Authorities claimed that homosexuality was the result of bourgeois Western and German fascist influence, and the official Soviet newspaper Pravda published an article which ended with the slogan: “Destroy homosexuality and fascism will disappear!”
From the beginning of 1934, gay men began to be arrested in large numbers in major Russian cities and sent to the gulags. One prisoner, Valery Klimov, wrote about the treatment gay detainees received:
“there were about 10 occasions when gays were murdered before my eyes. One was beaten to death in a prison in Sverdlovsk. There were 100 men in our cell; three or four raped him every day and then chucked him under the bunks. It was bestial, a nightmare. Once 10 of them raped him and then jumped on his head. I nearly went mad there; my hair turned grey. That’s how people lose their sanity; many never recover even after they leave.”
While lesbianism was never prohibited, and some masculine lesbians were valued in the military, many lesbians did still suffer persecution such as termination of studies or jobs, bullying, threats to remove custody of their children or being committed to psychiatric facilities.
The world fucking sucked back then. The UK chemically castrated Alan Turing later than this, resulting in his suicide. This practice continued into the 1960s.
Fuck me in the western world Gay Marriage didn’t get widely legalized until around 10-20 years ago. It wasn’t long before that that being gay was itself a crime. Homosexuality was decriminalized in Ireland for example in 1993. They were still convicting people of Homosexuality up until the end too with 32 convictions in 1990-1993. (Source)
the article gave me the impression that Valery Kimov was sent to the gulags around 1934.
But this was in 1983!
https://postsoviet90s.com/artifacts/k-chitateliu?thematic_tags[]=gay+prisoners
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.
There’s nothing gay about that, the wiki even shows it was used in Imperial Russia and is an Orthodox Christian thing.
The USSR killed and imprisoned gays, they were not super gay at all. It didn’t take decades of reactionary influencing to do, homophobia was always the norm.
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.
1917–1927: Don’t ask, don’t tell.
1927–1953: Go to hell.
1953–1964: Nothing would fundamentally change.
1964–1982: Homosexuality is a disease.
1982–1991: Don’t ask, don’t tell.
Wow, fucking wild variations!
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” (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.
1917–1927: Don’t ask, don’t tell.
According to Wayne R. Dynes, some sections of the Bolsheviks of the 1920s actively considered homosexuality a “[social] illness to be cured” or an example of “bourgeois degeneracy” while other Bolsheviks believed it should be legally/socially tolerated and respected in the new socialist society.
Yeah great environment to come out in and go public when the party is debating ‘curing’ you. Legally acceptable, but not worth the risk of making it public considering where it was all heading - hence don’t tell. I was not literally claiming it was the US’ DADT policy.
1927–1953: Go to hell.
Under Joseph Stalin, the Soviet government recriminalised sex between men through a decree that was signed in 1933.[14] The decree was part of a broader campaign against “deviant” behavior and “Western degeneracy”. On 7 March 1934, Article 121 was added to the criminal code of the Soviet Union. It expressly prohibited male homosexuality, punishing “muzhelozhstvo” with the sentencing of up to five years of hard labour in prison. There were no criminal statutes regarding sex between women. During the Soviet era, Western observers believed that between 800 and 1,000 men were imprisoned each year under Article 121
1953–1964: Nothing would fundamentally change.
After Stalin died in 1953, he was replaced by Nikita Khrushchev, who proceeded to liberalise Stalin-era laws regarding marriage, divorce, and abortion, but the anti-gay criminal law remained. The Khrushchev government believed that absent of a criminal law against homosexuality, the sex between men that occurred in the prison environment would spread into the general population as they released many Stalin-era prisoners. Whereas the Stalin government conflated homosexuality with pedophilia, the Khrushchev government conflated homosexuality with the situational, sometimes forced, sex acts between male prisoners.
1964–1982: Homosexuality is a disease.
Those legal scholars, who believed that consensual homosexuality should not be a crime, argued that it was a disease, which had to be dealt with by medical knowledge. They also contended that homosexuality was a congenital condition and therefore gay people were not guilty of being different from others. Finally, these scholars argued that investigating sodomy cases, where both partners had consensual sex, was not only pointless, but technically difficult. Other legal scholars, mainly those who worked for the Interior Ministry educational institutions, opposed the idea of decriminalising consensual homosexuality. They criticised their pro-decriminalisation colleagues and argued that such propositions were ill-timed and dangerous, since homosexuality could easily spread if not controlled by the law. Likewise, they believed that homosexuality was inconsistent with the Communist Morality
1982–1991: Don’t ask, don’t tell.
In 1983, a group of 30 Russian gay men met and attempted to organise a gay rights organisation under the name «Гей-лаборатория» («Голубая лаборатория») “Gay lab” / (“Blue lab”). At this point, homosexual relations were still punishable by a term of up to five years in prison. The group was put under pressure by the KGB and finally broke up in 1986.[43] Public discussion about re-legalizing private, consensual adult homosexual relations was not permitted until later in the glasnost period.
A poll conducted in 1989 reported that homosexuals were the most hated group in Russian society and that 30 percent of those polled felt that homosexuals should be “liquidated”.[18] In a 1991 public opinion poll conducted in Chelyabinsk, 30 percent of the respondents aged 16 to 30 years old felt that homosexuals should be “isolated from society”, 5 percent felt they should be “liquidated”, 60 percent had a “negative” attitude toward gay people and 5 percent labeled their sexual orientation “unfortunate”.[44] From 1989 to 1990, the Moscow gay rights organisation «Ассоциация сексуальных меньшинств» (“Association of Sexual Minorities”), led by Evgenia Debryanskaya, was permitted to exist, with Roman Kalinin given permission to publish a gay newspaper, Tema.
But eVeRyThInG i WrOtE wAs PrAcTiCaLlY wRoNg.
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?
Imagine hating gays so much you want to fuck them.
There are plenty of hateful, hypocritical groups out there. Look no further than the Rationalists or the Zizian offshoot, that believe that it’s okay to kill people if they get in your way of “saving humanity.”
This is the US Republican party’s new slogan.
