The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia

by Masha Gessen

Four months after the women’s forum, the two American lesbian activists and their Soviet partners held a gay and lesbian film festival and a series of workshops, first in Leningrad and then in Moscow. Mindful of the feminists’ experience, they made backup arrangements in case they lost their venues. But the festival proceeded without incident, in a centrally located “house of culture” in Leningrad and a similarly central movie theater in Moscow. Both venues belonged to the state, but by now they could be rented for a few hundred dollars. The organizers were able to bring into the country reels with gay-themed films, though neither censorship nor criminal penalties for homosexual conduct had been abolished. At the end of the festival, they even rented a restaurant in central Moscow and held the country’s first nonclandestine gay party. By this time, Moscow had a few “cooperative” restaurants—a perestroika-era euphemism for newly legalized private businesses—but this was not one of them: the gay party was held at the Central House of the Workers of the Arts, which for six decades had served the elite who serviced the ideology.