‘People were dancing on the edge of a volcano’

Historian Dan Healey explains his research on ‘homosexual desire in revolutionary Russia’ and ‘sexual dissidents’ of the Soviet era

The Garage publishing house in Moscow has released a new Russian-language translation of historian Dan Healey’s 2001 book, “Homosexual Desire in Revolutionary Russia: The Regulation of Sexual and Gender Dissent,” about the homosexual subcultures of St. Petersburg and Moscow and the ambiguous attitude of the late Tsarist regime and revolutionary rulers toward gay men and lesbians. The only previous translation was published in 2008, and Healey says this version is missing the voice he intended (though the troubled edition didn’t stop the book from becoming Russia’s most detailed biographical study of local queer culture from the era). Meduza spoke to Healey about how he’s studied the history of queer people in a country where it’s still safest not to mention them at all.

We’re in the middle of a disastrous war, and there’s a vast campaign going on targeting all kinds of dissidents [in Russia]. Is that weird timing for a book about Russian queers?

The thing is — it didn’t happen overnight. The project has been in development for probably 18 months. “Garage” contacted me during the pandemic and proposed the idea of publishing my first book, “Homosexual Desire in Revolutionary Russia,” and then possibly also publishing my second book, “Russian Homophobia from Stalin to Sochi.” We discussed it for a while, and I had an idea about how the translation should change.

The book was first published in 2001 in English, but the translation was produced in 2006 and was eventually published in 2008 by Ladomir Press in Moscow. (That’s a story in itself.) The impetus for this project was to produce a cleaner translation and a cleaner rendition of the book. I’m not saying there was anything wrong [with the Ladomir edition]; it was just a different project that kind of ran away for me. The discussion with “Garage” was about a fresher, cleaner translation that was more my voice.

I couldn’t help but notice that the new translation includes feminitives.

I think this book has always been a bit of a pathbreaker. The use of feminitives was proposed to me. And I was aware, of course, that this discussion was going on in the Russophone world, which is of course much wider than Putin’s “Russky Mir.” “Well,” I thought, “I have to put my weight behind that particular initiative.”

Ira Roldugina, who in a sense is your academic goddaughter, is a big fan of the first [Ladomir] edition. She told me privately that the second edition won’t include the original bibliography. Can you talk a little bit about this and the sources you used for the book?

I began my doctorate in Toronto in 1992. At that time, the Soviet Archives were opening up, and access was relatively free. It wasn’t perfect — a lot of things had yet to be declassified, and a lot of archivers strove to maintain some kind of order in their collections, despite the “free for all” atmosphere. There wasn’t a new law in archival administration until the late 1990s, so it was a puzzling time for them politically.

I knew before I arrived in 1995 to start my field work that I would not find in Soviet card catalogs or in the opisi [list of files] any direct mentions of LGBT people and/or incidents. Because simply the Soviet method of classification of knowledge had no place for homosexuality — you wouldn’t go to the card catalogue at the Lenin Library and look up “Gay and Lesbian history.” That topic would just simply not exist. It was all about polovye izvrashcheniya [sexual deviations] and polovye prestupleniya [sexual offenses].

So, I was looking at both forensic medicine and forensic psychology and psychiatry as the main materials. I already had a pretty good idea from my preliminary work in Toronto and in London that these would be the places where I would find materials that had been ignored up until then.

Because up until 1990–1991, you had scholars like Simon Karlinsky, who talked about some pre-revolutionary and some post-revolutionary gay artists and wrote about Russia’s gay history in a literary-cultural sort of tongue. I wanted to move the conversation more to the ordinary queer in the street. So, I went looking for crime cases, psychiatric case histories.

I read works in the library of the Serbsky Institute of Forensic and Social Psychiatry in Moscow in 1995. I found some interesting materials there, but most of them, in fact, were published materials from the 1920s that I could have seen at the Lenin Library down the street. I also looked in the Lenin Library: I told them I was interested in forensic psychiatry and sexual crime, and they gave me the relevant drawers. So, I was able to call up publications from the 1920s and earlier. And incidentally at the Publichka [the State Public Historical Library of Russia], I did something similar and found some remarkable pre-revolutionary material there, both Imperial Russian and Western material, surprisingly.

It was a case of looking for “sexual offenders.” That led me to crime cases that were sometimes very rich, that described the world of gay men in the 1930, 1940s, and 1950s. Back then in the 1990s, the limit of the cases I could access was about 1960; it was hard to find any criminal cases after that point in Moscow’s city archives. I also looked at discussions at Narkomzdrav [the People's Commissariat of Health of the USSR] about sexuality, and one particularly fascinating conference was about “transvestites.” (It was actually a freewheeling discussion between psychiatrists and biologists about sexual diversity, at least we would think about it that way [today].) They were talking about women passing as men, transgender people, people who requested sex changes, gay men. And they passed a resolution suggesting that two people who are biologically the same sex should be allowed to marry if a psychiatrist says it’s an appropriate approach.

It really is one of the most extraordinary findings of my entire first book — the 1929 discussion at Narkomzdraw. It didn’t go anywhere, but it points to a sort of different future that might have been. Because gay male sex had been decriminalized in the first Soviet criminal codes (for Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus), and there was a sense that it was a problem that could be managed by medical people, and it didn’t need to be a criminal issue at all.

And that, of course, changed under Stalin in 1933–1934.

I also was interested in the cultural and the literary sources, and there was a lot of new and interesting material coming out in the 1990s, when I was in Moscow doing my research, so I did spend a lot of time with Michail Kuzmin’s diaries in RGALI, the Russian State Archive of Literature and Art. Parts of those diaries had at that point been published. The diaries could run all the way up to 1933–1934. They were extremely illuminating in lots of ways and helped me to think a little bit more about the nature of the gay community in Leningrad after the Revolution, as well. That’s the kind of source base [I used].

And there’s also the Elena Gusyatinskaya archive. I knew that Elena Gusyatinskaya and Victor Oboin both had archives of personal papers — not their own personal papers, but those of gay people [that were entrusted to them]. I did ask them from time to time about those papers, but the answer was that these are under a long time restriction. And I could accept that. I felt that I had enough of the story to tell. I wasn’t as granular and personal about the subjectivity of lesbian and gay people in Tsarist and Soviet Russia as I would have liked, but I felt like I had enough material from the state archives and publications that people simply hadn’t looked at or considered with queer eye. So, I felt like I had enough.

Those private archives are extremely important, and we worry about their safety in the current situation.

Meaning that the police will come and arrest them?

It’s just the general precarity of private archives in Russia today. What was perfectly innocuous and of no interest to the state three years ago could now suddenly become the subject of an inquiry. Private archives in a sense came out of the democratic era in the 1980–1990s, so they will become politicized in the sense that the state will look at them and say, “We don’t like these collections. We don’t like these institutions.” Look at what they’ve already done to the [human rights organization] Memorial.

As for the lost references, Ira can find them in the old edition. The editors in Ladomir appointed this guy (I think his name was Leonid Bessmertny) as scientific editor, and this is when the project went off the rails a bit. He insisted on adding all of this material to my bibliography as if I had not done enough research. And he also insisted on lengthening many of the quotations in the text to provide as much verbatim material from the original publications as possible. He was a collector of publications about sexuality in Russian at the Lenin Library. He started in the 1950s, and he also had a private collection of more than 15,000 volumes in his home.

I visited him once in his flat, which might have been 35 square feet, but it had 15,000 thousand books in it. We spent eight hours reviewing the introduction. I only had one day with it, and we didn’t get to the book itself. I felt that he was a very interesting choice for a scientific editor, but he imposed his vision on the translation in a sense that all the bibliographic apparatus — the hundreds of pages that were there — kind of swamped my project.

It’s a good thing that it’s out there, but to my mind it dragged the book away from the perspective that I had.

You were the first to introduce the term “sexual and gender dissidents,” and this usage was widely criticized when the book came out.

I feel like the reviewers of the English edition didn’t like the term (“sexual dissidents”). I’ve actually addressed this in the preface to the new translation [of the Russian edition]. They thought the term should be reserved for political dissidents. The term “dissidents” is obviously an important keyword in Soviet studies. We all knew about Andrey Sakharov; we all knew about the heroes of the Soviet dissident movement who fought for human rights and made great sacrifices to insist that the state actually respected some Constitution. And those people are obviously heroes.

My motivation for picking up the word was, first of all, to point to the fact that sexual and gender variation and diversity almost automatically require of the person who’s experiencing it to become a dissident — to love differently, to do gender differently. And that was not an option for people who felt that way. Short of self-destruction, people had to find ways to express their sexual desire, or their sense of gender. And I argue that in the book.

Because I didn’t have much material about the interior world of these gay men or lesbians, I couldn’t illustrate that point as well as I should have done. But what do the Russians say? “The first fry is bound to be a flop.”

It wasn’t a perfect book. But a lot of work of younger scholars that’s come out since my book has gone down that road and looked at the interior worlds of queers. And they have found very often that these people, yes, did feel “other” from society. They did feel a sense of dissidence (about their sexuality). I think I’ve been justified for picking up the term. What’s interesting is that a lot of these younger scholars are using the term (“dissidents”). The term has become current in LGBTQ Russian and Soviet studies.

The other thing I like about the term is that it’s a bridge-builder. It shows allies, or potential allies, that they have common cause with LGBT people. That LGBT people are not some strange biological subset of the population that civilized liberals tolerate, yet do not understand, but [that we] actually have a lot in common. We have people who oppose different kinds of regimes. So, that’s what the word “dissent” gives us.

There was a big debate in Western LGBT studies about essentialism versus social constructionism — these two opposing ideas of homosexuality, one being a kind of inherent thing that’s there in the individual, “born this way,” sort of biological explanation [of homosexuality] versus the social construction vision of homosexuality, which is something that changes over time, that is understood differently in different cultures, and that manifests itself in different ways in different cultures.

Social constructionism doesn’t deny that there is some biological desire going on, but it adds the superstructure of social and cultural layers to it. I always felt that moving from simply talking about sexuality to talking about dissent was a productive political move. That it actually showed how queer people in the past had been not merely expressing a biological urge but doing something more important than that. Doing something that was political.

You once said that the architects of Perestroika were no less homophobic than liberals. And that homophobia is an inherent vice of any Russian politician, good or bad. There was one decade that was different, though — the 1990s. And a lot of queer people are getting very nostalgic about that time. Was that really a golden era for queers (and liberals in general)?

I think some of the response comes from looking at what came before, in the 1960–1980s, in late Soviet Russia. It was a society that was actually transforming itself very rapidly, but not talking about that change. By 1965, the Soviet Union became a majority urban dwelling population. With the single-family Khruschev-era apartments, they now have the possibility of their own front door and a private life. The problem was that the political culture had no space to talk about much of this, except behind closed doors, among experts.

And the private sphere itself was not very legitimated by the state. So, this straight jacket faded away in the late 1980s under Gorbachev’s Perestroika and Glasnost. And people began to discuss very freely just what this society was and what it wanted. That atmosphere continued right through the 1990s, but it also was accompanied by wrenching economic change.

When young people look back on the 1990s with nostalgia about the possibilities and the opportunities that were there… Yes, they were there, but imagine it against the backdrop of the 25-percent contraction of the economy, of keeping three jobs just to have the roof over your head, of having had a decent job until 1991. So, that was a kind of dislocation that people experienced. And I think, sadly, that the Russian population in general came to associate democracy with financial and economic ruin.

So, by the end of the 1990s, they were ready for a different experiment, when Yeltsin had run out of steam and ideas and had actually done most of the painful work of [transitioning from a planned to a market economy]. A lot of things were going on in society that the state wasn’t interested in, because the state was being plundered and under-governed.

But there was a lot of pleasure in the midst of this pain. I can remember going to night clubs like “Chance” that were just amazing. There was an aquarium with men swimming inside along with really bangy music. And you would just think: is this Berlin in the 1920s? It was extraordinary. But then you would leave at 6 in the morning and catch the first metro home, and impoverished Moscow would embrace you. It was quite a staggering contrast. But yes, there was a lot of pleasure at that time and a lot of optimism among gay and lesbian people about what might be possible.

Was there a coherent gay liberation movement in the 1990s? What went wrong? In the words of journalist Elena Kostyuchenko, how did we “miss the revolution”?

I’m reflecting on this quite a lot because I’m working on my own archive and my own memoirs. Despite all the divisions [in the movement] (and there were a lot of divisions), there was potential for a national LGBT movement at high degree of political maturity that would have been amazing. There were radicals, the Debryanskayas, and people who were more conciliatory and more oriented toward the marketplace. For example, a lot of gay male small- and medium-size enterprises started up and died during this time period. There could have been a pink ruble sector to rival Germany’s. That was possible.

But there were always clouds on the horizon. And the revolution in LGBT life had to reckon with these clouds and the bigger surroundings. But if you also think about the wars in Chechnya — those were warning signs.

I think one of the things you have to remember is that people were dancing, but they were dancing on the edge of a volcano in the sense that people did not feel very secure. I can remember hunger, even as a very privileged graduate student in Moscow in 1995–1996. [Eating] was so irregular, and I didn’t have a landlady to come home to. Most graduate students used to rent a room from a babushka, but I wanted to have my own door so that I could explore the gay Moscow. And I certainly did.

There was a revolution to be made, but it had to be made in concert with a lot of other bigger revolutions. That didn’t happen.

I don’t blame the democrats as much as some people perhaps do. I blame the West because I don’t think we realized the scale of decline in Russia, and the extent to which we could have helped financially if we thought of some kind of Marshall Plan for Russia after the Cold War. If we had done something like that with good faith, I think conceivably we could be in a better place. I think one of the exciting lessons of the 1990s is just how diverse and creative Russians can be when given their freedom. That kind of Russia would be a very exciting Russia to live in.

Interview by Anna Filippova