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