt these monks, according to those who wrote the rules. Nilus of Sora, a fifteenth-century hermit, wrote: “Distance yourself from the company of young men with beautiful and feminine faces; do not look upon them, for it is a net laid down by the Devil to catch monks, as one Father said. If it is possible, do not unnecessarily remain alone with them, said Basil the Great, for there is no thing more important than your soul….” To staunch this desire, Nilus threw nothing less than Christ’s sacrifice (which does not provide forgiveness for this vice) into the balance, and was desolate as a result: “We are agitated by unnatural things that are alien even to animals.”

The birth of the autocracy was accompanied by a synthesis of legal, moral, and religious matters as well as their placement under the authority of the Russian tsar. The pronouncements of the Council of the Hundred Chapters of 1551, presided over by the young Ivan IV, told of bisexual activities during large pagan feasts that transgressed the Church’s interdicts, and denounced the
inversion
of natural sexual roles: “Men and youths … dress in women’s clothing.” The
Domostroy,
a sixteenth-century Muscovite set of domestic rules (which was later denounced in the nineteenth century), expressed the mentality of wealthy boyars (aristocrats) and their inherent demand for self-control. Its misogyny and patriarchal conservatism were also revealed in its condemnation of unnatural morals. Chapter eight of the
Domostroy
, which explains “how the Christian cures himself of illness and all suffering,” deals with illness of the soul and perdition. The sin of Sodom is mentioned, alongside infidelity, and full of passionate excessiveness, including pleasure, swearing, blasphemies, and demonic attitudes and gestures, licentious games, dances, and instrumental music that evoke superstition and magic.

Russian sources are silent on the question of sexual freedom in Muscovite society, but it scandalized foreign visitors, particularly the apparent predilection for zoophilia and homosexuality. Russian “barbarism” was manifested in general impudence (e.g., promiscuity in mixed steam rooms, obscene puppet shows for children) and lasciviousness, and also by drunkenness. The German envoy Adam Olearius, in his
Voyage à Moscou
(Journey to Moscow) (1659), observed: “They practice all sorts of perversions and even sins
against nature
, not only with men, but also with beasts.” Homosexuality was thus associated with depictions of savagery, demonstrating how overdue social control by religion and morality was (an ambition set into motion in the West by the Reformation and Tridentine
Catholicism
).

The first non-religious criminalization of
muzhelozhestvo
, which appeared in Peter the Great’s military regulations of 1706, was not a civil law. Peter, himself bisexual, was nonetheless inspired by the discipline displayed by his Swedish enemies, and sought to expunge homosexual practices from his army. Homosexuals were subject to being burned on the pyre, although ten years later, the penalty was reduced to ten years in exile. The rule did not apply to high-ranking military leaders of the nobility, Souvo and Koutouzov, even though their habits were known.

The Code of Laws of 1830 and the new penal code of 1832 (Article 995) punished sodomy (now referred to under its biblical name) with four to five years of exile in Siberia. Another law, Article 996, doubled the sentence in cases of rape or abuse of a minor or the feeble-minded (once again, this was borrowed from the Germanic Protestant world). Another, earlier attempt at criminalization dated back to 1813, a time when Tsar Alexander I was a champion of the anti-French cause, which may have entailed his opposition to the Napoleonic Code’s decriminalization of sodomy; Alexander’s document invoked the Bible, as the tsar was going through a mystical period. But the law was not applied due to its prudish impreciseness (is it generally homosexuality it objects to, or specifically anal penetration?) and the difficulty establishing factual evidence. But it had an ideological function, both internally and externally: to compensate for the absence of a constitution by a moralizing excessiveness, and to present the Russian state as a paragon of virtue compared to the liberal West, during a time when the state tightened the alliance between the throne and the Church and proclaimed the “national and orthodox” nature of the autocracy. In 1845, the
muzhelozhestvo
became an “unnatural vice,” and punished with exile, hard labor, and property seizure. The paradox: the principal ideologist and minister of the time, Ouvarov, was gay.

As for members of the elite who were found to be homosexual, they were not subject to public scandal or legal trouble, but rather discreetly and temporarily exiled in order to undo any visible links. However, the absence of a precise qualification for
muzhelozhestvo
rendered the 1845 law more or less null and void. In 1872, the Russian senate defined “pederasty” and “sodomy” as homosexual anal penetration in one of its first acts. The idea of equal treatment for heterosexual sodomy shocks some: according to certain distinguished protesters from Kharkov, “sodomy has a less corrupting effect on a female than on a male.” By the end of the century, the first debate on homosexuality and the law between lawyers, doctors and priests pitted moralizing conservatives against moderates and liberals influenced by Western
psychology
and
medicine
, then by nascent
psychoanalysis
. The church and the state refused to secularize sexual rights, despite arguments that demonstrated the uselessness of the law: abolition was inconceivable, as it would appear to sanction the
decadence
of the liberal West. The autocratic moral order cut off any opportunity for rational discussion. The intrusion into the private sexual activities of consenting adults seemed lawful, given that male homosexuality (the only type conceived)—likened to bestiality and rape—aroused a deep-rooted fear of a reversal in the social order. In 1903, a commission proposed to remove bestiality from the law but not sodomy between consenting adults. But biblical references were being replaced by naturalist, anthropological arguments. The analogy of homosexuality with rape, the corruption of minors, or the abuse of the weak seduced the imagination, but it had its limits (who was raped?) and was not deemed to be pertinent where rational law was invented. The basis for
criminalization
was religious, but the most modern lawyers were now making a distinction between morality, law, and religion. The great liberal lawyer and criminologist Vladimir Nabokov (father of the famous writer of the same name) wrote a paper in 1903 in which he argued that private sexual relationships should not fall under the law of the state, provided they were adult and consensual; he went from personal disgust to sincere
tolerance
on the subject.

Control of the press in Russia explains why homosexuality was never exploited politically or socially. The aristocracy and monarchy were untouchable, but conservative historian Sergei Soloviev, head of the Hegelian School of Law, stigmatized Prince Meschersky, director of the reactionary journal
The Citizen
, as “Prince Sodom, citizen of Gomorrah” (which played on the phrase “Prince Minine and the bourgeois Pojarskii,” referring to the Moscow liberators of 1612 and national heros, Prince Pojarsky and Minin, a butcher). Meschersky showed great affection for his favorites at court, and Soloviev, son of an Orthodox priest, saw in him the tradition of vice that foreign travelers to Russia had noted in the sixteenth century. Conservatives considered open homosexuality of the elite to be a discredit to the regime.

The radical progressives were no less severe toward homosexuality. In a letter to fellow writer Leonid Andreyev, Maxim Gorky severely criticized the esthetics of homosexuality as described by Mikhail Kuzmin, author of the first homophile Russian novel
Wings
(published in 1906), which provoked an enormous
scandal
. Meanwhile, poet and playwright Viacheslav Ivanov affirmed: “They are slaves of the old fashion, people who cannot restrain themselves and who confuse liberty and homosexuality. They confuse the freedom of the individual in a particular way with the action of crawling from one cesspool to another, and sometimes this comes down to the liberation of the penis and nothing more.” This vision of homosexuality as the vice of hedonistic and asocial individuals, thereby becoming objective accomplices of despotic regimes, denotes a shift during the Soviet era to a conception of homosexuality linked to
Fascism
. Dramatist Anton Chekhov (who was also a physician) could not get beyond his scorn of lesbians, who were associated with prostitution. As for Vasily Rozanov (author of 1913’s
People of Moonlight,
the first Russian book on homosexuality from a non-medical point of view), he opposed the ascetic and repressive Christianity of the church by advocating the cosmic sexuality of the Bible (for which he was the self-proclaimed “pornographic” minstrel), but to him, the homosexual appeared uniquely as an enemy of sex
per se
(a view that was perhaps based on the idea of it being the activity of the repressed).Whether lecherous or chaste, the homosexual was a deviant being, a corruptor, and an enemy of life and of society; he was also the object of contradictory fantasies and constituted a useful foil.

After the Russian Revolution in 1917, the Communist Party officially abolished all the old Tsarist laws, including the prohibition on homosexuality. Its
decriminalization
, however, was ambiguous. It stemmed from a psychopathological view that excused victims for their illness or
abnormality
, and ridiculed obscurant religious moralism. Inasmuch as it appeared to be second nature, the homosexuality of consenting adults seemed to bother no one, and its repression appeared cruel. But it was also believed that
treatment
would be eventually possible; for this, however, the cure must come from choice. In the 1930s, the Soviet Union praised itself for its progressive legislation in an article in the
Great Soviet Encyclopedia
.