Gay in the USSR

Foreign Policy ^ | Mar 2013 | Nora Fitzgerald

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Many homosexuals were drawn to the promise of Marxism. There was a certain tolerance and even gay liberation in the early years of the Soviet Union, before homosexuality was re-criminalized in 1933 and the community went back underground.

"Gay Soviet history almost doesn’t exist," said Fiks, sitting at a desk in New York’s Winkleman Gallery on a windy Sunday in February. "The older generation didn’t do a lot of talking."

Fiks plucked the title for his exhibit, "Homosexuality Is Stalin’s Atom Bomb to Destroy America," from a 1953 article by Cold War pundit Arthur Guy Matthews. "In the U.S., I really think that the anti-communist and anti-gay crusades coincided and overlapped. The two emerging crusades would reinforce the other," Fiks said.

Two installations focused on one historical figure named Harry Hay, a communist activist who was forced out of the Communist Party and later became one of the founders of the gay rights movement in the United States. In what Fiks calls "a whim of historical irony," Hay appropriated writings of the Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin; he used Stalin’s definition of national minorities to come up with the idea that gay men and women both constitute a minority.

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People praise the likes of Vladimir Putin for pushing back against the onslaught of LGBT movements - but Josef Stalinists, shari'ah Muslims, and Chinese communists are also against. Doesn't make them saints. Hell has many ways of creeping into the world.