Homosexual Desire in Revolutionary Russia: The Regulation of Sexual and Gender Dissent

Homosexual Desire in Revolutionary Russia: the Regulation of Sexual and Gender Dissent\ \ By Dan Healey \ University of Chicago Press\ Copyright © 2001 Dan Healey\ All right reserved.\ ISBN: 0226322343 \ \ \ 1 Depravity's Artel' \ \ TRADITIONAL SEX BETWEEN MEN AND THE \ \ EMERGENCE OF A HOMOSEXUAL SUBCULTURE\ \ The place of sex between males in traditional Russian culture has generally been neglected by historians. Igor' Kon characterizes Russia's sexual culture, even in the nineteenth century, as having been divided between "high" and "low" culture more deeply than were Western European sexual cultures. The popular, everyday (bytovoe) sexual patterns and practices of the mass of Russians were marked by pagan survivals (orgies, nonreproductive sex acts), which Russian Orthodoxy, with its comparatively weak institutions and priesthood, had been incapable of eradicating. Ecclesiastical authorities "turned a blind eye" to popular sexual culture with resigned indulgence, while publicly the Church "compensated with a strengthened spirituality and unworldly asceticism in its religious doctrine" on sexuality and marriage. Sexual folklore as expressed in erotic tales, verse (chastushki), and profanity (mat) reflected values utterly at odds with Christianity. Kon does not speculate on how this chasm between sacred and profane affected Russian understandings of sex between men. Yet it seems plausiblethat the apparent ease with and (from a Western European perspective) tolerance of male same-sex eros grew from the popular repertoire of earthy narratives of "sexual mischief " and from the relative weakness of early modern Orthodox regulation of sexual matters generally. Foreign observers of pre-Petrine Muscovy reported the widespread practice and talk of "sodomy," apparently unfettered by any religious sensibilities or sense of civic dignity. Russian Orthodoxy's formal penalties for "sodomy" (muzhelozhstvo) had been indulgent in comparison with Western European canon and secular law, prescribing penances equal to those for adulterous male-female relations. Mutual male relations not involving anal penetration were regarded as little worse than masturbation in this ecclesiastical tradition. Nevertheless, Eve Levin rightly emphasizes that in this same tradition, all sexuality was regarded with suspicion as a source of impurity and sin, even intimacy within marriage. \ \ The state in Russia only turned its attention to the regulation of sodomy later than Western polities and did so as part of efforts to introduce new forms of social control. The military prohibition of sodomy introduced by Peter the Great in 1716 imposed on soldiers and sailors new forms of discipline patterned after the lessons of the European "military revolution." Extending this regulation to the civilian male population in 1835, Nicholas I sought to instill those religious sensibilities and civic virtues that Russian males apparently still lacked. \ \ Efforts to instill these sensibilities imply that a masculine tradition indulgent of mutual eros continued to exist into the nineteenth century. Medical, legal, and diaristic sources from the years after 1861 demonstrate that such a tradition flourished. Men who experienced same-sex desire expressed it according to the social roles they played. Workshops, bathhouses, and large households were sites for same-sex relations within this tradition, and significantly, both provinces and capitals provided such sites. Masters and servants, coachmen and their passengers, bathhouse patrons and attendants, craftsmen and apprentices, and clergy and their novices exploited the opportunities of their positions to obtain or offer sexual favors. These men and youths should not be mistaken for homosexuals in a modern, European sense; their culture of masculinity included indulgence in same-sex eros, and it did not enforce the necessarily severe penalties associated in a later era with the stigmatized, medicalized condition of homosexuality. \ \ Depravity's Artel' \ \ Russia in the mid-nineteenth century remained a society relatively untouched by the forces of industrialization and urbanization transforming Western Europe. The vast majority of the population were peasants, and some twenty million remained serfs until the Emancipation Edict of 1861. Relations between gentry landlords and their servants and peasants were patriarchal, with landlords frequently intervening in the sexual and intimate lives of their charges. Similarly, patron-client hierarchies dominated the worlds of work and worship in Russia's towns and church establishments. Same-sex eros between males occurred in these environments and reflected their characteristic patterns of domination and subordination. \ \ The sexually available subordinate male was found in numerous settings. Men of means, often exploiting the license that money and vodka conferred, made use of such youths or men. A Moscow merchant (himself of the peasant estate) provides a rich example of these relations. In 1861, Pavel Vasil'evich Medvedev kept a diary recording his emotional and sexual experiences. Unhappily married, Medvedev sought consolation alternately in church and at the tavern. When drunk, he indulged in "lustfulness" with both males and females--and recorded these encounters in his diary. The document speaks chiefly of a traditional masculine culture indulgent of sex between men. Yet the cash exchanges accompanying some of Medvedev's encounters and their location outside the household point to the seeds of a transition to a modern homosexual subculture. \ \ Medvedev and his companions repeatedly turned to subordinate males for sex when lust was unleashed by vodka. An account of an evening of theater, dining, and drinking "to excess" ended with Medve-dev's reflections on how to satisfy one's arousal during the journey homeward: \ \ \ For some time now my lust leads me to pick a younger cabdriver, who I make fun of along the way--with a little nonsense you can enjoy mutual masturbation. You can almost always succeed with a fifty-kopek coin, or thirty kopeks, but there are also those who agree to it for pleasure. That's five times this month.\ \ \ Cabdrivers who supplemented their income (or simply took pleasure) in this fashion are not unusual characters in Russian legal and psychiatric literature of the era. One particularly colorful example of this sexual exchange comes from the provincial town of Uman'. There a pair of brothers, injudiciously hired as coachmen by one Prince Obolenskii in 1882, exploited his sexual interest in them ruthlessly. The prince, married with children, became infatuated with Petr and Fedor Filonovskii. They left their old employer and joined Obolenskii's staff as drivers. Before long, police observed that the Filonovskii brothers were living in a newly rented flat, were driving new phaetons and horses, and "went boozing in public houses . . . their hands decorated with diamond rings." Leaving his wife and children at home in the country, Obolenskii would visit Petr and Fedor at the rooms in town, which he had paid for and furnished luxuriously; the prince came bearing parcels containing expensive wines and foodstuffs. The brothers engaged in anal intercourse with their employer, and for a time, were handsomely rewarded. Eventually they became greedy, passing false promissory notes in Uman'. The police learned of their relations with their employer through a third coachman, who, it emerged, had also had sex for cash with Obolenskii. (Police referred to all three as gigolos [al'fonsy].) Letters found in the infamous flat exposed Obolenskii as their patron and lover, and he along with the Filonovskiis came to trial in March 1883. The outcome of this criminal case was not revealed in an article for jurists and forensic doctors that presented the Prince's sophisticated medical defense in great detail. \ \ Coachmen were not alone among male servants willing to service male employers sexually. Medical reports described how youths and young men profited in this fashion as waiters, household staff, and as simple soldiers or officers' servants. It is not always possible to gauge whether subordinates were motivated solely by incentives of money and advancement. The apparent willingness of Russia's serving classes to tolerate even unpaid "gentlemen's mischief " (barskie shalosti), as St. Petersburg venereologist V. M. Tarnovskii said they called it, might imply a relative indulgence of mutual male relations. (Tarnovskii's perceptions of prostitution clashed with those of most of his colleagues and must be viewed cautiously.) There is also little hint in the various medical accounts that these subordinates experienced anxiety about their own masculinity. \ \ Another example of traditional mutual male sexuality in the provinces highlights the apparent patriarchal confidence accompanying such encounters. It also suggests that peasants evaluated same-sex relations with employers from varying moral perspectives. A petition for legal separation from her spouse, initiated by Anna Nikolaevna Kazakova in 1891, alleged that her husband of ten years, Konstantin Nikolaevich Kazakov, lured peasant servants and their children's tutors into sexual liaisons. The dossier of Kazakova's plea, read and granted by Tsar Nicholas II in 1893, contains depositions from household servants describing their encounters with the master (barin) in salty language. "The master commits sin with muzhiki [peasant adult males], using them in the buttocks [v zadu]," insisted one informant, reporting rumors in her village. Another peasant woman said, "Konstantin Nikolaevich uses muzhiki in the buttocks instead of women." Bykovskii, a male peasant serving in the household, told how the master plied him with vodka and instructed him to visit at night; after his first vodka-soaked sexual encounter with the master, he woke up to find a three-ruble note in his pocket. Bykovskii disregarded the warnings he received from other household employees (of both sexes) about the master's "sinful" acts. A peasant hired as the household driver, Mikhail Ushakov, admitted he had been sexually involved with both husband and wife. In 1887 he had been repeatedly propositioned by Konstantin Kazakov, and though the driver refused to allow the master to penetrate him anally, they did have intercourse once with the master taking Ushakov's member ("khui," the coarsest term for this body part) and placing it between his own buttocks. Both husband and wife gave their driver tips of three to five rubles for sex. Ushakov was fired when it was discovered that Anna had been made pregnant by him. Unhappy families were indeed unique in their misery. These depositions reveal that peasants circulated warnings about this gentry landlord's "sin" with males, indicating that at least some regarded such transgressions negatively. Others operated within a different moral economy. For Bykovskii and Ushakov, drunkenness could excuse "sin," and perhaps even launder the money they received for it. \ \ In urban workshops, men in positions of authority subjected youths to sexual advances or assaults. Medvedev wrote that he repeatedly masturbated with a member of his household, a "boy" of eighteen, an apprentice or servant, who "satisfied me according to my desire with manual onanism, and I did the same for him." Medvedev consoled his religious anxieties by writing that the young man enjoyed their encounters, arguing that he was old enough to know what he wanted. Court records of male rapes demonstrate a similar if more sinister pattern. In one Moscow workshop, a twenty-six-year-old craftsman, Reshetnikov, was notorious for his sexual advances toward apprentice boys, and his unmasking in 1892 initially provoked laughter rather than opprobrium. The same year saw the trial of a baker, Chelnokov, whose sexual involvement with his apprentices aroused the ire of a Moscow charity. Pedagogic arrangements, informal and unsupervised, were similar sites for abuse. One victim of sexual interference from his fifty-five-year-old teacher explained in court in 1881, "I came not long ago to Petersburg from the village, and not knowing the customs here did not complain, because I thought that's the way things were with every master." \ \ In a similar fashion, clerical training and mentorship could be accompanied by same-sex erotic activity, sometimes of an enduring nature. The 1919 trial in Moscow of a Bishop Palladii for "corruption of a boy and for unnatural vice (pederasty)," revealed not merely the hidden sexual side of this cleric's relations with his fourteen-year-old novice, but a history of such partnerships. Monastic tradition demonstrated the temptation to mutual sexual activity that patron-client relationships of this type could generate. Young male novices had long been viewed, in penitential texts and monastic practice, as a stimulant to the lustful impulses of older monks. Custom and regulation formed a network of surveillance, closely scrutinizing the material and spatial aspects of seminary and monastic life thought to encourage sensuality. Convention dictated that religious community members kept a close watch on who shared cells with whom, whether doors were locked when two brothers were alone together, and whether younger brothers assisted older ones in dressing or bathing. Palladii had begun his ecclesiastical career as a seminary inspector in Moscow and later Saratov, charged with overseeing the daily lives and morality of teenage religious scholars. Inspectors monitored the older boys and young men, who lived in private accommodation outside the seminary, where the temptations of alcohol, tobacco, and illicit sex were harder to control. Investigations into the bishop's past identified a number of youths, and two adult monks, whose ecclesiastical careers had been launched during the late tsarist era with Palladii's assistance. These patron-client transactions fit within the wider pattern of traditional mutual male eros. \ \ From as early as the seventeenth century, the Russian bathhouse (bania), was perhaps another site for this traditional sexual indulgence between men. Here again, the power held by older, wealthier males over young subordinates inflected relations. By the late nineteenth century, medical discourse had identified baths as a significant locus of male prostitution in Russian cities. The first commercial baths appeared in Moscow in the mid-1600s, and the state mandated that the sexes should be scrupulously segregated. Authorities differ on how rigorously segregation was actually observed and on whether the baths represented a desexualized space in Russian culture. Certainly, separate steam rooms for men and women created a homosocial environment, which contributed to the evolution of bathhouse male prostitution in a later era. A seventeenth-century miniature illustrating a visit by bearded, mature males to the baths shows four beardless, youthful males serving them (fig. 1). One youth, in trousers, removes an older man's boots; another trousered lad draws water from a well. A naked young man pours water on the stove to produce steam, as another, also unclothed, beats a bearded older visitor, lying nude on a bench, with a leafy switch. While there is no intimation of sexual acts in the illustration, the serving boys' subordinate social position is emphasized by their youthful beardlessness. The fifteenth-century Metropolitan Daniil and archpriest Avvakum in the seventeenth century condemned men who shaved their beards as inciting immorality, because smooth faces made them resemble women and thus were an invitation to sodomy. With the growth of commercial relations in the eighteenth century, youths may have sought out careers in bathhouses. A group of sixteen-year-old peasant males apprehended entering Moscow in 1745 claimed they came to seek work in commercial baths. By the late tsarist era, Mos-cow's bathhouse staff reportedly came from generations of male (and some female) migrants all bound by ties to the same handful of rural districts (affiliation by zemliachestvo). Urban spas, staffed by beardless youths, may have been sites of mutual male sexual relations long before the recorded instances of the nineteenth century. \ \ Male bathhouse attendants appear in a range of sources of the 1860s to 1880s as sexually serving a male clientele. Pavel Medvedev wrote of a visit with a friend to an unnamed Moscow bathhouse in 1861, where they found "onanism and kulizm (anal intercourse)" awaiting them. Few references to a bathhouse male sex trade in Moscow appear in forensic texts or the city court records, but there are enough discussions of the phenomenon in St. Petersburg to suggest that what Medvedev described here persisted in Moscow until the 1917 revolution. The link between baths with private rooms and the exploitation of young males was evident from the 1919 trial of Bishop Palladii. Twice he testified that while he and his novice Volkov had indeed been to "public" (obshchie) baths or baths for the upper clergy (arkhiereiskie bani) in Moscow, they had never visited baths with private rooms (bani s nomerami). He claimed "it was the custom that two boys went with me, to allay the suspicions of bystanders." The notoriety of private roomsinMoscow'sspaswas sufficientlywidespread tomovePalladii to repeated denials on this point. There is little reason to doubt that the city's baths harbored casual male prostitution earlier in the Imperial era. \ \ Evidence from St. Petersburg on this trade is more detailed, suggesting that it was organized according to peasant traditions until perhaps the 1890s. The migrants' practice of mutual assistance and solidarity in the city with fellow-villagers or countrymen (based on zemliachestvo), and the peasant pattern of working in a team (the artel') for an equally apportioned share of earnings, was observed among bathhouse sex workers from the 1860s to the 1880s. These customs were a feature of recruitment, apprenticeship, and labor relations in the self-contained bathhouse world. Such peasant strategies were evident in the 1866 case of a St. Petersburg "depraved work team" (artel' razvratnikov). Vasilii Ivanov, a twenty-year-old bath attendant, testified in court that he had come to work in the bathhouse where another attendant from his native village worked. Once there, his colleagues recruited him into the practice of sexually servicing clients. Customers who, Ivanov observed, "did not need to be washed," would ask for other attentions: "[the client] lies with me like with a woman, or orders me to do with him as with a woman, only in the anus, or else leaning forward and lying on his chest, and I [get] on top of him, all of which I did." Ivanov reported that he and his colleagues earned about one ruble for each session of "sodomy" they provided. They operated as an artel', pooling the proceeds from sexual services, after the baths' manager, acting as the team's starosta or leader, took his cut. "All the money we got for that [sodomy] we put together and then divided it up on Sundays," he testified, also declaring that "all the attendants in all the baths in Petersburg" were engaged in sodomy. \ \ The temporal threshold between the formation of this "depraved work team" and the arrival of more commercial prostitution, with a brothel-keeper managing atomized male sex-trade workers, remains indistinct from existing sources. In the 1880s, Tarnovskii noted the continued existence of youths he called "commercial catamites" (prodazhnye kinedy) servicing bathhouse clients. They still worked within the artel', which the venereologist admired and romanticized. In discussing bathhouse prostitution, he celebrated the shrewdness of the so-called "Russian simple folk" (russkii prostoliudin) and their exploitation of the baths as a site for profit. "Among us, especially in Petersburg, thanks to the numerous baths with private rooms and bathhouse attendants, there exist a plethora of pederast prostitutes living, as it were, on the artel' principle." Attendants were reportedly happy to indulge "congenital and aged catamites" who sought release at the baths; Tarnovskii estimated that perhaps three-quarters of male attendants were willing to engage in "active" anal intercourse with this category of pederast for cash, while "the passives are only few among them [i.e., the atten-dants]." Although the venereologist did not fully approve of bathhouse prostitution, his comments were consistent with his controversial praise for the tsarist system of licensed (heterosexual) brothels. There was also a national smugness in Tarnovskii's assertion that in Russia there was less blackmail of pederasts than in European capitals because of the traditional artel'. Tarnovskii saw in the artel' a source of public order: \ \ \ Here in Petersburg, remuneration of catamites is practically the same as paying a prostitute; in these circumstances blackmail [shantazh]on the part of bathhouse attendants living by the artel' and equally sharing the profits is unthinkable; there is no surveillance [by police of blackmailers, as in Europe].\ \ \ In Russia's bathhouses, according to Tarnovskii, immoral relations were concealed from the public, and persons of substance who could afford to rent a private room in better spas indulged themselves without exposing their reputations to unseemly accusations. The mutual responsibility (krugovaia poruka) and surveillance characteristic of artel' relations supposedly kept commercial catamites honest and compliant. Upper-class male desire, satisfied by male prostitutes organized according to traditional peasant patterns, could be socially harmless or neutral so long as the sexual transaction took place within the commodified privacy offered by better-quality urban bathhouses. \ \ The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in Russia were a period of rapid social transformation, and same-sex relations were marked by these changes. The emancipation of the serfs in 1861 and industrialization in the 1880s and 1890s brought large numbers of people (principally but not exclusively males) to cities in search of work. A significant proportion of these newcomers stayed only temporarily or seasonally; many left wives and families behind in the village. Others settled and became the basis of an urban proletariat in St. Petersburg, Moscow, and a handful of other centers. Urban workers' housing was crowded. A huge proportion lived in barracks, flophouses, or shared rooms and even shared beds; a significant percentage lived in employers' households and workshops. The rapid expansion of Russia's industrial base was accomplished by large numbers of male workers living in cities where there was neither space nor money for the replication of peasant marriage and family patterns. In tsarist Moscow, working men in the sexually active younger age groups outnumbered women, and they were crowded together in accommodations precluding any possibility of starting families or of bringing a wife and children from the village to join them. While traditional forms of patriarchal solidarity and mutual supervision such as the artel' and zemliachestvo functioned in the town, they could not always serve to enforce the compulsory heterosexuality of village life. Men found opportunities for sexual expression with each other in Russia's industrializing centers. As they exploited these new possibilities, they transformed Russian masculini-ty's traditional patterns of mutual male eros. An urban, homosexual, subculture took shape. \ \ The "Little Homosexual World" Emerges \ \ A homosexual subculture began to appear as Russia's two capitals grew in size and complexity at the end of the nineteenth century. It developed its own geographies of sexualized streetscapes, its rituals of contact and socialization, its signals and gestures, and its own fraternal language. In these rituals, gestures, and language, the subculture elaborated roles for participants, often based on the principles of the market in male sex. The subculture also flourished in private spaces and created domestic environments. Off the streets, in flats and bathhouses, some male homosexuals sought to intensify and further commodify mutual male sexuality and male prostitution. Others used domestic and other indoor spaces to forge emotional partnerships, to develop a poetics and a historiography of homosexuality, and to celebrate a culture of gender and sexual dissent. Continuities and contrasts between tsarist and Soviet homosexual practices can be established through an examination of the geographies of homosexual Petersburg-Petrograd-Leningrad and Moscow, the semiotics of the subculture, and the subculture's use of domestic and commodified interiors across the political divide of 1917. \ \ From the 1870s, mechanisms of mutual recognition and contact beyond the confines of the traditional patron-client relations associated with older forms of mutual male eros began to develop. Denizens of the "little homosexual world" (gomoseksual'nyi mirok, as an acid-tongued satirist would dub it in 1908) began to use specific streets, parks, public toilets, and other city amenities to meet and exchange information, to display themselves, and to find sexual and emotional partners. These sexualized territories also served as the meeting ground between males who sold sex (who were not always identified with the homosexual subculture) and their clients. Sources for these patterns are again more modest for Moscow than for St. Petersburg and suggest a slower evolution toward a homosexual subculture in the older capital. Medvedev's 1861 diary made no mention of cruising or male prostitution in Moscow's streets. Respectable upper-class individuals like composer Peter Tchaikovsky found willing sexual contacts in Moscow among servants or through louche friends, rather than risk scandal by public cruising. One surviving Moscow sodomy trial of 1888 indicates that lower-class males could find "devotees" of same-sex relations on the city's Boulevard Ring, later an arena of homosexual liaisons well into the 1920s and 1930s. On Prechistenskii Boulevard, townsman Petr Mamaev was arrested after a drunken dispute with a younger man named Agapov. Mamaev told police, "For the past eight years I have been committing sodomy with different, unknown persons. I go out to the boulevard at night, strike up a conversation, and if I find a devotee [liubitel'], then I do it with him. I cannot identify who I did it with . . . I attempted to do just the same with Agapov, without money, without any exchange of money in mind, just to obtain pleasure for myself and for him." \ \ This testimony suggests that by 1888 even Moscow's police expected an "exchange of money" to be associated with "sodomy," yet as Mamaev claimed and as Medvedev had also admitted in his diary, Moscow harbored many males willing to engage in sex "just to obtain pleasure." Nevertheless, sources for an early geography of Moscow's homosexual subculture remain scarce. \ \ It is instructive to compare this obscurity with the richness of material available on St. Petersburg for the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The St. Petersburg streetscape had acquired a specifically homosexual geography by the 1870s. The new capital's main thoroughfare, Nevskii Prospekt, had reportedly been a place for "pederastic depravity" as early as the 1830s, although this was evidently within the context of traditional mutual male eros. Especially notorious was the Passazh (Passage), a covered gallery completed in 1848 connecting the busy Nevskii with another contact point, Mikhailovskaia (now Iskusstvo) Square. This central, public arcade of shops proved ideally suited, especially in the winter, for the discreet pursuit of same-sex liaisons. By the 1860s, the Passage was already attracting blackmailers who preyed on the men picking up available youths in its upper reaches. The Mikhailov gang, a group of accomplished extortionists caught in 1875, was well known to the operators of nearby Dominic's Restaurant and of the billiard hall located inside the Passage itself. In the late 1880s or early 1890s, a nameless individual penned an elaborate denunciation of St. Petersburg's tetki (literally "aunties," a term describing men whose sexual inclinations were primarily oriented toward men; tetki were frequently the clients of men selling sex). He noted that "On Sundays in the winter tetki stroll in the Passage on the top gallery, where cadets and schoolboys come in the morning; at around six in the evening, soldiers and apprentice boys appear." \ \ By the late 1880s, the pavements of Nevskii from Znamenskaia Square to the Anichkov Bridge (both locations where public toilets were reportedly used for making contacts) and on toward the Public Library and the Passage formed a promenade visible to initiates. This was apparently the city's most enduring homosexual cruising ground, with participants reporting encounters into the 1910s and 1920s. Seasonal favorites were the exhibitions and fairs held in the Mikhailovskii Ma-ne'ge (now the Winter Stadium). Prerevolutionary Shrovetide fairgrounds, with their balagany (amusement booths and crude temporary theaters) erected in the nearby Field of Mars (Marsovoe pole), were reportedly stalked by some tetki looking for young spectators to corrupt. Wednesdays saw a gathering of upper-class tetki at the ballet performances of the Mariinskii Theater. A similar class patronized restaurants, with their private dining rooms, discreetly (if sporadically) serving as meetings places for "pederasts." The Palkin Restaurant, located at 47 Nevskii Prospekt, which was the same building that housed the notoriously homosexual Prince Meshcherskii's reactionary Grazhdanin newspaper, was a busy gathering spot in the late 1880s. \ \ Saturdays were reserved by some who sought "apprentice boys" or youths from the "lower orders" at the more plebian amusements of the Cinizelli Circus. The embankment of the Fontanka Canal and the gardens adjoining the circus remained hubs of male prostitution into the 1920s. By 1908, one jaundiced critic was able to map the daily routine for "an entire band of suspicious young people," the male prostitutes he judged to be part of the "little homosexual world." In the mornings they gathered in the garden adjoining the circus that served as a dog run, then moved on to Nevskii Prospekt and the Cafe´ de Paris in the Passage during the afternoon, and returned to the Fontanka Embankment or the Tauride Gardens to attract clients in the evening. The critic's observations about the availability of male lovers (some for hire) in the Tauride Gardens are confirmed in Mikhail Kuzmin's diary and his correspondence with Val'ter Nuvel'. \ \ If most of these cruising paths centered on or around Nevskii Prospekt, with the infamous Passage and the Cinizelli Circus as their hubs, other places were important for civilian males seeking sex with military men. According to the anonymous citizen who denounced the capital's tetki in the late 1880s or early 1890s, a busy fair-weather spot served this trade near the Peter and Paul Fortress: \ \ \ In the summer the tetki gather almost daily in the Zoological Garden, but their assemblies are especially populous on Saturdays and Sundays, when soldiers come from their quarters and when Junker cadets, regimental choirboys [polkovye pevchie], cadets, gymnasium pupils, and apprentice boys have the day off. The soldiers of the L[ife]-Gu[ard] Mounted Regiment, cavalry guards, and both Urals and Ataman Cossacks come to the Zoological Garden solely for the purpose of earning a few twenty-kopek pieces without any labor on their part. They know all the tetki to see them, and so--a soldier, passing one of them, glances significantly at him and goes off in the direction of the water-closet, checking to see if the tetka is following him. If he does, then he [the soldier] pretends to see to his bodily functions, and tries to show off his member [chlen]. The tetka stands next to him and if the member is really big, he feels it with his hand and pays the soldier twenty kopeks.\ \ \ \ In the course of an evening the tetka conducts several such probings and, having chosen a member to his taste [vybrav sebe chlen po vkusu], he sets off with the soldier to the nearest bathhouse, where he uses him in the anus, or conversely, the soldier uses the tetka that way, for which he would receive three to five rubles from him.\ \ \ Tetki were also to be found strolling along Konnogvardeiskii (Horse Guards, now Profsoiuznyi) Boulevard, usually earlier in the day. This street, with its barracks and riding school for the eponymous regiment, was conveniently located for escorting young recruits to the nearby Voroninskie and other bathhouses. Soldiers who enjoyed sex with men continued to meet each other on Nevskii Prospekt during the world war and the 1917 revolution, and one male prostitute reported that in the 1920s, Aleksandr Gardens was a good place to meet "old soldiers" in the summertime. The local subculture celebrated the availability and beauty of the cultivated young male body in uniform. Meanwhile, the perennial reality of low military pay meant that some soldiers and sailors in the northern capital continued to offer sex in exchange for cash or other considerations well into the 1930s. \ \ The most singular institutions of St. Petersburg's prerevolutionary homosexual subculture were those bathhouses that became places of resort for the tetki and their male friends. In the bathhouse, the traditional masculine indulgence of same-sex eros confronted and mixed with an emerging homosexual subculture. The proliferation of voices describing bathhouse homosexual relations reflects this confrontation. In 1906, the poet and diarist Mikhail Kuzmin signaled the place of the bathhouse in Russia's urban homosexual subculture in Kryl'ia (Wings), his notorious novel celebrating a young man's coming out. Simultaneously, foreign apologists for homosexuality in the modern, Western sense, sang the praises of the Russian bath as a place of particular oppor-tunity. Meanwhile, outsiders decried the influence of an identifiable minority of males abusing the traditions of bathhouse sociability. Critics also voiced concern about male prostitution in the baths. In the wave of sex-themed journalism following the 1905 revolution, lurid descriptions appeared of bathhouses as virtual male brothels. St. Peters-burg's Znamenskie Baths near the square of the same name (today's Vosstanie Square) supposedly catered to the "little homosexual world": \ \ \ Hardly do you penetrate this "cloister" but the massive figure of bath attendant Gavrilo, famous in the homosexual sect, approaches with a ducklike waddle. Gavrilo is an obese man of forty to forty-five with an ugly, repulsive face and an obsequious look that bores into your soul. This "gentleman" doesn't shrink from offering you his "services" on the spot or those of somebody else . . . Gavrilo will bring you an album of photographic pictures where all these homosexual "Frinas" and "Aspazias" are depicted, dandyfied and decorated, some even in women's finery . . . You just point to one of these "miniatures" in the album, and in about five minutes the "original" is at your disposal. And incidentally, you are immediately informed of the price.\ \ \ This 1908 satire of the "little homosexual world" likened the baths to the familiar tsarist institution of the licensed (heterosexual) brothel. The representation of the male "Frinas" and "Aspazias" (aliases employed by female prostitutes) in a photographic catalog, and their presentation as feminine, may have been exaggerations for the amusement of readers rather than actual marketing devices to attract clients. Yet Mikhail Kuzmin's diary recorded a strikingly similar scene in December 1905. He wrote, \ \ \ In the evening I thought I would go to the bathhouse just for style, for pleasure, for purity [chistota] . . . The man who met me at the door, on hearing that I required an attendant, a sheet, and soap, slowly turned and asked, "Perhaps you want a good-looking attendant?"--"No, no."--"Well alright then." I do not know what came over me, for I was not even aroused.--"No, just send an attendant."--"Then I'll send you a good-looking attendant," he said, with a persistent look.--"Yes, please, a good-looking one," I said distractedly, sliding farther downhill. Lowering his voice, he then asked, "Maybe you would like one a little younger?" Thinking a bit, I replied, "I'm not sure."--"Right away, sir."\ \ \ Aleksandr, the young man sent to Kuzmin, "began to wash me unambiguously," and as he did so "he stood too close to me and generally behaved without the slightest shame." The attendant told the poet that he could enjoy himself now and pay his debt later; he hinted that a tip at Kuzmin's discretion would be welcome. \ \ \ After some mutual groping and banter, we began to talk to each other like thieves . . . Aleksandr is twenty-two years old, has been in the bathhouse for eight years, obviously they sent me a professional [ professional ]. He claimed that the manager only told him to "wash" me, that he was not supposed to be my attendant but the others were all sleeping; that they don't go into the private rooms that often, that you can tell from the eyes and manner. And kissing me good-bye, he was surprised when I shook his hand. For the first time he blushed, said, "Thank-you very much," and accompanied me out. With Aleksandr leading me past the ranks of other attendants, already getting up, I did not feel entirely comfortable, as though they all knew what we had done, but despite that I gazed at them more easily and attentively.\ \ \ The perpetually impecunious poet returned in January 1906 to pay off his debt. Kuzmin somehow found the cash to visit Aleksandr repeatedly in spring 1906. At about the same time, a cousin of Tsar Nicholas II, Grand Duke Konstantin Romanov, agonized in his diary about sexual encounters with Petersburg bath attendants who were clearly available on demand. \ \ These vignettes indicate that male sex work was becoming more commercialized. The absence of references to the artel' of male attendants, pooling their earnings from "sodomy," suggests that figures like Gavrilo and the persistent manager encountered by Kuzmin now operated more like Russia's licensed brothel-keepers, who engaged female prostitutes with financial contracts. Youths selling sex, and pimps who organized them, were commodifying the sideline in "sodomy" described by bath attendants a half-century earlier. The frequent mention of baths with private rooms for hire make it clear that commodified privacy in the late tsarist era facilitated both sexual encounters "for pleasure" and those for payment. \ \ The fate of bathhouse mutual male sexuality after 1917 is difficult to establish. The tsarist homosexual subculture had depended in part on the commodification of private spaces, such as bathhouses and res-taurants. Soviet rule brought new constraints on access to this kind of space. Even during the limited capitalism of the New Economic Policy (NEP, 1921-28), when restaurants and baths were available for lease or hire to entrepreneurs, allocation was controlled by functionaries aware of the sexual disorder associated with such establishments. Hotel rooms were, at least nominally, reserved for visitors from out of town (priezzhie) and even heterosexual couples encountered difficulty resorting to them for sex. Reports of organized male prostitution in the bathhouse cease after 1917, but individuals continued to strike up acquaintances and have both voluntary and paid sex either on the premises or after meeting there. In 1927, a sixteen-year-old thief who engaged exclusively in sex with boys told a psychiatrist that he preferred partners from among his fellow besprizornye (homeless youths).\ \ \ \ Continues... \ \ \ \ Excerpted from Homosexual Desire in Revolutionary Russia: the Regulation of Sexual and Gender Dissent by Dan Healey Copyright © 2001 by Dan Healey. Excerpted by permission.\ All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.\ Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site. \ \

List of FiguresAcknowledgmentsList of AbbreviationsIntroduction1Pt. ISame-Sex Eros in Modernizing Russia1Depravity's Artel': Traditional Sex Between Men and the Emergence of a Homosexual Subculture212"Our Circle": Sex Between Women in Modernizing Russia50Pt. IIRegulating Homosexual Desire in Revolutionary Russia3Euphemism and Discretion: Policing Sodomites and Tribades774The "Queer Subject" and the Language of Modernity: Reforming the Law on Same-Sex Love Before and After 19171005Perversion or Perversity?: Medicine, Politics, and the Regulation of Sexual and Gender Dissent After Sodomy Decriminalization1266"An Infinite Quantity of Intermediate Sexes": The Transvestite and the Cultural Revolution1527"Can a Homosexual Be a Member of the Communist Party?": The Making of a Soviet Compulsory Heterosexuality181Pt. IIIHomosexual Existence and Existing Socialism8"Caught Red-Handed": Making Homosexuality Antisocial in Stalin's Courts2079Epilogue: The Twin Crucibles of the Gulag and the Clinic229Conclusion251AppHow Many Victims of the Antisodomy Law?259Notes265Bibliography353Index375