> And, no, Pugliese, gays were not locked up in the Brezhnev era.
http://www.ciberkiosk.pt/livros/pye.html The poster is still a little startling: two men, well into the jowly and wrinkly end of middle-age, are kissing each other on the lips. You can't quite see whether there is tongue action, but certainly there are closed eyes and displaced spectacles and inclined heads. The poster was enormous and it was everywhere.
The two men, before you get any ideas, were Leonid Brezhnev and Erich Honecker of East Germany, a pairing whose erotic possibilities are the stuff of nightmare. The poster was a statement about the bonding of two states who were generally dedicated to the snuffing out of queers, queerdom and men who kiss only for pleasure and not for official, symbolic and diplomatic reasons (though both their eyes are still tight shut, just like lovers.)
Now we tend to think of kissing as erotic, as intimate; the stereotype of a working prostitute is someone who'll use any other organ any way you like, but won't kiss. We think this is self- evident. But a puritan Soviet state put up posters of what we can't help reading as a homo-erotic clinch, between two intimates; and nobody on the streets batted an eye.
In other words, "gay" is a matter of how you read things. -- Michael Pugliese