The Dictionary of Homophobia (128 page)
However, in the name of an egalitarian morality and a totalitarian state, Stalinist virtue demanded a standardization of sexuality reduced to the reproductive function. The
a priori
suspect, pleasure, was only legitimized by the accomplishment of the social task. The Soviet citizen was enjoined to procreate and have children corresponding to state policy (which was entirely natalist after the Revolution) and “Soviet values”: the
family
once again found its function as the primary “unit” of socialization. In this context, the reproductive role of sex became dogma, scientifically justified by the biological nature of the species, whereas the fundamentally social character of the “producers” (both economic and sexual)—which proved the entirety of Marx’s theory—implied the responsibility of the Soviet public to the state (representative of the perfect society) in sexual matters. Homosexuality was, by contrast, a waste of energy and production. Moreover, growing anti-Nazi sentiment proved to be harmful to homosexuals as well, who were linked with the SS over the infamous Night of the Long Knives; in June 1934, Gorky published an article in
Pravda
entitled “Eradicate Homosexuality and Fascism Will Disappear.” In 1933, Stalin introduced a new criminal code that made homosexuality a crime again, punishable by five years of hard labor (Article 154, then 121).
Repression of homosexuals in the Soviet Union began in earnest in 1933–34; Soviet justice was severe. In 1936, state prosecutor Nikolai Krylenko turned homosexuality into an anti-bourgeois and anti-Fascist issue. Homosexuals were accused of collusion with Fascism; they were the “dregs of society,” “degraded rabble” from the former regime. Homosexuality was a sign of the moral decadence and irrational nihilism of a bourgeoisie in crisis, and it proved fatal during the purges. While the writer Kuzmin died of natural causes, his lover, Yuri Yurkun, was shot in 1938. An article on homosexuality in the 1952 edition of the
Great Soviet Encyclopedia
turned it into a Western phenomenon caused by alcoholism, sexual permissiveness, and capitalist social conditions. The existence of homosexuality in the Soviet Union was thus an insult and an impossibility; repression of the “enemies of the people” was ramped up by way of the
gulags
. But the gulag helped to create a homosexuality of substitution through violence, where the presumed “passives,” and those forced into passivity, became the “degraded” and scorned sexual objects, or the favorites of their protectors. Further, a section of the KGB was devoted to rounding up and arresting homosexuals, furnishing on average 1,000 new prisoners every year, that is to say between 50,000 and 60,000 until the fall of the regime. Homosexuality that resisted socialist conditions fell under the domain of
psychiatry
and “sexual perversions” (along with sadism and
pedophilia
); it was also noted that it was evident in certain psychopaths.
But a decree by President Boris Yeltsin abolished criminalization in 1993, one of many signs of democratization sent to the West. However, post-Soviet stigmatization of homosexuals has taken the form of irony; male homosexuals are considered “light blues”
(goluboy),
while lesbians are designated as “pink girlies”). These condescending terms are strange avatars of the hetero-sexist system of gender marking from birth by use of colored ribbons on cribs and in children’s parks, pale colors indicate infancy, so these terms for homosexuals suggest a blockage in male or female sexual development at an early stage: a form of vulgar Freudianism, which was popular in the Soviet Union. There is also the use of scornful and aggressive terms, such as
pedik
and
pidor
, abbreviations for pederast. Accusations of homosexuality are considered the ultimate insult among men. The questioning of one’s virility—
Idi na khou
(“Go fuck yourself”)—is not specifically aimed at
goluboys
and can be used in lieu of the popular
ieb tvoyou mat
(“Go fuck your mother”), which is just as humiliating. Meanwhile in politics, the eastern refinement of the frail Anastas Mikoyan, an Armenian who was a longtime Soviet statesman serving both Stalin and Khrushchev, was rumored to be a “
favorite
” of Stalin’s team: how else could one explain his having survived the purges and his longevity in the higher circles of power? This rumor (or was it only a joke?) revealed a vulgar psychology which projected its logic onto those in power (who were both feared and reviled) and finding in this sexual reductionism a means to deprecate the tyrant (i.e. Stalin).
Many Russians, ambivalent toward “democracy” and skeptical of its success, associated the Soviet Union’s breakup and the end of the social programs engendered by General Secretary of the Communist Party Leonid Brezhnev with the weakness of the new “feminine” regime; the decriminalization of homosexuality by Yeltsin was considered one more example. Viewed as the beneficiaries of Western liberalism, homosexuals are called “sexual democrats” by their critics, which reveals a popular Russian metaphor for the abuse of power (whereby the innocent population is “sodomized” by the freedom of the powerful) as well as a popular analogy (homosexuals are to sexuality what the corrupt are to democracy). To opponents, decriminalization was like an admission of complicity, and made out homosexuals to be the privileged ones in the new era of corruption. Gorky was thus not far off the mark: for Nationalists and those nostalgic for the Empire, the Orthodoxy, or the Stalinist egalitarian order, these perverted sensualists symbolized the moral perversion that is foreign to the Russian people, the result of the multifaceted penetration of the enemy into Holy Russia. The Orthodox Church ferociously rejected this opening up of the country, and demanded that the state protect minors and forbid perverts from having access to teaching or other positions of authority. In his 2002 book on the history of Russian boxing, Orthodox historian and patriot Andrei V. Grotovsky argues for the revival of nationalist, virile virtues and the teaching of boxing as a school of honor and socialization for young men. According to him, “the absence of tradition in the domain of sexual education produces the development of
inversion
(rejection of the sexual norm), which is linked to the appearance of sadism.” Consequently, by applying Freud’s theory and Orthodox spirituality, he sees
sports
as a remedy for moral decadence. In Russia (as well as Ukraine and Belarus), psychiatric interests have replaced criminalization, inviting the “abnormal” to undergo treatment, particularly in the case of victims of police harassment, accused of “hooliganism” for militant activities or meetings. This is a strange continuance of the association between political, moral, and sexual dissidence: with official state homophobia gone, homosexuals are persecuted by other means. The current in-between status of gays and lesbians is exemplified by the fact that 2008 will mark the third Pride parade in Moscow, provided it is not shut down by the police, which occurred with the first two.
—Nicolas Plagne
Engelstein, Laura.
The Keys to Happiness: Sex and the Search for Modernity in Fin-de-siècle Russia
. Ithaca, NY: Cornell Univ. Press, 1992.
Frémont, Benoît. “Out of the Blue: une histoire des homosexuels en Russie,”
Regard sur l’Est,
nos. 26–27 (2001).
Karlinsky, Simon. “Russia’s Gay Literature and Culture: The Impact of the October Revolution.” In
Hidden From History: Reclaiming the Gay and Lesbian Past
. New York: Penguin, 1990.
Kon, Igor.
The Sexual Revolution in Russia from the Age of the Czars to Today
. New York: Free Press, 1995.
Kreise, Bernard. “Avant-propos.” In
Les Derniers Instants de Pouchkine
. Toulouse, France: Bibliothèques Ombres, 2000.
Kuzmin, Mikhail.
Les Ailes
. Toulouse, France: Bibliothèques Ombres, 2000.
Levin, Eve.
Sex and Society in the World of the Orthodox Slavs 900-1700
. Ithaca, NY: Cornell Univ. Press, 1989.
Morozov, G., and V. Romassenko.
Neurologie et psychiatrie
. Moscow: Editions de la Paix (n.d.; some time after 1950).
Stern, Mikhaïl.
La Vie sexuelle en URSS
. Paris: Albin Michel, 1979.
Tuller, David.
Cracks in the Iron Closet: Travels in Gay and Lesbian Russia
. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1996.
Vighnevski, Anatoli.
La Faucille et le rouble, la modernisation conservatrice en URSS
. Paris: Gallimard, 2000.
—Balkans, the; Bible, the; Communism; Europe, Eastern & Central; Gulag; Heresy; Justinian I; Orthodoxy (Christian); Sodom and Gomorrah; Theology.
SAPPHO
Sappho is the emblematic figure of female homosexuality; the term “Sapphics” is derived from her name, and the word “lesbian” from the island of Lesbos, where she lived. However, the meaning of these words was only established in nineteenth-century Europe; during Antiquity, lesbianism was described using very different terms which had nothing to do with Sappho. Over the centuries, based on Sappho’s fragments that have reached us, a myth has been created around the poetess that is both shifting and paradoxical, making no distinction between the real “I” and the poetic “I”; further, the numerous “Fictions of Sappho” (literary responses to the poetess, as documented by scholar Joan Dejean in the book of the same name) have tended to obscure the original works’ historical foundation. Sappho has become the temporally independent figure of lesbianism around which the different discourses on
lesbophobia
have crystallized.
Sappho lived on the Greek island of Lesbos at the end of the seventh century and beginning of the sixth century BCE. Among her poems (composed to be sung), the most famous describes a woman’s physical demonstrations of love and desire for another woman (Fragment 31). By using a first-person voice, Sappho creates an atmosphere where natural landscape, music, aromas, and emotions are mixed. In her time, she incurred neither condemnation nor rejection for the homoeroticism expressed in her poetry. In Greece, she was praised for her talent and, if the comedy of the fifth and sixth centuries BCE depicted her as the lover of several men, it is most likely because she was a famous woman, and because in Athens, the female inhabitants of Lesbos had a bad reputation (the Greek verb
lesbiazein
generally means “to perform fellatio”); it was only at the end of the first century BCE in Rome that the question about Sappho’s sexual orientation was first formulated (again, the distinction between the real “I” and the poetic “I” was never made). Thus, a double discourse developed; the first one linked female homosexuality to sexual
debauchery
(Sappho becomes a woman with an unbalanced morality, a
tribade
), and the second spread the rumor of Sappho’s suicide, who was said to have jumped from a rock on the island of Leucas (now Levkas) because of her unrequited love for the young boatman Phaon (Ovid,
Heroides,
XV).
Based on this discourse, Sappho, rediscovered in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries CE, is constantly reinvented. The first fictions of Sappho were elaborated upon by philologists. In 1555, French poet Louise Labé (who is herself a historically disputed figure; according to one book, her poetry was the creation of a group of male poets) originated the concept of a heterosexual Sappho, which soon became predominant in France. Anne Le Fèvre, who edited a French translation of Sappho in 1660, clearly stated that Sappho liked women, without condemning or defending her; other scholars of the seventeenth century remained either undecided or in favor of Labé’s concept. By the eighteenth century, Sappho’s heterosexuality was undisputed, but during the course of the nineteenth century, German Hellenists started propagating the idea of a chaste Sappho; the first to do so was Friederich Gottlieb Welcker, in his pioneering philological study of Sappho in 1816, which explained that female homosexuality and poetic talent were not compatible. He was followed by Frenchmen like Paul-Pierre Rable in 1855, who translated only part of Fragment 31, and André Lebey in 1895, who chose to replace the female beloved with a masculine pronoun in “Ode to Aphrodite.” Today, Edith Mora sees homophobic reactions in these interpretations of Sappho’s work; K.J. Dover, while invoking the ambiguity of the texts themselves, demonstrates the weight of translators’ prejudices who suppress “the only indication that the designated person is a woman”; Jack Winkler conjures up translations that retain the misogyny and homophobic anguish of philologists, and Holt N. Parker demonstrates that the “Sappho Schoolmistress” persona is a construction in service to a heterosexual masculine norm. Further, the fact that Welcker imagines a virtuous Sappho while justifying masculine homosexuality in Greek literature suggests that his response is a case of lesbophobia and a fear generated by the expression of female desire.
Between 1895 and 1910 in France, several authors proclaimed Sappho’s homosexuality. The British-born lesbian poet Renée Vivien proposed a translation of Sappho’s poems in 1903, enriched by new fragments found in Egypt. As Edith Mora has commented, Vivien made Sappho “more of a lesbian in the public opinion than she was in her own verses” by adding verses based on her own ideas. This new Sappho became the “mother lesbian, a guardian spirit, the embodiment of homosexual temptation,” according to Sappho scholar Nicole Albert. In the 1875 edition of the Larousse dictionary, a “Sappho,” by antonomasia, was a “woman whose genius or morality reminds us of the famous woman thus named.” A shift from the chaste Sappho to the courtesan, then the sensual lesbian of the new fictions of Sappho, took place in French literature at the end of the nineteenth century. She was depicted as a courtesan by Emile Deschanel in 1847, and in 1884 Alphonse Daudet’s
Sappho
is a prostitute with the experience of the entire “sexual spectrum … in all of Sappho’s terrible glory.” Baudelaire depicted her as the archetype of the “damned woman,” while Verlaine made her into a wild persona who roams like a “female wolf” and “pulls her hair out by the handful.”
The works of the first psychiatrists and sexologists at the end of the nineteenth century, such as Richard von Krafft-Ebing and Havelock Ellis, who defined homosexuality as sexual
inversion
, were affected by the lesbophobic content of the Sapphic novels. Sappho becomes the incarnate of the threat of lesbian
contagion
in Gabriel Fauré’s
La Dernière journée de Sappho
(The last day of Sappho) (1900), in which she advocates a sexual revolution, teaching women how “to procure every voluptuous pleasure for themselves,” and in
Les Désexués
(1924) by Charles Etienne and Odette Dulac, where the heroine becomes a lesbian after having kissed her music-hall partner who was playing the role of Sappho. The lesbian also becomes a clinical case: “a pathetic Sappho,” “psychotic” in
Amants féminins
(Feminine lovers) by Adrienne St-Agen (1902). Even the name of the poet became an insult; in 1908, Jorau stigmatized Vivien as a “modern priestess of lesbian love,” and “a Sappho,” while “Billy,” originator of the Sapho 1900 [spelling correct] literary circle in 1951, qualified Vivien as a false Sappho. Thus, Sappho, homosexual once again, unleashed lesbophobic passions well into the twentieth century.