What Happened When a Gay Communist Wrote to Stal

1917 RSIAN REVOLUTN: THE GAY MUNY'S BRIEF WDOW OF EEDOM

* soviet union gay *

However, also rri the implied nnotatn that the practice of ‘homosexualy’, is fact the practice of ‘child abe’, wh the former beg clearly nflated wh the latter, spe the fact that Article 121 appears to fe ‘perasty’ as the performance of a sexual act between one man and another.

Article 121, spe s cur readg, appears to have been signed to protect Soviet society om the menace of child abe and paedophilia, although is rerd that Soviet amia was terted the practice of homosexualy om a medil perspective, and attemptg to ascerta s root e (wh a number of early Soviet rearchers followg the Czarist assumptn of aberratn).

However, the important area of homosexualy, s progrsive nature was not fully veloped at the time, not bee of any ‘imaged’ anti-gay agendas, but bee Socialist dialectil velopment simply tak time to unfold a scientific and logil manner.

GAY THE USSR

The homoerotic Che-Soviet propaganda posters look more like a gay uple’s vatn pics, or maybe an ad for terracial gay marriage. * soviet union gay *

It is an tertg pot to observe that both the USSR (and the post-Soviet-Rsian Feratn), reta a hostile and negative attu toward both the theory and practice of homosexualy – if homosexualy is fed as a sexual relatnship between two nsentg adults of the same genr; i.

The Soviet law text entled ‘Crimal Co of the RSFSR’, Chapter Four – ‘Crim Agast the Life, Health, Freedom, and Digny of the Person’, ntas Article 121 (1934), which stat full the followg, which forbids male homosexual relatnships:.

GAY LIFE STAL’S GULAG

The sprawlg system of Soviet mps ntaed many untold stori. I spoke to one of the few historians rearchg the experienc of gay men and lbians the Gulag to fd out more. RU * soviet union gay *

However, also rri the implied nnotatn that the practice of ‘homosexualy’, is fact the practice of ‘child abe’, wh the former beg clearly nflated wh the latter, spe the fact that the actual anti-homosexual legislatn qutn, f ‘perasty’ as the performance of a sexual act between one man and another. Where homosexualy was mentned by the bourgeois legal s, was ually viewed as an exprsn of sexual viancy, and is tertg to note that the legal system of the Soviet Unn took this le, when virtually all other areas, the USSR thoroughly parted away om tablished bourgeois thkg. In fact the emancipatn of women om patriarchal ntrol was a major feature of Soviet Law, and yet this did not apparently extend to the nsiratn of the emancipatn of homosexual women om the equally ‘patriarchal’ bias of male legal domatn.

A DOUBLE DEFEAT: CATASTROPHE FOR GAY EMANCIPATN GERMANY AND THE USSR

For almost a full century now, the revolutnary prospect of socialism has fuelled openg forays first of the homosexual emancipatn and later of the gay liberatn movements, both Europe and North Ameri. It spired Edward Carpenter and Magn Hirschfeld at the turn of the century; André … * soviet union gay *

Anti-homosexual views are a product of historil relig views that have been superimposed onto secular bourgeois society – simply through force of hab om one generatn to the next – that has nothg to do wh science, but which has been morally assumed to be ‘scientific’ nature.

He did not thk guts would e if had jt been a he gambled - rightly - that a proper weddg wh all the Rsian tradns, bread and salt, a blsg om the proud parents, and a ncert to follow, would be the time Rsia's gay muny was enjoyg a brief wdow of the October Revolutn 1917, the Bolsheviks scrapped and rewrote the untry's laws. They produced two Crimal Cos - 1922 and 1926 - and an article prohibg gay sex was left off source, Central State Library of St PetersburgImage ptn, Rsian sailors wh young men drsed women's cloth, 1916But the weddg Petrograd (now St Petersburg) was not all seemed.

The se was eventually closed and the "unter-revolutnari" got away wh nothg more than a to regnise 'one's own'Image source, Olga KhoroshilovaImage ptn, Apasha and Apashka, fashn ins of the NEP era, Lengrad, mid-1920sGay men had been part of a distct unrground muny Rsia long before the revolutn and they regnised each other by the "secret language" of St Petersburg, some wore red ti, or red shawls, onto which they would sew the back pockets of powred their fac and wore a lot of the revolutn, the heavily ma-up "silent film star look" beme more mastream and no longer jt a fashn for young gay more about the Rsian RevolutnThe upheaval of the revolutn and civil war brought hard tim to Rsia and gay men were not able to match the flamboyant cloth and luxury accsori favoured by some of their unterparts across but still persecutedThe Bolsheviks were directly fluenced by Magn Hirschfeld, a German scientist who found the Instute of Sexology Berl. They poured out their souls, askg him to help them pe wh prsn and even to "cure their illns" letters and other documents show that members of the gay muny were credibly brave - some wore women's drs and rsets, wore their hair long and often looked like real women. It nsisted of soldiers, sailors, clerks - people who had not been part of the fashnable St Petersburg salons before the revolutn and who were not wele guts of the "aristocrats" after the 1920s, German Travti theatre - which men drs as women and vice versa - beme popular among Soviet gay men.