The past five years have wnsed an explosn of tert the histori of lbian, gay, bisexual, transgenr, and queer people the Soviet Unn and s succsor stat. This special issue extends our unrstandg of the history of queer experience the late Soviet Unn and s succsor stat. Its eight articl balance attentn between the Rsian “re” and republics on the “periphery” of the USSR: Geia, Kyrgyzstan, and Latvia. One article draws attentn to Italy, and t...
Contents:
THE ERA WHEN GAY SPI WERE FEARED
MI5 has been named the UK's most LGBT-iendly employer - but isn't long sce beg gay was nsired synonymo wh treachery. * gay kgb *
Image source, Getty ImagMI5 has been named the UK's most gay-iendly employer - but isn't long sce same-sex relatnships were nsired a threat to natnal secury. Below this, for MI5's benef, was a list of supposed signifiers of male homosexualy ("a gay ltle wiggle", "his tie has the latt knot", "an unnaturally strong affectn for his mother") pretext for this unsoliced advice - which now seems clearly offensive - was the se of John Vassall, a gay civil servant who spied for the Soviets unr threat of blackmail. "Fast forward 53 years and the service tops Stonewall's 2016 list of the 400 bt plac to work for lbian, gay, bisexual and transgenr (LGBT) people.
Acrdg to the Tim, more than 80 of s employe belong to an LGBT staff source, Eveng StandardImage ptn, Brish civil servant and Soviet spy John Vassall shortly after his release om prison 1972And yet a ban on gay men and women servg MI5, MI6 or GCHQ was force as recently as 1991.
As well as Vassall, who was ught a honeytrap by the KGB, at least two of the Cambridge Five spy rg, Guy Burgs and Anthony Blunt, were gay, while a third, Donald MacLean, was bisexual. There was also Daily Telegraph Mosw rrponnt Jeremy Wolfenn - son of John Wolfenn, who chaired the missn that remend the legalisatn of male homosexual acts - who was photographed by the KGB havg sex wh a man, and whom MI6 subsequently attempted to e as a double agent. He turned to heavy drkg and died 1965 age ptn, Alan Bat played spy Guy Burgs Alan Bent's An Englishman AbroadIn the Uned Stat, Senator Joseph McCarthy's anti-munist mpaign targeted sr of gay officials, explicly lkg homosexualy wh subversn and Soviet sympathi, a procs known as the "lavenr sre".
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 * gay kgb *
FBI chief J Edgar Hoover - himself wily believed to have been gay - ed the agency to target dozens of gay ernment was a perd which LGBT people risked losg their reers and their eedom if their sexualy was revealed.
"This associatn between homosexualy and secrecy, furtivens and potential treachery ensured gay characters were a recurrg trope Cold War-era spy fictn. John Le Carre's The Spy Who Came In From The Cold and Tker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy clu gay subtexts - ma even more explic the 2011 movie adaptatn of the latter.
THE DARK HISTORY OF ANTI-GAY INNUENDO
Image source, Getty ImagSome have ma the se that the Brish telligence servic appear to have been relatively acceptg of homosexualy, if only pared wh other parts of society that monly persecuted LGBT people. Acrdg to Christopher Andrew's thorised history of MI5, gay men and women were 1951 judged by the service when vettg public servants to be "maladjted to the social environment", potentially "of unstable character" and vulnerable to blackmail.