The Calvert Journal: Photography Moscow Culture Travel Cruising past: photographer Yevgeniy Fiks resurrects Moscow’s forgotten gay history

Homophobia has never been in a “better” state in Russia than it is today. The horrific murder of 23-year-old Vladislav Tornovoy in Volgograd this May — he was raped with a bottle, castrated and stoned — shook the public. But not enough, it seems: little has been done to prevent a repeat. One of the murderers admitted the reason for the killing was the “provocative” dress of the victim and his sexual orientation, which, apparently, “hurts patriotic feelings”. The authorities did have to admit it was a hate crime and to acknowledge Russia’s homophobia problem; but this is a problem that the government themselves have exacerbated with the recent introduction of a new nationwide law “against the propaganda of homosexuality”.[...]

These spaces — the city’s hidden topography of gay life — have recently been brought to light in the work of New York-based Russian photographer Yevgeniy Fiks. A self-proclaimed “post-Soviet artist”, Fiks sees it as his duty to react against the collective amnesia surrounding the Cold War period; previously he commemorated the overlooked history of communism in New York. At first glance, Fiks’s plainly titled new book, Moscow, could be just an ordinary photo album of public places in the Russian capital: we see parks, squares, boulevards, riverside embankments and public toilets. We admire the splendid architecture of the capital, its greenery and its striking constructivist-classicist constructions and we are impressed by the care taken by the Soviet authorities to make even toilets look beautiful. The pictures emanate a sense of peace and silence. But the way in which we see the locations depicted in these photographs is transformed when we learn that each and every one of them was a Soviet cruising ground.

What we suddenly perceive in these pictures is the eye of the original viewer. Yes, there are a lot of public toilets, but we now see these facilities in a different way, as sites that enable spontaneous relations between adults. These prohibited actions had to take place in hiding, away from prying eyes; paradoxically, this was only possible in public. Fiks has ordered the photos chronologically according to the period in which certain haunts were popular, from the Twenties to the Eighties, which means here we’re looking at the complete history of Moscow cruising. But the timescale seems to leave one question unanswered, quite deliberately: what about the years after the transition from communism? Fiks’s photographs seem to distance the author from Soviet, and specifically, Stalinist, times, and to reclaim the public space for a different version of history (not one much promoted in official versions of the Soviet past) and to reclaim homosexuality from today’s horrifically homophobic climate.[...]

More central to contemporary arguments around gay rights are Stalin’s repressions. In fact some commentators argue that the current disputes aren’t strictly between homosexuals and heterosexuals, but are rather products of a conflict between two different versions of homosexuality — “Soviet” and “Western.” After Stalin banned it in the mid-Thirties — a letter of protest written to the Soviet leader by openly gay British communist Harry Whyte is included in Fiks’s book — discourses around homosexuality in Russia became deeply intertwined with the practice of male-only sex, on a huge scale, in the gulag. Prisoners were deprived of any possibility of expressing their sexuality (men and women were imprisoned separately) and all sexual acts were associated with the criminal hierarchy in the camps and the further humiliation of prisoners, especially those in a “passive” role. The consequent taboo attached to homosexual identities prevents them from being seen as something “natural” in Russia.

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The New York Review of Books: Mitch McConnell, Republican Nihilist

Writing for the Review last fall, the American historian Christopher R. Browning said of the Senate majority leader, “if the US has someone whom historians will look back on as the gravedigger of American democracy, it is Mitch McConnell.” In Browning’s view, McConnell is not dissimilar from the German conservative politicians, who in the 1930s brought Adolf Hitler to power, “thinking that they could ultimately control [him] while enjoying the benefits of his popular support.” With Hitler as Chancellor, the conservatives saw their fulsome policy agenda enacted: rearmament, suspension of civil liberties, the outlawing of the Communist Party, and the abolition of labor unions, among other moves. But as they would later find out, controlling the monster they put in power would be something else altogether.[...]

What separates McConnell from other destructive political actors, such as former House Speaker Newt Gingrich and his fellow congressional Republican revolutionaries, or President George W. Bush and his vice president, Dick Cheney, is that McConnell’s political actions are unmoored from ideology and policy. For McConnell, politics is fundamentally about accruing political power for the sole purpose of accruing more political power.[...]

McConnell seemed almost to relish the anger his positions engendered. When reformists began referring to him as Darth Vader, he appeared at a press conference toting a light saber. In playing this part, McConnell earned the gratitude of his fellow Republicans, something that would pay off when he sought to become the party’s leader in the Senate. McConnell would adopt a similar position in 2009 after Barack Obama’s inauguration. He became the public face of opposition to Obama’s policies, as he expertly wielded the Senate’s limitless tools for obstruction and delay to block the new president’s legislative goals. In his willingness to again play the role of villain, McConnell displayed a unique understanding of how modern American politics works: the more liberals hated him, the more Republicans loved him.[...]

There was, however, a political downside to McConnell’s unrelentingly rejectionist approach: it played directly into the hands of the extremists in his own party. Indeed, the Senate GOP’s inflexible opposition to Obama, the venomous attacks of Republican partisans (including questions about Obama’s birthplace and religion), and McConnell’s declaration that “the single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president” gave oxygen to the fledgling Tea Party movement. In 2010, the victory of extremist conservative Republicans in party primaries would help cost McConnell the chance to become majority leader in the Senate (postponing that outcome until 2014).

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The Atlantic: France’s Double Standard for Populist Uprisings

The yellow vests have effectively become a movement of middle-class and lower-middle-class people afraid of slipping further down the economic ladder. The demonstrations began as rural protests, but they now also draw support from cities. Calling the participants the “white working class” is tricky, but it’s become clear that those in the banlieues—which have large populations of several generations from across Africa—haven’t been a major force. And even if those from the banlieues identify with some of the main issues the yellow vests are raising, for the most part, they have not seen themselves reflected in the movement.[...]

But Nordine said he and others from the banlieues haven’t been joining in the Saturday demonstrations, which have often been marred by violence. “If we did that, we’d immediately be stigmatized and people would say, ‘The yellow-vest movement is going to turn into a guerilla war because you’re going to have kids from the suburbs showing up and trashing things,’ ” he said. Nordine didn’t talk about the ethnic makeup of the banlieues, but his remarks point to a recurring frustration: If you’re from “la France profonde”—rural France, largely white France—the demonstrations start a national debate (even if thousands of people have been questioned by police since the start of the yellow-vest protests); if you’re from the banlieues—and most likely of immigrant descent—and take to the streets, the demonstrations are seen as threats to public order.[...]

The banlieues have faced similar problems of unemployment and purchasing power for years. Over decades, they have also become a shorthand for people of color and problems of “integration”—code for a thicket of problems around economics, schools, social mobility, and even Islamic radicalism. These issues have simmered for years, without the kind of media attention that the yellow-vest protests have drawn. In December, a woman from Chanteloup-les-Vignes in Yvelines, a Paris suburb, who identified herself only as Yasmine F., wrote a blog post about why she wasn’t joining the yellow-vest protests. “To have trouble paying for gas means you already need to be able to pay for a car, have a job and degrees, and to get degrees and a job you need to be able to benefit from a better education and not to constantly be the victim of racism, discrimination and disdain from the upper classes,” she wrote. “For me, all those struggles come before the one about rising gas prices.”

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Vox: Why safe playgrounds aren't great for kids

The stereotypical modern playground — with its bright colors and rubberized flooring — is designed to be clean, safe, and lawsuit-proof. But that isn't necessarily the best design for kids.

US playground designers spent decades figuring out how to minimize risk: reducing heights, softening surfaces, and limiting loose parts. But now, some are experimenting with creating risk. A growing body of research has found that risky outdoor play is a key part of children’s health, promoting social interactions, creativity, problem-solving, and resilience.

Some communities are even experimenting with “adventure playgrounds,” a format with origins in World War II Denmark, where bomb sites became impromptu playgrounds. Filled with props like nails, hammers, saws, paint, tires, and wood planks, these spaces look more like junkyards than play spaces — and parents are often kept outside of the playground while children are chaperoned by staff. Now, that question of keeping children safe versus keeping children engaged is at the heart of a big debate in playground design.

Slate: The Troubling Resilience of the Queer Closet

What’s weird about this love affair with the closet is that it is not a structure that queer people hammered together ourselves. With the invention of the homo/hetero binary in the late 19th-century, various forms of persecution and harassment were brought to bear against alleged sexual deviants. As George Chauncey chronicled in his definitive history Gay New York, terms like “leading a double life” or “wearing a mask” arose to describe the sense of being split or divided into multiple selves. Only after 1960 did “the closet” take precedence as the authoritative term. The new metaphor, however, did different work than those it supplanted, in that it summoned a new ideal of total exposure: Out and proud gays would have no “skeletons in the closet,” no secrets, no hiding—total integration of a unified self.[...]

So, what’s wrong with using the closet as the defining architecture of the queer experience? For one thing, coming out—out of the dark, solitary closet and into the sociable light—makes queerness responsible for clarity of expression to others. By its very nature, queerness should reside in a sea of ambiguity, unstably morphing through androgynous and fluid forms, as brilliantly depicted in Virginia Woolf’s novel of spontaneous gender transformation, Orlando. By contrast, acquiescing to the demand to come out entails a tacit willingness to be pinned down, defined, made intelligible—in effect, to halt and freeze queerness at the very instant of its assertion. I’d prefer that we allow queer exteriors to more closely resemble, by analogy, Joan Crawford’s disposition: icy, enigmatic, alluring—but never transparent or laid bare. The requirement to come out places a particularly cruel burden on trans people, who endure enormous pressure to explain and categorize themselves in binary ways that are understandable and comforting to outside audiences. Katie Couric’s notorious shift from inquisitive to inquisitional in interviewing transwomen Carmen Carrera and Laverne Cox in 2014 stemmed from the closet-based assumption that an instance of “coming out” entitles straight people to audit queer bodies.[...]

To some extent, our love of invoking the closet could just be a defensive posture. But I suspect, too, a more troubling motive, for the closet gets wielded by queer people themselves to cement status. To imagine queer people as beginning in the closet, from infancy if not birth, permits a smug smirk among the victoriously “out”—in the advertising parlance of Virginia Slims, you’ve come a long way, baby!—who laud themselves in contrast to the cowards still shut up in the closet. Let’s be real: Flipping on the gaydar isn’t typically some humane outreach of sympathy. More often, it’s a catty exercise in penetrating the pretenses of closet-trapped queers. To makes matters worse, scouring youth for latent signs of queerness does the dirty work of policing gender expression, which in turn breeds paranoia as closeted queer folks strain to repress telltale signs of their secret—the lisp of a dude’s s that lingers too long, or fingernails trimmed to dykish bluntness. The closet turns the queer gaze prosecutorial.

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Haaretz: Poland vs Israel: Who's Really Winning the War Over Holocaust History?

Last year’s conflagration was primarily the fault of Poland, which passed its ill-conceived memory law on the eve of Holocaust Remembrance Day, and then compounded this with insensitive remarks from senior figures, including Morawiecki’s comments about "Jewish perpetrators" of the Holocaust.

But this time around it is the Israeli side that has set the blaze. The claim by Foreign Minister Israel Katz that Poles "imbibe anti-Semitism with their mother’s milk" was false, essentializing and offensive – not least to the many Poles who risked, and often lost, their lives helping Jews during the war, as well as the many today who devote themselves to protecting and promoting Poland’s Jewish heritage. [...]

The fallout from this could have been contained. Yet instead it was compounded by the Israeli government making no attempt to denounce or distance itself from Katz’s remarks, nor even to rein him in. The very next day he repeated the remarks in another radio interview. The situation was further exacerbated by a slew of commentary in Israeli media that was often uninformed on WWII history and presented further negative generalizations about Poles as a whole.[...]

And this is precisely the problem. These disputes over WWII history bring out the worst elements and attitudes on both sides. They trigger a vicious circle of mutually reinforcing animosity fuelled by competing, one-sided historical memories. The discourse comes to be dominated by the most extreme voices, who have a political or ideological motivation to stir things up.

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Quartz: What Russia wants from the Trump-Kim summit

The US is consulting Russia ahead of the summit, “asking our advice, our views on this or that scenario,” Russian foreign minister Sergey Lavrov told Russian state news organizations yesterday (Feb. 25). Lavrov is reportedly recommending that the US offer “security guarantees” to the North Korean leader to encourage him to denuclearize and has even flown to Vietnam this week as well.

The notion that the US president is taking advice from Vladimir Putin’s government on North Korea is alarming, analysts said. Yet it shouldn’t come as a surprise. Trump has previously demonstrated his willingness to believe Putin over his own US intelligence agencies.[...]

Putin’s overall goals in the region: ease sanctions against North Korea, burnish his government’s image, and make America look weak. Any situation in which Trump offers economic aid or to ease sanctions to the Kim regime, without securing any concrete steps toward denuclearization, would accomplish these steps, analysts said.[...]

Last year, Trump surprised US military officials and his own advisors when he suggested the US stop participating in “war games” with South Korea, an idea he reportedly got from Putin.

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The Guardian: Brutal and dogmatic, George Pell waged war on sex – even as he abused children

As an archbishop in Melbourne and a cardinal in Sydney Pell poured his energies into combating contraception, homosexuality, genetic engineering, divorce, equal marriage and abortion.

He was particularly brutal to gay people. When a wreath was laid outside St Patrick’s Cathedral in Melbourne in memory of gay students in Catholic schools driven to suicide, Pell’s disdain was absolute.

“I haven’t got good statistics on the reasons for those suicides,” he declared. “If they are connected with homosexuality, it is another reason to be discouraging people going in that direction. Homosexual activity is a much greater health hazard than smoking.”[...]

Pell did nothing to curb paedophile priests in his years as auxiliary bishop, though the predations of some of the worst of them were being reported to him. He didn’t know enough, he would claim, and he didn’t have the authority to act. Despite the pleas of parents and teachers, Pell left mad Father Searson, toting a gun and terrifying children, in charge of the primary school in Doveton.

His elevation to archbishop shocked Melbourne Catholics. But he didn’t need to be loved by them. He didn’t need their votes. His authority came from Rome, where he sat on a number of councils policing church doctrine. These were the years the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith worked up fresh hard teachings to revile homosexuals.[...]

If you wanted to build a network of Catholic universities, Pell was your man. If you wanted to save hundreds of millions of dollars that victims of abuse might win in the courts, Pell was your man. If you wanted to block official inquiries into the abuse of children by clerics for as long as humanly possible, Pell was your man.

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The Guardian: Lay Catholics who stay silent are complicit in the church’s failure on abuse

But my parish in south London appears to exist in a parallel universe, and a quick straw poll among friends who (reluctantly) attended mass at their churches at the weekend revealed it was the same in theirs. There were about 70 people at the morning mass I attended. Some of them were very elderly, and maybe deserve some understanding; but others were in their 30s, 40s, 50s. What on earth are they doing, standing up and sitting down by rote, parroting prayers that, in the light of last week’s revelations in Rome, ring so hollow? There was not a word about the horrors from the priest. In his sermon he talked about how lucky we were to be hearing that day’s reading from St Luke’s gospel, since it had last been read at Sunday mass in 2007. The only mention of the churning tumult in our institution came in a prayer read out by a layperson, which called on God to grant “wisdom” to those making decisions in the Vatican about the safety of young people and vulnerable adults.[...]

But there’s one thing we know for sure, and if I’d been a priest saying mass at a Catholic parish last weekend I would have based my sermon on it. Jesus Christ, the founder of the Catholic church, didn’t often get angry. But once or twice he got absolutely furious, and it was always about the same thing: the religious elite, who in his day were the Pharisees. “Do not imitate their actions, because they don’t practise what they preach,” he warned, telling them they were “like whitewashed tombs, which look fine on the outside but are full of bones and decaying corpses on the inside” (Matthew 23 v3, and v27).

If Jesus had been at last week’s abuse summit, he’d have been furious again; and he could have used those same lines. We, the Catholics who still have even a smidgen of faith in anything at the heart of this organisation, now have to be furious, too: we have to force change, and then we have to work out whether there is anything worth preserving in the whitewashed tomb that calls itself the Catholic church.

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