S PORT ING H OMONAT IONALISM : R USSIAN H OMOPHOBIA , I MAGINAT IV E G EOGRAPHIES & THE 2014 S OCHI O LYMPIC G AMES Fred Joseph LeBlanc1 British comedian Stephen Fry published an open letter to British Prime Minister David Cameron and the International Olympic Committee comparing the Russian Federation’s recent homophobic laws to Nazi Germany and calling for a ban on the 2014 Olympic Games in Sochi, Russia. This essay suggests homonationalist Russophobia allows Western queer citizens, who often are denied full equal rights in their own countries, to enact both national and transnational belongings in the vilification of Russian policy. This paper suggests Russia’s 20th and 21st de- and re- criminalisations of homosexualities can be viewed as protection against a foreign threat within its own project of nation-building and focuses on media that (re)produce homonationalist, Western imaginative geographies that celebrate the multiculturalism, diversity, and sexual liberalism of gay- friendly North America and Western Europe whilst (re)configuring Russia as backwards and homophobic, and whose gays and lesbians need Western-style liberation. K E Y WO R D S : Russia, queer, LGBT rights, homonationalism, Sochi Olympics “The whole of Russian culture is based on resistance to something. And it is clear that if there is nothing to resist then the culture disintegrates.” - Hilary Pilkington and Elena Omelchenko (2002: 201) On 7 August 2013, celebrated British actor Stephen Fry published on open letter to the United Kingdom’s Prime Minister David Cameron and the International Olympic Committee (IOC) on his website, which was subsequently republished by newspapers around the world. In the letter openly gay Fry reprimanded Russian President Vladimir Putin’s administration for passing recent legislation that outlaws propaganda that promotes non- traditional (that is, gay and lesbian) sexual relationships to minors, comparing the move to Nazi Germany’s treatment of sexual minorities, and called for a boycott of the 2014 Winter Olympic Games to be held in Sochi, the Russian Federation (hereafter simply Russia). He 1 School of Sociology, Gender & Social Work, University of Otago, Dunedin, New Zealand Sociology Association of Aotearoa New Zealand Annual Conference 2013 LeBlanc 1 suggested the 2014 Winter Olympics be held instead in Lillehammer, Norway, the site of the 1994 Games, or, curiously, Utah, the US state that hosted the 2002 Games but whose NBC- affiliated TV station KSL-TV refused to play the network’s situation comedy The New Normal, whose plot revolves around a monogamous gay couple using a surrogate to build a family. Three weeks after Fry’s letter, American gay activist Dan Savage, perhaps best known for the It Gets Better video campaign and his recent call to boycott Russian vodka two months earlier, told Radio Free Europe, “I visited Moscow in 1990 and met with gay people there. And it just breaks my heart that they were so full of hope for their futures and for the progress that they hoped their country would make as it joined the civilised world” (2013). Certainly the treatment of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) people in Russia, and indeed most of the former socialist bloc, is problematic, with even incremental changes being met with large scale opposition (Holzhacker, 2012). Certainly the bans on “homosexual propaganda” throughout various Russian oblasts and the 2012 law banning gay pride parades for one hundred years evoke gloom for queer kin. And certainly the reports of violence against gays and lesbian, both at protests and merely walking in the street, are disturbing. There are a number of reasons for the West to advocate a boycott of the Russian Games, including, but not limited to: the violation of the rights of the Mari minority, a Finno- Ugric ethnic minority positioned largely around the Volga River, in an attempt to force them to assimilate to Russian culture; changes in political party registration to dissolve parties representing small ethnic groups, abuses of the Roma, colloquially known as gypsies, that are ignored by the police; discrimination against women that refuse to wear headscarves in the Chechen Republic; murders of Central Asian and Far East minorities downgraded to hooliganism; non-Russian Orthodox religions having difficulties in registering, renting premises, and organising meetings with foreign representatives of their faith (who are increasingly refused visas); the 2002 Law on Extremism for its impact on religious minorities, particularly the Muslim community, by allowing the criminalisation of a wide spectrum of speech and assembly; or Moscow co-opting the Belorussian and Ukrainian governments. Why now, why gay and lesbian rights? This essay at no point wishes to be apologist, but it reads Western responses of Russian homophobia through the theory Jasbir Puar terms homonationalism, a “collusion between homosexuality and American[/Western] nationalism that is generated both by national rhetoric of patriotic inclusion and by gay, lesbian, and queer subjects themselves” (2006: 67). Homonationalism, she describes, is “an exceptional form of national heteronormativity [that] is now joined by an exceptional form of national homonormativity” (2007: 2). While Puar’s work focused on the always already racialised and sexualised terrorist body, the ways in which Western sexual exceptionalism is celebrated as proof of a progressive Western Europe/North America can be used explore the ways in which homonationalist Russophobia allows Western gay and lesbian citizens, who often are denied full equal rights in their own countries, to recite liberal, sexually progressive, national, and transnational scripts in the vilification of Russian policy that renders Russia, as Savage Sociology Association of Aotearoa New Zealand Annual Conference 2013 LeBlanc 2 suggests above, uncivilised. This essay 1) describes the de-, re-, and decriminalisation of homosexuality in Russia and how it is constructed through historically specific discourses, and 2) explores homonationalist politics through LGBT and mainstream media that privileges Western modes of visibility politics that assume superior Western LGBT activisms can be easily and successfully translated to Russia. Q U EE R ING R U S S IA ? The rise and fall (and subsequent rise and fall) of LGBT rights in Russia seems to be multifaceted, often contradictory, and frequently “uncivilised.” Russian linguist Brian James Baer (2009) notes that Russia remains a very normative culture, due mostly to its history of authoritarian rule from the tsars to Communists, to post-Soviet administrations. Under tsarist rule, consensual sex between two men was punishable under the Criminal Code, which forbade the “unnatural vice of sodomy,” typically resulting in exile to Siberia. Despite the variety of “unnatural” acts that describe sodomy, itself an umbrella term of non-procreative acts, only male penetrative-anal sex (м�?желож�?тво) was punishable (Healey, 1997). The limited scope of sodomy was due to the Military Articles of 1716, fashioned upon other European armies’ codes and focussing on maintaining the integrity of Peter the Great’s army, was extended to an overall ban on consensual sodomy in the civilian population in 1835. The post-revolutionary Soviet government decriminalised homosexuality in 1922, convinced that neither law nor morality should discipline homosexuality – that was the role of medicine through the growing fields of endocrinology and sexology, though Alexander Kondakov (2008) suggests homosexuality’s absence from the Criminal Codes of 1922 and 1926 was likely due to the belief that homosexuality would disappear along with other bourgeois vices. With Joseph Stalin’s first Five Year Plan, it seemed the struggling economy of the nation required a retraditionalisation of gender roles resulting in, among others, the recriminalisation of sodomy in 1933-34, which sought to contrast Soviets with “Nazi Germany’s �?grey, desiccated faces’, its sickly youth demoralised and corrupted by homosexuality and other illnesses of civilization,” though it has been suggested that the fear of Nazi espionage groups infiltrating homosexual circles in the major cities was a concern (Healey, 2003: 3). While homosexuality amongst men was criminalised, homosexuality amongst women was disciplined not by law, but by medicine, leaving female homosexuality to the realm of reparative psychotherapy (Nartova, 2007). In 1993, post-Soviet Russia decriminalised sodomy once again, ten years before the United States Supreme Court decriminalised sodomy nation-wide in the US via Lawrence vs Texas. The decriminalisation of sodomy was by no means an indication of a more liberal, progressive culture, as, emboldened by the rise of religiosity through the Russian Orthodox Church and nationalism, 2002 and 2007 proposals sought to recriminalise homosexuality and a 2004 proposal attempted to prevent the election of gay legislators. Famously, between 2006 and the time of this writing, ten regions passed laws prohibiting “gay propaganda.” Alexander Kondakov (2012) describes the reaction as follows: Sociology Association of Aotearoa New Zealand Annual Conference 2013 LeBlanc 3  These protest actions were not as massive as the famous Stonewall rebellion in the United States: Russian lesbian and gay public marches gathered no more than a couple of dozen participants. The activists themselves have argued that an “LGBT community” does not exist in Russia; hence there is no one who could support public activism. (175) Francesca Stella (2013) also confirms the lack of a mainstream visible LGBT activism in her research on Moscow Pride parades, stating Unlike well-funded and professionalised Western LGBT charities focusing on lobbying for equal rights, Moscow-based organisations did not actively seek public visibility or pursue an openly political agenda. To some extent this focus reflected a lack of resources: these initiatives were largely self-funded and received no endorsement or financial support from the local authorities, relied mainly on the work of activists and volunteers, and often shared their premises with other charities or commercial organizations. But keeping a low profile also emerged as a deliberate strategy to avoid confrontation and attracting too much attention. (468) Additionally, in 2005 GayRussia’s Nikolai Alekseev announced his intention to create Russia’s first Gay Pride parade in 2006. Stella argues that it “represented an overtly political and very visible claim to public space, quite unlike any of the initiatives previously organised” and failed to get domestic support from Moscow-based LGBT organisations and relied on Western support, increasing the fear of Western political encroachment (ibid.: 470). Russia had always been the centre of what Daniel Healey calls a geography of perversion; to the East was uncivilised debauchery, while to the West was a decadent bourgeois sexuality, which “permitted and permits Russians to imagine their nation as universally, naturally, and purely heterosexual” (2001: 253). And as socialism was meant to free post-revolutionary Russian society from the vices of Western, bourgeois society, any continued presence of such decadences was problematic under strict Soviet rule. Oddly enough, Thomas Harrison suggests that the Bolsheviks were actually responsible for the closest socialism has come to sexual liberation, even gay liberation, following the establishment of the Soviet Union. The age of consent for voluntary homosexual relations was lowered to 14 and the 1922 criminal code removed legal restrictions on most sexual relations and that “sex crimes were defined as the violation of an individual’s �?life, health, freedom, and dignity,’ not as specific sexual acts,” (2009: 19) which helped make the rest of the world see the Soviet Union as a nation of godless heathens where anything goes in the bedroom. Harrison argues that this was “a major accomplishment at a time when the maximum sentence for sodomy ranged from five years in Germany to life imprisonment in England” (ibid.: 20). In keeping with European tradition, the medicalisation of perversion entered Russian discourse in the late 19th Century and the sexology of perversion was important to post- revolutionary Russia. While endocrinology and sexology sought to understand the nature of the (always male) homosexual’s perversion, the role medical discourse played in understanding early Soviet homosexuality is seen through 1928’s Five-Year Plan in which, Sociology Association of Aotearoa New Zealand Annual Conference 2013 LeBlanc 4 “it seemed to those medical experts who thought about the issue that the loyal, hard-working individual homosexual was still a harmless figure on the social landscape. Medicine’s role was to help that person accept himself so as to boost his productivity” (Healey, 2002: 359). While men committing homosexual acts were arrested and convicted of sodomy, the USSR had a tendency to not report crimes in an effort to show the superiority of the Soviet model, which, the Party boasted, had ultimately fixed society and virtually ended crime; Soviet citizens remained mostly unaware of homosexuality and the number of convicted homosexuals. The censorship of homosexuality would come to end in the late 1980s during perestroika, but in a social sphere wherein homosexuality was almost completely invisible, Baer notes that The sudden appearance of homosexuality in the midst of Russian society incited denunciations of Western influence as well as Spenglerian interpretations of Russian history, in which homosexuality, imagined in terms of effeminacy and emasculation, appeared as a symptom – and a metaphor – of the decline of post-Soviet Russia in general and of the post-Soviet male in particular. (2009: 2) In discussing the Russian crisis of masculinity, Elena Zdravomyslova and Anna Temkin argue that the normative Soviet masculinity, which posited men as soldier, protector, and patriarch, had become unattainable in the late Soviet period and that the values underlying the model of hegemonic Soviet masculinity were never placed in doubt, but at that point adhering to them seemed senseless. Times had changed; no one was encroaching on the motherland; women and children needed no protection from anyone; and Soviet ideals were threadbare. (2013: 50) For most Russians, in fact, homosexuality was a post-Soviet phenomenon, a Western encroachment upon an innocent, heterosexual Russia that was trying to rebuild itself. The Western model of homosexuality, Baer argues, “has become a convenient symbol of Western cultural imperialism” (ibid.: 6). He notes that “the invisibility of homosexuality appears as a specific threat to heterosexual men, who may be the object of homosexual desire and from whose ranks, it would seem, new homosexuals are culled” (Baer, 2009: 47). Importantly, this configures male-male relations as immediately suspicious, seemingly justifying homophobia’s sexual paranoia. Early post-Soviet gay activism in Russia, largely funded by the West and assuming a translatable Western sexual ontology, were based on a politics of visibility, as they had been for decades in the West. However, for over half a century the Soviet state “interfered in every aspect of its citizens private life, including the bedroom” leading many gays and lesbians to prefer secrecy to Western-style visibility politics that could lead them once again to State legislative discipline of their sexual lives (Baer, 2009: 12). Not surprisingly, then, Nadya Nartova (2007) explains that in the late 1990s gay and lesbian politics shifted from addressing mainstream heterosexual culture to forming gay and lesbian communities. As an interviewee told journalist David Tuller: I don’t want to fight for the rights of lesbians - they never repressed lesbians here because no one ever knew that they existed. No, the problems for lesbians only start Sociology Association of Aotearoa New Zealand Annual Conference 2013 LeBlanc 5  when they fight for their rights. Because now the Russian public knows the word. They know that lesbians exist. (1997: 61) Concomitantly, trying to create a national identity after the collapse of the USSR and with the resurgence of the Russian Orthodox Church, the emerging trends of globalisation and retraditionalisation in post-socialist East Europe provide a way to understand how shifting political paradigms results in the manifestation and scapegoating of queers. Irene Dioli explains that new discourses of nationalism excluded gender and sexual minorities from national identity: Indeed, especially during the nineties, homosexuality was labelled as a foreign import: with the beginning of LGBT activism, often supported by Western European organisations, nationalists were able to use discomfort with non-standard sexuality to amplify hostility to national and ethnic others. (2009: 4) Nationalism, then, becomes a process of active heterosexualisation and ethnic (local, Russian) purity. As Dana Heller argues, “resistance to the West continues to serve as a force that holds Russian culture together, a resistance that has strengthened with the disappearance of the Soviet state as principle antagonist” (2007: 201). With the disappearance of the Soviet state as the principle enemy to Russians, Russia sought an easy scapegoat to underpin the performativity of the nation. Baer echoes this sentiment, noting that in Russia “homosexuality appears as an especially insidious threat precisely because it is not always visible; that is, homosexuals can pass as straight” (2009: 46). However, even when homosexuals “pass as straight,” the heteronationalist project can quickly come undone unless a new strategy, such as the West’s homonationalism and its inclusion of specific types of nation-friendly homosexualities, is set in place. P ER FO R M IN G W ES TE R N H O M O N A TIO N A LIS MS How had we gotten Russian queerness wrong? For most of the West, Russian homosexuality remained as hidden as Soviet homosexuality was to Russians. Until recently, what little the West did know was largely via occasional reports of discrimination and violence in the gay press and the Russian “lesbian” popular music duo, t.A.T.u, consisting of teenagers Lena Katina and Yulia Volkova. Dana Heller remarks that t.A.T.u’s “faux-lesbian pop eroticism” was a “productive flashpoint of East-West misreading and failed translation” (2007: 195). Though the band and their manager, Ivan Shapovalov, had raised the ire of Russian conservatives, most of Russia saw the queer gimmick as entirely disengenuous, thus freeing Katina and Volkova from the shackles of a lesbian identity; it was only in the West that their shtick was considered possibly real. Heller comments, I believe that t.A.T.u. is symptomatic of the paradoxical forms of contemporary Russian culture that illuminates at the level of literary production. It is symptomatic in the sense that their performance of lesbian desire, widely criticised as hollow and unnatural, lies somewhere between the ostensible depth of longing and the parodic inversion of that longing. �?Illicit eroticism’ is reversed in the very instance of its staging, rendered null and bland. (207) Sociology Association of Aotearoa New Zealand Annual Conference 2013 LeBlanc 6 For Russians, actually, t.A.T.u was meant to be a critical statement on the girl-on-girl fantasies of dirty old men; for the West they suggested a liberal Russian culture that would embrace a lesbian pop group. Despite Russia sending the band to represent their country in 2003’s Eurovision Song Contest, it is difficult to suggest they represented a growing acceptance of homosexuality when Volkova expressed her opinion on homosexuality: “It is kind of a sickness” (ibid.: 206). Russian homophobia has reached the world stage precisely because of the 2014 Olympics. Amidst progressive legislation in the West and North America, including gay marriage and the US’s repeal of the Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell military policy and anti-sodomy laws, the attention the 2014 Olympic Games is giving to Russia seems like an ample time to discuss displeasure with internal Russian politics, at a time when the whole world would be looking at the Olympic host. It is also a politically useful time for the imaginative global LGBT community to demonstrate national and transnational ties against the goliath Russian homophobia. As Puar notes it is through imaginative geographies produced by homo-nationalisms, for example, that the contradictions inherent in the idealisation of the United States as a properly multicultural heteronormative but nevertheless gay-friendly, tolerant, and sexually liberated society can remain in tension. (2007: 39) Put another way, the West can idealise itself as progressive and liberal against a foreign culture, in this case Russia, despite the inability for some Western states to extend full rights to LGBT subjects. The insistence of one’s nation’s “gay-friendly, tolerant, and sexually liberated society” enacts pro-national, pro-Western, and anti-Othering scripts that continually (re)produce the Other as intolerant, sexually repressed, and uncivilised. For Puar, that Other is Islam; in 2013 Russian homophobia seems to have momentarily trumped Arab homophobia in the media’s discussion. Pitting liberal Western sexual ontologies against the homophobia and heterosexual fundamentalism of Russia is a useful pro-Western strategy, since “as homonationalism goes global, moreover, it undergirds [Western] imperial structures through an embrace of a sexually progressive multiculturalism justifying foreign intervention” (Puar, 2013a: 336). Though the current intervention with Russia is cultural and not militaristic, it demonstrates that “the gay and lesbian human rights industry continues to proliferate Euro- American constructs of identity (not to mention the notion of a sexual identity itself) that privilege identity politics, �?coming out,’ public visibility, and legislative measures as the dominant barometers of social progress” (ibid.: 338). Homonationalism, however, can undermine queer citizenship from within. Those that do not recite the correct or preferred scripts that combines nationalism with LGBT politicking demonstrate the tensions of the homonationalist project. Figure skater Johnny Weir, known less for his 6th place finish at the 2010 Olympic Games and three US national titles than for his flamboyance that caused Canadian broadcasters to question his gender on air and suggest he skate in the Ladies category, spoke out against a boycott of the games. CBS News’ Brian Montopoli reported that Sociology Association of Aotearoa New Zealand Annual Conference 2013 LeBlanc 7  Unlike openly gay speed skater Blake Skjellerup of New Zealand, who has vowed to wear a gay pride pin if he makes it to Sochi, Weir does not plan to broadcast his sexuality in Russia in a challenge to the law. He will not wear a rainbow flag or a “pin of two men kissing,” he said; if he performs well, he will not kiss his husband sitting in the stands. “I can kiss him when I get to my hotel,” said Weir. (2013) Russian-born Jewish gay porn entrepreneur Michael Lucas wrote an opinion piece for Out Magazine, called Weir’s CBS News interview “a disgusting ten minutes to watch” and argued that the athlete is merely trying to protect his celebrity status in Russia by accommodating homophobia. He further explained that “the Russians don’t mind token flamers like Weir; what scares them are everyday people who happen to be gay. They’re scared of homosexuality becoming normal,” the way it has in the West (2013). Puar importantly argues that “the national not only allows for queer bodies, but also actually disciplines and normalises them; in other words, the nation is not only heteronormative, but also homonormative” (2007: 50). Effeminate, or “flaming,” gays like Weir are not worthy of national attention, whether American or Russian, unless they are subjects being critiqued against “normal” gays. Thus we can see the neoliberal homonormative construct of gays and lesbians as practically straight people who deserve rights and privileges as people who happen to be gay in private. Michael Lucas, it should be noted, also threatened a donor boycott of the New York LGBT Center when space was rented out to a group fundraising during Israeli Apartheid Week. Noting that Israeli Occupation is a queer issue, Puar (2011) argues that Lucas is guilty of pinkwashing the Palestinian occupation by promoting Israel as a progressive, gay-friendly mecca in the centre of a homophobic Middle East, and shutting down any anti-Zionist responses within the queer community. She previously noted that “Israel’s decision to host World Pride was irritating strategic, as the event would showcase Israel as a tolerant, diverse, and democratic society, further submerging its dismal human rights record” (2007: 16). While she expresses gratitude that some Leftist queer groups have made the Palestinian occupation a queer issue, she laments that “for many Palestinian queers, gaining access to a LGBT Center that has positioned itself as indifferent to their concerns is a minor point in the agenda for political transformation.” The gay press backlash against Weir continued, even as he continually noted the Olympics should not be a political event, but one that showcases and rewards elite athletes. Alex Panisch, reporting for Out Magazine, snarkily responded, “Yeah nothing political about those flags or national anthems or anything” (Panisch, 2013a). Weir is frequently juxtaposed to New Zealand’s Blake Skjellerup, an openly gay speed skater and Olympic hopeful, who Out’s Alexander Belonsky assures the gay readership will “keep it real” in Russia after the out athlete remarks, “I'm not going to tone down or change who I am just because I go to a different country” (2013). Cyd Zeigler’s online Out interview with Skjellerup also provides a weblink to financially support the athlete’s training and Olympic bid to compete, and features a locker room photo of him holding a pin with the 2012 Olympic logo set against a rainbow flag, promoting the image of a young, White gay man whose response to Olympics meets the Sociology Association of Aotearoa New Zealand Annual Conference 2013 LeBlanc 8 requirements for the Western-style gay activisms that are privileged in the gay press. Though both athletes have emphasised the role of the IOC creating a peaceful athletic forum where any athlete can be rewarded for his or her hard work, what matters is the ways in which one athlete, effeminate and pro-Russian, is configured as worthy of ridicule and the other, butch and refusing to re-enter the closet in Sochi, is configured as a heroic gay athlete, as homonationalist. In an online blog that recognised a boycott of the 2014 Sochi Games was highly unlikely, UK gay magazine Gay Times (2013a) remarked “The idea of a boycott has seemingly been kicked into the long grass, but whatever you believe, more can be done to apply pressure to the Russian government in the run-up to Sochi 2014.” Gay Times still focussed on the Olympic Games as a rallying point for the global LGBT community. The December 2013 issue of Gay Times, featured heterosexual British Olympic diver Jack Laugher, who would not even be competing in the Winter Games, as its cover story. Asked about the Olympics Games being in Russia, he tells interviewer Benjamin Butterworth, “I think they’re [Russians] absolutely disgusting; I really do not believe in their laws, I’ve read all about it and seen it on the TV and they’re so wrong” (2013: 49). The feature of a pro-gay heterosexual athlete seeks to underpin the homophobia that runs rampant in sport, but also constructs the importance of the liberal heterosexual, the idealised heterosexual affected by gay politicking, in the LGBT rescue narratives of Russian sexuality. In the same issue, Darren Scott asks the 1980s gay pop star Boy George if he supports a boycott of the Sochi Games, demonstrating the centrality of the issue to all queers, athletes or not (ibid., 38). In fact, the attention paid to Russia in the mainstream LGBT press is not limited to the Olympics, either. In an interview with Dmitry Oskin, the openly gay star of the UK reality show Meet the Russians, Gay Times asked Oskin if he would ever return to Russia. He replies, No, I don’t think so, I don’t see a reason to. It’s so much easier to be gay here. All my friends are jealous because they want to live in a country where you can be yourself, whether you’re gay or lesbian or whatever you are. It’s beautiful. (2013b) Oskin confirms what Gay Times already knows: we are better than they are for gays and lesbians. Interestingly, none of the major publications described above, or other gay interested blogs and online magazines such as Queerty.com or Towleroad.com paid any attention to the 2014 Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA) World Cup, to be held in Brazil, where hundreds of thousands of people in various cities have been forcibly relocated to develop areas for the World Cup in 2014 and the Olympic Games in 2016 (Elizondo, 2011), including favelas that UNESCO named a World Heritage Site (Williamson and Hora, 2012). Out’s only reference to the FIFA World Cup is in an article by Stacy Lambe (2013) that condemns Russian homophobia and FIFA’s choice of Qatar for the 2022 World Cup. It would seem, then, that Western LGBT media is more interested in the human rights of white LGBT Russians than poverty-stricken Brazilians. But Russian homophobia presents a problematic response to the social imaginary of White/European liberalism and undermines Sociology Association of Aotearoa New Zealand Annual Conference 2013 LeBlanc 9 the notion of a uniformly liberal, sexually progressive Europe that is necessary to mark the Other as racialised, uncivilised, and sexually repressed – the very basis of Western/Arab homonationalisms that Puar first described. What I suggest is the Sochi Olympics is the convergence of Western homo- nationalisms that presume the universality of gay/lesbian identity and the superiority of its own forms of identity politicking and Russian homophobia that undermines the performative liberalism of Whiteness and Europeanness that problematises the racialised imaginative geographies that construct homophobia as centred in the Middle East, Latin America, and Africa, the spaces of non-Whiteness and non-Europeanness. By contrast, Poland and Hungary have effectively mobilised pro-Western support in the Europeanisation of their LGBT communities, including Brussels-based International Lesbian and Gay Association sending delegates to Hungary’s 2007 Gay Pride parade and the Dutch Cultuur – en Ontspannings Centrum (COC) helping to fund Poland’s Campaign Against Homophobia (KPH) and other groups to meet in Gdańsk. European engagement on LGBT issues is very important to KPH, who are concerned that the European Union is not pressing the Polish government on the issue of anti-discrimination (Holzhacker, 2012). But while some postcommunist European nations are looking Westward economically, they remain socially conservative. Poland, as Political Scientists Conor O’Dwyer and Katrina Schwartz note, has come under fire of the European Parliament, the European Court of Human Rights, Amnesty International, the United Nations, and the International Lesbian and Gay Association (ILGA Europe) for not ensuring the European Union’s anti-discrimination directives (2010). In 2005 Latvia became the first European nation to add an anti-gay marriage amendment to its constitution. Pride parades have been banned in Poland, Latvia, and Romania, yet these EU countries largely remain outside of the purview of large scale Western critique. The EU, of course, requires anti-discrimination directives as a condition of membership, but these countries give the illusion of Europeanisation/Westernisation (that is, liberal, gay-friendly, and multicultural affect) that exists in official policy, if not in local practice, in the inclusion of European membership, since “the targets and success of gay and lesbian political organising have increasingly come to be defined and measured through the prism of legalisation” (Puar 2013b: 23). While legislation can certainly protect LGBT subjects when properly enacted, the presence of such legislation is not sufficient to mark a country as liberal. What is at stake is the use of official legislation as the marker of a gay- friendly, multicultural nation. The accession of certain postcommunist nations into the EU creates a kind of post-national, pan-European liberalism that ignores the intersections of historical and local East European communist/ postcommunist/ nationalist discourses that are rendered absent by those nations’ “return” to “Europe” and the liberal, multicultural, sexually-friendly imagination such a return incurs. C A N R US S IA BE Q U E E R ED AS WE K N O W IT ? Sociology Association of Aotearoa New Zealand Annual Conference 2013 LeBlanc 10  Homonationalism, Puar has argued, is not a counter-nationalism or a giving-up-and- giving-in-nationalism, nor a gay racism or politically conservative identity, or even a simple good queer versus bad gay discourse, but instead it is at the very centre of productive nationalisms of progressive, multicultural Western nations. She describes her theory as “derived not as a corrective but as an incitement to debate” (2013a: 336, emphasis mine). While it provides a useful analytic to argue that homonormative legislation in the West, such as gay marriage and military inclusion, privileges a minority of gay and lesbians that already hold the majority of social and political capital, what I suggest is homonationalism as a survival strategy for Russian gays and lesbians. If, as Nartova and Kondakov have noted, Nikolai Alexeev failed to get support from local LGBT organisations for a Western-style Pride parade, one can begin to see the importance of localising queer activism. If, as Kondakov suggests, “the willingness to tolerate an oppressive situation is stronger than the will to demand rights as this process entails risks” (2012: 179) in a way that seems counterproductive to Western sexual ontologies, how do we support local Russian activism? How do we fault well-meaning Western homonationalisms that wish to reach out to queer kin? In his book Other Russias: Homosexuality and the Crisis of Post-Soviet Identity, Baer discusses the dusha (д�?�?а), the Russian soul which characterises all Russians. The dusha has long been seen by Russians as superior to the emptiness of the soul (п�?�?тота д�?�?и) in the West and is itself opposed to Western encroachment and importantly characterises the enduring and suffering of the superior people (Williams, 1970). Baer explains that “at times, the homosexual is constructed as essentially other, a foreign import, at other times he is construction as an archetypal Russian: passion-sufferer, sinner, and great artist” (Baer, 2009: 118). That is, the suffering of the gay Russian’s soul is an affirmation of his own Russianness. For Baer, this may be they way to assist Russian queerness in their own local political desires. Although often overshadowed by its more flamboyant cousin, the sexually liberated “global gay,” the enduring figure of the spiritual homosexual suggests at least one way in which homosexuality in Russia today is imagined: not as an “otherness” but rather as the very embodiment of traditional Russian values, underscoring the complex relationship that obtains between local and increasingly global discourses on the subject of homosexuality (93-94) With the reestablishment of the Russian Orthodox Church, and its adherence being seen as an important aspect of nationalism, “the continued importance of soul in contemporary Russia offers the homosexual... a discursive position not at the margins but at the very heart of Russian culture” (103), one that focuses not a Western politics of visibility and civil rights, but rather on a “spiritual discourse of compassion” (107). When gay activism is seen as a Western encroachment, configuring the homosexual as having the ultimate suffering soul firmly establishes his/her Russianness, dissolving the homosexual’s configuration as unRussian. Sociology Association of Aotearoa New Zealand Annual Conference 2013 LeBlanc 11  Perhaps the best course of advice is to continue to recognise Russian homophobia, but allow Russian gays to ultimately evoke what we consider to be early, archaic Stonewall-style gay politics. Reducing direct Western critique could mean less of a Russian nationalist homophobia being used to produce Russianness. The culture of dissent via media, known as samizdat (�?амиздат), a neologism that refers to underground dissemination of self-publishing of dissent media (from self, �?ам, and publishing house, издатель�?тво) could be promoted to create a distinctly Russian queer dusha that deserves tolerance. Samizdat authors, Ann Komaromi (2012) notes, expected a readership beyond their private circle and political allies, either Soviet or international. A great deal of samizdat incorporated Western thought and “concentrated them in the space of localised expression,” creating a distinctly Russian discourse. (ibid.: 90) While samizdat did not dismantle the Soviet Union, it “remains interesting as a set of discussions, informal institutions, and practices that arguably did help shape the cultural life of post-Soviet states into the new millennium” (ibid.: 88). While discussions of homophobia from the West continue, there should be an encouragement to LGBT Russians to utilise uniquely familiar local dissent practices to improve larger cultural discussions that promote the queer dusha as nationally and culturally Russian, a move that construct Russia’s own potential homonationalisms as a gay and lesbian survival strategy. B IB LIO GR A P H Y Baer, Brian James (2009). 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