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.
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 *
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". 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. 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.
THE DARK HISTORY OF ANTI-GAY INNUENDO
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. In 1965 MI5 risted a view om the Treasury that homosexualy should be an absolute bar to any kd of public office that required posive ptn, Jim Broadbent and Ben Whishaw BBC drama London SpyThe legalisatn of male homosexualy 1967 meant the fear of blackmail uld no longer hold.
This terview troduc the work of acclaimed historian Dan Healey, who sheds light on how gay men survived the Soviet Gulag, their life afterwards and different attus the USSR to gay men and Healey, Profsor of Morn Rsian History at Oxford Universy, has explored the history of homosexualy tsarist and Soviet Rsia, the nature of masculy unr socialism, the problems of sexual disorrs and sexual vlence the USSR and the history of medice Stal’s Gulag. Healey is the thor of the only published monograph on the history of homosexualy Rsia: Homosexual Dire Revolutnary Rsia: The Regulatn of Sexual and Genr Gkov spoke to Dan Healey after the lnch of his latt book: Rsian Homophobia om Stal to do we know about gay/queer people Gulag?
We know om FSB archiv and publicly accsible urt papers that homosexual mat of the Gulag were generally men aged between 25 and 50, most of them urban dwellers. That giv you a kd of snapshot of the posn of the group of people imprisoned for their homosexualy unr Article 154-a of the RSFSR Penal relatns between men were punishable by imprisonment of between three and five years, and sexual relatns between men wh the e of vlence or the subjugatn of one party to the other were punishable by imprisonment of between five and eight subjects of your book were not only people arrted unr Article 154-a.