Abstract
The historiography of modern homosexuality acknowledges that the association of effeminacy in men with same-sex love is a feature of recent constructions of homosexual identity.1 This association appears both in constructions of homosexuality produced by medicine and by male homosexuals themselves. Gender behavior that transgresses masculine norms was not a compulsory component of the homosexual identity in the modern West, especially after homophile movements and gay liberationists took up the language of identity in the twentieth century. Yet from the early eighteenth century, effeminacy features in descriptions of a significant minority of the men who formed homo-sexual subcultures in northwestern European cities. Effeminacy was not simply an imitation of feminine styles, gestures or speech, but an ironic appropriation that some men-loving men used to proclaim affiliation and facilitate contact.2 In a few infamous taverns in eighteenth-century London, ‘mollies’ staged raucous mock-birthing and wedding rituals to amuse knowing audiences of ‘sodomites’. In Paris in the same era, men who sought sex together in public squares and parks knew each other by a repertoire of aliases drawn from women’s names and aristocratic titles.3 In Imperial Russia, the ‘birth of the queen’ came later than in western Europe.
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Notes
My work proceeds from the axiom that sexualities are socially constructed and historically contingent discourses, and not (for the historian’s purposes) essential, universal, and timeless biological impulses. For post-essentialist guides to conceptualizing ‘homosexuality’ and the male ‘homosexual’ in history, see Edward Stein (ed.), Forms of Desire: Sexual Orientation and the Social Constructionist Controversy (New York, 1990);
Jeffrey Weeks, Against Nature: Essays on Histoty, Sexuality and Identity (London, 1991).
For a genealogy of effeminacy, see Alan Sinfield, The Wilde Century: Effeminacy, Oscar Wilde, and the Queer Movement (London, 1994).
On irony as a constituent of modern gay identity, see Brian Pronger, The Arena of Masculinity: Sports, Homosexuality and the Meaning of Sex (London, 1990), 104–10; on the functions of male femininity in the homosexual subculture,
see George Chauncey, Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890–1940 (New York, 1994), 101–11.
For a statement on the ‘performativity’ of normative and subversive gender roles see Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (London, 1990).
On London, Randolph Trumbach, ‘The Birth of the Queen: Sodomy and the Emergence of Gender Equality in Modern Culture, 1660–1750’, Hidden From History: Reclaiming the Gay and Lesbian Past, ed. Martin Duberman, Martha Vicinus, and George Chauncey, Jr. (New York, 1989);
on Paris, Michael Rey, ‘Parisian Homosexuals Create a Lifestyle, 1700–1750: the Police Archives’, ‘Tis nature’s fault: Unauthorized Sexual Behavior During the Enlightenment, ed. Robert P. Maccubbin (New York, 1985).
Dan Healey, ‘Moscow’, Queer Sites: Gay Urban Histories since 1600, ed. David Higgs (London, 1999).
Jeffrey Burds, trans. and ed., ‘Dnevnik moskovskogo kuptsa Pavia Vasil’evicha Medvedeva, 1854–1864 gg.’ (in progress). I am grateful to Professor Burds for providing me with a transcript of the diary; references here use his transcript’s pagination. The diary is held in Tsentral’nyi istoricheskii arkhiv g. Moskvy (TsIAM), f. 2330, op. 1, dd. 984, 986. For an introduction, see A. I. Kupriianov, ‘“Pagubnaia strast” moskovskogo kuptsa’, Kazus: Individual’noe i unikal’noe v istorii, ed. tu. L. Bessmertnyi and M. A. Boitsov (Moscow, 1997).
V. M. Tarnovskii, Izyrashchenie polovogo chuvstva. Sudebno-psikhiatricheskii ocherk (St Petersburg, 1885), 70.
Eros and sexual violence between men have been a constant feature of Russian prison life since documentation of the phenomenon began in the late nineteenth century. Soviet Gulag and prison life have invested mutual male eros and sexual violence with powerful meanings. On these thernes, see Lev Samoilov, ‘Puteshestvie v perevernutyi mir’, Neva, no. 4 (1989), 150–64; Dan Healey, ‘Homosexual Desire in Revolutionary Russia: Public and Hidden Transcripts, 1917–1941’ (Ph.D. diss., University of Toronto, 1998), chapter 6; V. K. and Nikolai Serov, ‘Letters about Prison Life’, Out of the Blue: Russia’s Hidden Gay Literature, ed. Kevin Moss (San Francisco, 1996). In the military an analogous sexual culture exists; on hazing employing sexual violence (dedovshchina) see Catriona Kelly and David Shepherd (eds), Russian Cultural Studies: an Introduction (Oxford, 1998), 328; on male rape by Russian soldiers in Chechnia, see Ian Traynor, ‘Tales of torture leak from Russian camps: escaped Chechen victims tell of rape, beating and humiliation’, The Guardian, 19 February 2000, 17.
Historians of western men’s same-sex love generally accept that the trans-formation of city life by capitalism facilitated the appearance of a subculture with mechanisms for homosexual affiliation beyond traditional patriarchal relationships. There is less agreement on when this transition occurred in various settings, which is logical given uneven development across Europe. See John D’Emilio, Making Trouble: Essays on Gay History, Politics, and the University (New York & London, 1992), chapter 1.
The subject of a sardonic series of sketches in V. P. Ruadze, K sudu! … Gomoseksual’nyi Peterburg (St Petersburg, 1908).
Claude Courouve, Vocabulaire de l’homosexualité masculine (Paris, 1985), 207–9. German used the word in a similar fashion.
V. Merzheevskii, Sudebnaia ginekologiia. Rukovodstvo dlia vrachei i iuristov (St Petersburg, 1878), 205.
He fleetingly described a gathering of such men: ‘Russian tetki are repulsive.’ See P. I. Chaikovskii, Dnevniki 1873–1891 (Moscow-Petrograd, 1923, reprint 1993), 203 (13 March 1888); the word retains this generalized sense today.
See Vladimir Kozlovskii, Argo russkoi gomoseksual’noi subkul’tury: Materialy k izucheniiu (Benson, Vt., 1986), 69.
RGIA, f. 1683, op. 1, d. 199, 11. 1–13. The denunciation is reprinted in full in V. V. Bersen’ev and A. R. Markov, ‘Politsiia i gei: Epizod iz epokhi Aleksandra III’, Risk, no. 3 (1998), 105–16; it was discovered and partially published by Konstantin Rotikov [pseud], ‘Epizod iz zhizni “golubogo” Peterburga’, Nevskii arkhiv: istoriko-kraevedcheskii sbomik, no. 3 (1997), 449— 66. Bersen’ev and Markov argue that the undated denunciation was written in the early 1890s, while Rotikov dates it from 1889. Rotikov uses it exten-sively in his cult-success guide to the ‘gay’ history of St Petersburg, Drugoi Peterburg (St Petersburg, 1998). For critical evaluations of this work from the perspective of western histories of sexualities, see Evgenii Bershtein, ‘Goluboi Peterburg’, Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, no. 1 (1999), 403–6; Brian James Baer, ‘The Other Russia: Re-Presenting the Gay Experience’, Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian Histoty, 1, no. 1 (2000), 183–94.
Queer theorists regard the ‘active/passive’ interpretation of gay men’s anal sexuality as a function of the dominant sex/gender system. See for example, Guy Hocquenghem, ‘Towards an Irrecuperable Pederasty’ and Leo Bersani, ‘Is the Rectum a Grave?’ in Reclaiming Sodom, ed. Jonathan Goldberg (New York, 1994). Russian forensic doctors in different eras have expressed a nervous awareness of the ambiguous power of the supposedly ‘passive’ partner in men’s same-sex contacts. Such men’s ‘ability through exercise to govern this muscle [the sphincter] at will’ troubled A. Shvarts, in ‘K voprosu o priznakakh privychnoi passivnoi pederastii (Iz nabliudenii v aziatskoi chasti g. Tashkenta)’, Vestnik obshchestvennoi gigieny, sudebnoi i prakticheskoi meditsiny, no. 6 (1906), 816–18 (quote at 818). For late Soviet techniques to unmask ‘passive homosexuals’ by measuring sphincter control mechanically, see I. G. Bliumin and L. S. Gel’fenbein, ‘Ob odnom diagnosticheskom priz-nake pri ekspertize polovykh sostoianii muzhchin’, Voprosy travmatologii, toksikologii, skoropostizhnoi smerti i deontologii v ekspertnoi praktike. Vypusk 3 (Moscow, 1966).
Fragmentary evidence hints at these life transitions, suggested in the Petersburg denunciation (ibid.). Homosexual sponsorship promoted the careers of the male protégés of Prince Meshcherskii; see W. E. Mosse, ‘Imperial Favorite: V. P. Meshchersky and the Grazhdanin’, Slavonic and East European Review, 59 (1981), 529–47. In a Soviet psychiatrist’s case history of a Moscow male prostitute in his thirties, the prostitute related how his engagement in the sex trade was interrupted during extended periods of sponsorship in first an aristocrat’s and then an industrialist’s household: V. A. Belousov, ‘Sluchai gomoseksuala-muzhskoi prostitutki’, Prestupnik i prestupnost’. Sbornik II (1927), 309–17. For career structures of male prostitution in England of the same era, see Jeffrey Weeks, ‘Inverts, Perverts and Mary-Annes: Male Prostitution and the Regulation of Homosexuality in England in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries’, Hidden from History, eds M. B. Duberman, M. Vicinus, and G. Chauncey.
The young Tchaikovsky escaped scandal when the Chautemps Restaurant was exposed in the press; see Alexander Poznansky, Tchaikovsky’s Last Days: a Documentary Study (Oxford, 1996), 10. Another scandal forced the closure of a restaurant around 1893; see P. V. Ushakovskii [pseud.], Liudi sredniago pola (St Petersburg, 1908), 6.
John E. Malmstad and Nikolay Bogomolov, Mikhail Kuzmin: a Life in Art (Cambridge, Mass., 1999), 107; for the correspondence,
see N. A. Bogomolov, Mikhail Kuzmin: Stat’i i materialy (Moscow, 1995), 229.
V. M. Bekhterev, ‘O polovom izvrashchenii, kak osoboi ustanovke polovykh refleksov’, Polovoi vopros v shkole i v zhizni, ed. I. S. Simonov (Leningrad, 1927), 170.
In Wilhemine Germany, these two ideals of male homosexuality found expression in the gender inversion-based theories of Magnus Hirschfeld, which were countered by the masculine supremacist arguments of Benedict Friedländer and his Community of the Special. See Eve K. Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley, 1990), 88–9. Variations on ‘women-hater’ as sexual identity (including ‘stratophiles’, devotees of sex with military men) circulated in pre-1914 Europe; see Xavier Mayne [Edward I. Prime-Stevenson], The Intersexes: a History of Similsexualism as a Problem in Social Life ([Naples], 1908), 198, 212–23.
On these points, see Dan Healey, Homosexual Desire in Revolutionary Russia: the Regulation of Sexual and Gender Dissent (Chicago, 2001), chapter 4.
Novels exploring the homosexual predicament appeared in major European languages in the two decades before 1914, but most resolved their plots with melodrama, suicide, or dismal self-hatred, while the young hero of Wings achieves a joyful acceptance of his sexuality; ibid. On the novel’s reception, see Simon Karlinsky, ‘Death and Resurrection of Mikhail Kuzmin’, Slavic Review 38, no. 1 (1979), 92–6.
Healey, Homosexual Desire in Revolutionary Russia, chapter 3. On the bachi, see I. Baldauf, Die Knabenliebe in Mittelasien: Bacabozlik (Berlin, 1988).
On this raid and reports about it, see ibid., and V. M. Bekhterev, ‘O polovom izvrashchenii, kak osoboi ustanovke polovykh refleksov’, Polovoi vopros v shkole i v zhizni, ed. I. S. Simonov (Leningrad, 1927).
See the profiles of the male and female homosexual in L. G. Orshanskii, ‘Polovye prestupleniia. Analiz psikhologicheskii i psikhopatologicheskii’, Polovye prestupleniia, ed. A. A. Zhizhilenko and L. G. Orshanskii (Leningrad-Moscow, 1927). Health Commissar Semashko, a physician sympathetic to homosexual emancipation, found it necessary nevertheless to condemn the ‘masculinization’ of women as a vulgarization of revolutionary ideals; see N. A. Semashko, ‘Nuzhna li “zhenstvennost”? (v poriadke obsuzhdeniia)’, Molodaia gvardiia, no. 6 (1924), 205–6.
Eric Naiman, Sex in Public: the Incarnation of Early Soviet Ideology (Princeton, 1997). On sexology see also Frances Bernstein, ‘What Everyone Should Know About Sex: Gender, Sexual Enlightenment, and the Politics of Health in Revolutionary Russia, 1918–1931’ (Ph.D. diss., Columbia Univer-sity, 1998).
V. P. Osipov, Rukovodstvo po psikhiatrii (Moscow-Leningrad, 1931), 574–5.
Nowhere in these documents (which used ‘homosexual’ freely) was the word ‘heterosexual’ used. Men whose sexuality was judged respectable were labelled as married (zhenatyi) or family men (semeinyi; sem’ianin). Modern concepts of heterosexuality, like the term itself, were developed after discourses of homosexuality; see Jonathan Ned Katz, The Invention of Hetero-sexuality (New York, 1995).
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Healey, D. (2002). The Disappearance of the Russian Queen, or How the Soviet Closet Was Born. In: Clements, B.E., Friedman, R., Healey, D. (eds) Russian Masculinities in History and Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230501799_9
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