For this reason, there were no laws condemning lesbians or any mention in historical material of women who were persecuted or targeted as a result. The caricature of the female homosexual, complete with masculine characteristics, only appeared late in Greek literature; and during the first century CE of the Imperial Roman era, a few satirical writings appeared which described certain non-standard, “monstrous” behaviors, including lesbianism. Also, the few terms to describe lesbians in ancient Greece (such as
hetairistria
and
tribas
) had pejorative connotations, and any literary discourse on female homosexuality turned lesbians into an abstract, notional figure, set apart from reality.
Finally, the archaic era may have been a short moment where love between women was part of the functioning of the city, but female homosexuality was not a preoccupation for men in ancient Greece, as it was deemed irrelevant to both male power and sexuality; relations between women were also not perceived as equal to those between men. Was this attitude the result of indifference or denial by silence? It is difficult to answer, given the fact that so few women’s voices from the era were heard.
—
Sandra Boehringer
and
Luc Brisson
Brooten, Bernadette J.
Love Between Women: Early Christians Responses to Female Homoeroticism
. Chicago/London: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1996.
Cantarella, Eva.
Selon la nature, l’usage et la loi. La bisexualité dans le monde antique
. Paris: La Découverte, 1991. [Published in the US as
Bisexuality in the Ancient World
. Second edition. New Haven, CT: Yale Univ. Press, 2002.]
Dover, Kenneth J.
Homosexualité grecque
. Grenoble, France: La Pensée Sauvage, 1982. [Published in the US as
Greek Homosexuality
. New edition. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 1989.]
Halperin, David M.
Cent ans d’homosexualité et autres essais sur l’amour grec
. Paris: EPEL, 2000. [Published in the US as
One Hundred Years of Homosexuality, and Other Essays on Greek Love
. New York: Routledge, 1990.]
Winkler, John J.
The Constraints of Desire: Anthropology of Sex and Desire in Ancient Greece
. New York/London: Routledge, 1990.
—Balkans, the; Essentialism/Constructionism; History; Italy; Peril; Sappho; School.
GULAG
Beginning in 1934, tens of thousands of homosexuals were deported to the gulags, the generic name of Soviet penal labor camps, under the auspices of the NKVD (Narodunyy Komissariat Vnutrennikh Del; People’s Commersiat for Internal Affairs), the leading secret state police organization in the Soviet Union, then later the KGB (Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti; Committee for State Security). Earlier, on December 17, 1933, sexual relations between males, which had been decriminalized in the wake of the October Revolution of 1917, were re-criminalized throughout the USSR; on April 1, 1934, Article 154 of the Soviet penal code (which later became Article 121) was introduced, providing for sentences of up to five years in prison or penal camps. From that moment on, Soviet laws regarding homosexuality were entrenched and would not change for decades, until after the end of the Soviet Union in 1991 (homosexuality was decriminalized in post-Soviet
Russia
in May 1993). The experiences of homosexuals in the gulags is very poorly documented. One notes that Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, the Nobel Prize-winning author, did not mention homosexuals in his acclaimed novels about the gulags such as
One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
, no doubt adhering to homophobic Russian Orthodox tradition; the other big names of Soviet gulag literature are also silent on the subject, particularly Varlam Shalamov and Eugenia Ginsburg. The most renowned “121,” as homosexual prisoners in the gulags were known, was the Armenian filmmaker Sergei Parajanov, condemned twice for homosexuality, in 1952 and 1974.
The gulag is important in the history of homophobia for the extreme degradation that prisoners suffered, akin to real sexual slavery. Let’s recall that mass
deportation
to the gulags became a phenomenon in the 1930s and remained so until Joseph Stalin’s death: there were 140,000 zeks (as prisoners were known) in 1930, 1 million in 1935, 2 million in 1941, and close to 3 million in 1950. Throughout the era of the gulags (there were still 900,000 zeks during the 1960s, after the death of Stalin), homosexuality was not uncommon in the camps, at least where prisoners were sufficiently fed to still have a libido. Prisoners were subject to additional harm if they were caught committing a homosexual act; other prisoners would force them to engage in sexual acts, thus making them sexual slaves. Young teenagers deported to the gulags starting in 1935 (youths were eligible for deportation at the age of twelve) were also used as sexual objects (the raping of teenagers in boot camps and preventive detention camps appears to have been frequent). The sexual abuse and rapes were often accompanied by beatings and torture.
According to Eduard Kuznetsov, who was released from the gulags in 1979 after being condemned to fifteen years in camp, many prisoners would engage in homosexual relations; of the eighty-three prisoners with him, eighteen were “passive” and thirty were “active,” although it was commonly believed that only the “passives,”
opouchtchennie
, were considered the true homosexuals. Being identified as an
opouchtchennie
was not necessarily someone that was condemned to the gulags for homosexuality (a “121”) or even someone who considered himself homosexual; it could be a “pretty boy,” a timid person, or even someone who lost a card game and could not pay his debt, or someone who broke the group’s rules. And once named as an
opouchtchennie
, it was irreversible; the tag would follow prisoners from camp to camp. The concept of the
opouchtchennie
, which owes a lot to Russian Orthodox prejudices, has had a negative connotation throughout Soviet history. In the 1930s,
opouchtchennies
were housed in a separate building in the gulag that was managed by a type of “father pimp,” who was supposed to maintain order and protect his “boys.” Later, this relative measure of protection for them disappeared, and the
opouchtchennie
was condemned to live alongside the other prisoners, who would become his abusers. Not only was the
opouchtchennie
subject to death threats and torture, he was also relegated to the lower echelons of the camp hierarchy in terms of jobs (he could only have those jobs no one else wanted) or food (he did not receive any supplements of any sort). His belongings were marked (he was to use special flatware and utensils at meal times). They were also referred to as “goats” and “roosters,” derogatory terms that were the lowest of all
insults
, to the point that if used inappropriately, it could lead to the offender’s murder. Similarly, a “goat” who had concealed his identity and thus been allowed to eat and live alongside other prisoners (the “bosses” and the “bitches”) was deemed to have committed one of the most heinous acts, deserving of death. In this way the gulags clearly aimed to reinforce and sanctify the hierarchical system, as in other closed societies: those in power work to increase their power, while those without renounce their dignity. As acknowledged by Kuznetsov, who was not exempt from homophobia himself, the goat was the voiceless instrument without any sexual rights; it was only during sex that he was not a pariah. Exploiting the social and physiological fragility of homosexual prisoners, the gulag administration often tried to use them as informers. It was common for authorities to threaten such prisoners with allowing their fellow convicts to rape him unless he gave up the information they wanted.
Similar realities were apparent in women’s camps, whose population greatly increased in the 1940s (female prisoners represented less than 5% of the total gulag population in the mid-1930s; this number rose to 25% in 1950). Virile women (referred to as
kobly
, or male dogs) took on masculine names and held dominion over other, more feminine women (
kovyrialki
). The relation was hierarchical as much as it was erotic, and roles were entrenched and could not be changed. Male criminals sometimes succeeded in penetrating women’s camps in order to rape a
kobly
, who then had to commit suicide according to the group’s law.
The first homosexual prisoner of the Soviet gulags to denounce the atrocity of the life for the opouchtchennie was writer Gennady Trifonov. In December 1977, he wrote an open letter to the Literaturnaya Gazeta (which, not unexpectedly, was never published) from his camp in the Ural Mountains: “I have experienced all that can be imagined in horror and nightmare; the situation of gays in Nazi camps was nothing compared to ours. Reduced to the state of animals, we dream of developing a mortal disease to have a few days of rest before death.” Another former prisoner, condemned to three years in a gulag for the crime of homosexuality near the end of the Soviet era, reported that he witnessed the murder of ten homosexuals in the camp, most of them under conditions of extreme savagery. In the gulag at Sverdlovsk, one prisoner was killed by ten fellow inmates who, after raping him, jumped on his head with both feet.
Some Soviets living in exile, such as Mikhail and August Stern for example, saw in the gulag the origin of homosexual culture in Russia. While this is totally wrong, of course, it is certain that the gulag culture provided the basis of what would become the post-Soviet gay culture, marked by fear and
violence
; but its system was also emblematic of the homophobia that remains entrenched in current Russian society. It is telling that gay journalist and writer Yaroslav Mogutin, who had expressed interest in the history of homosexuals in the gulag, was forced to claim political asylum in the United States in 1995.
—Pierre Albertini
Amalrik, Andrei.
Notes of a Revolutionary
. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1982.
Kon, Igor S.
The Sexual Revolution in Russia
. New York: The Free Press, 1995.
Kuznetsov, Ednard.
Lettres de Mordovie
. Paris: Gallimard, 1981.
Mogutin,Yaroslav. “Gay in the Gulag,”
Index on Censorship
24, no.1 (1995).
Stern, Mikhail, and August Stern.
Sex in the Soviet Union
. London: W. H. Allen, 1981.
—Communism; Deportation; Prison; Russia; Violence.
HENRI III
The House of Valois line of the French monarchy came to an end on August 1, 1589, when King Henri III, at the age of thirty-eight, fell under the knife of Jacques Clément, a Dominican monk. Clément became a fanatic as a result of numerous outrageous pamphlets criticizing Henri III, who was abhorred by the Catholic League whose founder, Duke de Guise, was murdered on the king’s orders. Henri III was a Christian who, according to critics, turned satanic by presiding over an inverted world order, a symptom of which—and not the least—was the sin of sodomy.
“Hermaphrodite,” “sodomite,” “bugger”: in the semantic terrain of anti-royal homophobia, there were three levels of slander, referring respectively to unorthodox social behavior, criminal sexual practices, and a threat to Christianity. Memorialist Pierre de L’Estoile reported cases of the king’s public transvestism, including an event where he was dressed as a female Amazon, and a series of celebrations in Blois in 1577, “where he was usually dressed as a woman, opened his doublet and uncovered his throat, wearing a string of pearls and three linen collars … as ladies of the court were then wearing.” Several painted portraits of him depict the famous earring on his left earlobe, especially notable given the austerity of his clothing. In addition, the king frequently wore makeup, used a curling iron on his hair, and was fond of idle entertainments such as cup-and-ball, habits which appeared to many to hint at his homosexuality, but which were adopted by his fawning followers who shared his tastes, sartorial or perhaps even sexual: the famous “
favorites
.” As for his same-sex interests—which the king himself seems to confess when he declares to know how to love only “with extreme”—there are epistolary signs, among them the end of this note addressed to his favorite Caylus: “I kiss your hands with nothing but affection.” One might interpret the
sterility
of his marriage to Louise de Lorraine-Vaudémont in the same manner; Louise loved him deeply, but Henri usually responded with polite indifference. In the end, the king’s stigmatizing behavior was seen to endanger Christianity itself due to its suggestions of sexual and religious heterodoxies; this is apparent given that he was frequently referred to with the insulting epithet “
bougre
” (“bugger”), a term applied to homosexuals: the word
bougre
is a variation of “Bulgar,” in reference to Bogomilism, the first Bulgarian
heresy
that took place in the country in the tenth century. The “Bugger King,” then, is a heretic king, and vice versa. In the context of holy wars, the analogy is intentional, and was frequently referred to at the height of two periods of anti-Henri III propaganda. The first, which occurred at the beginning of his reign, 1574–76), was mostly enacted by Protestants; the second, after he reconciled with them, was instigated by the Catholic League in 1588-89. During this last period, King Henri was regarded the same: as a vain, effeminate sodomite. In one particular characterization, he was visually depicted as a hermaphrodite monster, with teats revealing his feminine lust, a fish’s body, dragon wings expressing his bestiality, and rosary beads in his right hand as a sign of faith—or rather, bad faith, seeing that he conceals his allegiance to the cult of Machiavelli, whose picture appears in the mirror that he holds in his left hand.
Yet, a careful examination of evidence renders this criticism of the king invalid. Cross-dressing was a fashion in the French court, and L’Estoile correctly stated that there were fantasy-based masquerades. The flowery epistolary style of the king’s correspondence, which led to malicious interpretation, was also in keeping with the popular style of the day. As far as the suggestion of relations between the king and his “favorites,” there is no evidence to support it. Beginning in 1585, René de Lucinge, a Savoy diplomat and an ambassador to the court of Henri III, spent his time trying to confirm this suspicion, but he had the assistance of the Catholic League, making his testimony more than suspect. Queen Louise’s inability to produce children was not due to her husband’s abstinence, but the result of an unfortunate miscarriage in 1575, a situation which, according to observers, made the king desperate. Further, during his younger bachelor days, he had engaged in a number of affairs with women, which caused the Queen Mother to say affectionately that he was “a good stallion” whose dalliances should have produced at least one child out of wedlock. In his adulthood, he also engaged in impressive demonstrations of piety by performing acts of contrition, including self-flagellation sessions and exhausting processions. While his adversaries saw only hypocrisy, it is difficult to see any real evidence of heresy, of which homosexuality would be the most important element.