The Gay Gulag. Charlie Bauer PhD. GScene magazine. October 2013

The Gay Gulag.

As I write this Russia ducks and dives with its ideology about all things ‘gay’ based around what people will or won’t be allowed to do at the Sochi Olympics. What’s really interesting is the ghostly spectre of Thatcher’s very own Section 28 on the horizon, prompting the removal of any ‘propaganda’ about ‘nontraditional’ sexual relations around minors.

I still find it remarkable, after all these years that it always leads back to money and church-endorsed primitivism.  Until recently this obsession was only a fixture in the British psyche thanks to the likes of Rebekah Brooks and her ‘Name and Shame’ campaigns, stating that gay men and child abuse somehow walk hand in hand at the edge of the sand together. However, operation Yewtree is still no heterosexual corrective - a witch hunt is a witch hunt, after all. However, all this one-upmanship between Murdoch (phone tapping) the BBC (pedophiles) and the Guardian (protecting whistleblowers) is grinding them all down into the same hole of lies. So where is good honest, informed journalism to be found thesedays?

Since we’re now used to constant lies within our own media, lets bring our minds to the former communist countries constant lying because they can always bend state data. This is also why any information generated by the Russian government must be treated as fabrications. And as the newly ‘emerging’ economic nations crumble, India, Brazil and Russia – we wait, wincing, to see the toll across the board regarding queer rights.

I was first (and last) in Russia in 1997 for three long, miserable months.  On my free days I’d wander around the Gumm store opposite the Kremlin and observe the immaculate storekeepers guarding a single Tefal toaster in a display case.  Back then, this is what new economies represented for this country; a beige toaster. This, to them, was Western aspirationalism – standing by, ready to pounce at consumerism. It was also the time when America was tentatively dipping their toes into the Russian economy. Occasionally, in the Banya, I’d listen to the tales of woe from the American businessmen who’d just managed to hand over every cent of their investment capital to the Siberian Mafia. The entire country, it seemed, was operating a huge scam.  

For two months I researched any form of Gay activity and hit Iron Curtain after Iron Curtain. Eventually, I broke down and pleaded with the receptionist behind the front desk of the Metropol Hotel, where I was interned for duration of my stay.

Since I was a foreigner and paying in dollars, I got special privileges - she winked and

slid me a piece of paper, telling me to make sure that I went with a driver.

That Friday I arrived at ‘The Three Monkeys’, Moscow’s, nay Russia’s, first-ever gay club. Situated in the upstairs of what looked like a suburban house, the place was packed with everyone bouncing along to a miasma of retro hits including Dean Martin. What was most interesting, because there was no real ‘queer history’ throughout communism, was the clientele, noticeably that everyone was aged between teens and mid 70’s – a completely even mix. In one corner I saw the hotel receptionist smoking a huge Cuban cigar in the company of a group of older women - cigar smoking apparently a public sign of lesbianism. Images of Beryl Reid and Susannah George swirled around my head and I immediately fell in love with this innocent heaven.

After an evening of being cruised by men of all ages, it occurred to me that there were no real distinctions at The Three Monkeys. Here there were no presold western conventions, no gay histories of colored hankies, no sexual style definitions, no transgender divides, no David Bowie - just a new burgeoning identity and community without a blueprint. It made me think that, no matter how free I thought I was growing up in covert homosexualand of the UK, this was something I’d never seen before. While the 20^th century liberated the west, here the closet stretched out as long as perestroika allowed it.

These people had invented the culture themselves, a culture with no exclusivity or cliques, so prevalent in so-called western sophistication. Here, in Russia of all places, were the freest gay people I’d ever come across. I raised a toast of neat Vodka with the receptionist and felt the most liberated I’ve felt in my life.

Now Russia has resorted back to its dark past. Not its communist past - it would never give up those western aspirations and luxuries for anyone – it needs the money so it’s self deception runs even deeper. Stalin hid genocide behind communism without a care of what the world thought about it. Putin cannot, he and his church funded regime are fully exposed. We hope that, as Russia falls, he will become desperate and start to weaken but no longer at the expense of human rights.

As I write this, yet again the rules have been bent regarding the Sochi winter Olympics. This week Putin is attempting to ease concerns that the new anti-gay laws will be used to punish athletes who display rainbow colors at the event. He now insists that gay people are not discriminated against in Russia, and that he sometimes even awards them with ‘prizes and decorations.’ Then he mentions Tchaikovsky and the fact that they all love his music.

But it’s true, the videos we’re seeing from the garden squares and the Prospekts showing gay and trans people being beaten - but only by local hooligans. But as they say, if you strike the shepherd the sheep will scatter. The sheep in this case will be Putin’s hooligans, hot on the heels of the church.

Click on link below for published version:

The Gay Gulag: Free Russia. Gscene magazine. October. 2013

Burn Hollywood Burn. Bauer. GScene magazine. September 2013

Burn Hollywood Burn


When asked about ‘Realism’ in the movies, the writer Dorothy Parker famously replied “The only ‘ism’ Hollywood believes in is ‘Plagiarism’”

Hiding all things Queer in Hollywood has gone on since the first moving images were recorded. By the time the 1933 Greta Garbo ‘Queen Christina’ movie about a lesbian monarch was released, there was anything but a whiff of dykery to be seen. This was even a full year before they would legally have to put the queer reins on with the hysterically titled 1934 ‘Legion of Decency’ code. Eventually, a plethora of other ‘issues’ were needed to mask Queer themes to keep them away from the ‘easily offended’. The problem became how to get around the ‘Homo problem’ and still maintain a high level of drama and persecution.

In the movie Crossfire, they turned all the queer-bashing and murder from the book into anti-Semitism. Same thing, apparently. Same with ‘The Lost Weekend’ when Ray Milland morphed from a man wrestling with his sexual identity, into that of a raging alcoholic - well, if the glove fits… Thank goodness we live in more evolved times.

Isn’t it great that we now have movies like ‘Milk’ and ‘Brokeback Mountain’ to finally weigh up those old queer scores? Isn’t it groovy that the mainstream has finally embraced Queer culture? And how swell it is when films like ‘Malcolm X’ fore-front issues of contemporary black identity and remind the world that the struggle is far from over. And that ‘Shindlers’ List’ is actually an eternal reminder of what happens when the hatred of a single race acquires a political platform?

I actually think that all these films should be part of an enforced global school curriculum to keep all the haters and revisionists at bay. Unless there is ever going to be a Gay Nation of Islam remake of Malcolm X, that is.

And I’m not saying that boardroom Hollywood is homophobic. Not xenophobic, sexist, racist, anti-Muslim either. But Hollywood has never been the pioneer of the underdog. The saying goes that there is no ‘Pink’ dollar’ in Hollywood, and no ‘Black’ dollar either. In Hollywood there is only THE dollar, and whoever walks in the door with it gets to stay. And when there is no money honey, there is no Hollywood selling someone’s idea of freedom. And so Hollywood falls.

Since the Internet has taken hold, Hollywood has become nothing more than a slow money grab - just take a look at the garbage it churns out today. The only bonus being that, since Hollywood no longer controls distribution, (hurrah to Netflix) other narratives are free to spread. Great for us, sad for the executives who now have to find someone else to fleece.

In the current post-capitalist period, Hollywood has even more to get it just ‘right’ - the right combination of sex, violence, ambiguity etc. so that they can get the maximum audience into the cinema seats. The real prize is getting an audience where grandpa takes grandson to the cinema – meaning that the product can be sold to everyone in between. But increasingly, if any films don’t fill these quadrants, i.e. have ‘minority subjects’ like Queers in them - then they just don’t get financed. Unless Matt Damon agrees to star, that is. This is why there’s so much shite at your local Multiplex and why Lucas and Spielberg have been freaking out stating that; if a few more $200 million movies fold, then it’ll be the end of $200 million dollar movies. Bring it on, I say.

But it’s not only about the Dorothy Parker plagiarism issues and stealing of ideas - it’s also the ‘normalizing’ of those ideas where the damage really lies. Let’s face it if Hollywood could get away with turning Nelson Mandela white, they’d book Leonardo DiCaprio in advance.

Even in its demise, Hollywood is still viewed as being all about good ideas and a platform for the people whose voices have been suppressed. Realistically any real trace of this went away with the blacklist. And I’m not being hypothetical here.  In addition, a colleagues serialized novel, ‘The man who,’ has been withdrawn from this magazine for ongoing legal reasons. This ‘gay’ story written ten years ago (and lifted five years later) has become the latest chapter of heterosexualised Hollywood. Yes, the gay sperm donor and all the complications surrounding him all those years ago, has now become not only straight but indeed anal – if only to get more bums on seats. (Make your own decision whether you prefer the ‘homosexual’ book or the ‘heterosexual’ film later this year). But either way thank god it will be one of the last Hollywood movies you’ll probably ever see. Besides the slated remake of ‘Lassie’ which goes into production next year, that is.

When I say that Hollywood has lost control of their distribution model to the internet, read it as everyone else’s ‘artistic freedom’. It means any of us can make a movie that has a chance of becoming a hit. And there are enough sassy, queer, off-Hollywood films in production - Michael Urie’s ‘Such Good People’ springs to mind - to keep us all going. So, as the studios struggle to keep up the heterosexual front end, the queers are doing what we know best – using the back door. For those at the top, it’s well and truly over because there’s finally a drive from the ‘bottom up’ and sometimes, as we all know, that hurts like hell. So, let’s welcome the new underdog movies that are surfacing, offering us all a different ‘Queer.’

To read the magazine version click the link below:

BURN HOLLYWOOD BURN. BAUER. GSCENE MAGAZINE. SEPTEMBER 2013