***** Homosexual Desire in Revolutionary Russia: The Regulation of Sexual and Gender Dissent. .(Book Review)
Journal of Social History, Summer, 2003, by Jeffrey Merrick
Homosexual Desire in Revolutionary Russia: The Regulation of Sexual and Gender Dissent. By Dan Healey (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001. xvi plus 392 pp. $40).
. . . The experience and regulation of same-sex relations evolved differently in pre-Revolutionary Russia than in western Europe. Operating within traditional structures (defined by class and age) and institutions (bathhouses and monasteries), men interested in and involved with other men were not routinely troubled on that account. The church did not stigmatize sodomy with distinctive horror and hostility. The state did not generalize its prohibition from the military forces (1716) to the civilian population until 1835, and even then the police did not enforce it systematically. An urban homosexual subculture emerged in Saint Petersburg and Moscow in the wake of emancipation and industrialization, two hundred years later than in London, Paris, and Amsterdam. Here, as there, men met partners by exchanging signals in public places and had sex for pleasure or profit. Some adopted effeminate mannerisms, and some developed a sense of sexual identity. But in Russia, unlike western Europe, medical discourse about the physical and mental causes and consequences of homosexuality had relatively little influence in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Liberals cited medical arguments in advocating legal reforms before 1917, and Bolsheviks acknowledged medical authority in drafting the criminal code of 1922, which decriminalized same-sex relations between consenting adults. Before and after 1922, however, jurists and doctors expressed a multiplicity of views about sexual difference/deviance in a Sovietized country composed of productive men and women. As economic problems and political conflicts continued into the 1930s, pressure for social and sexual conformity increased. After Hitler seized power in Germany, influential figures within the Stalinist regime associated homosexuality with fascism and denounced "pederasts" as agents of corruption and subversion. After recriminalizing same-sex relations in 1934, the government prosecuted both workers and intellectuals to enforce compulsory heterosexuality and appropriated medical language to provide scientific justification for the deportation of homosexuals to Siberia.
Healey traces the evolution of Soviet theory and practice with much more subtlety than any summary can suggest. In Chapter Six, for example, he examines the ways in which the authorities prosecuted some categories of men, ostensibly for sexual offenses but actually for political reasons, in the 1920s. While "pederasts" cruised boulevards and lavatories in Saint Petersburg and Moscow, Bolsheviks attacked "predatory" priests and monks in order to undermine "superstitious" loyalty to the church and "perverse" male prostitutes in order to eradicate "primitive" provincialism in Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan. Throughout the book, Healey repeatedly and insightfully discusses similarities and differences between assumptions about and attitudes toward male and female homosexuals. The women were less likely than the men to show up in public or end up in court, since tsarist and communist legislation did not mention lesbians. They gained latitude after 1917 because the Revolution allowed them to work, dress, and act in unconventional ways and thereby meet others who shared their sexual interests. As suggested by the cases of the "transvestites" discussed in Chapter Six, the authorities were not only confused about various types of "intermediates" but were also less concerned about "masculine" women than they were about "feminine" men. They did not criminalize sexual relations between women, but they did, of course, require women to fulfill their "natural" role as mothers. The failure to conceptualize lesbianism in modern terms, before, during, and after the Revolution, not only exempted lesbians from prosecution but also subjected them to traditional expectations. . . .
<http://www.findarticles.com/cf_dls/m2005/4_36/104635113/print.jhtml> *****
Dan Healey, _Homosexual Desire in Revolutionary Russia: The Regulation of Sexual and Gender Dissent_, 2001: <http://www.press.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/hfs.cgi/00/14265.ctl>
Dan Healey: <http://www.swan.ac.uk/history/staff/healey/Longer%20CV.htm>. -- Yoshie
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