Side story 8: The Red Closet
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An article from the San Francisco Chronicle, November 16, 1983
The Red Closet
By Randy Shilts
The names used in this article are Pseudonyms in order to protect the identities of those interviewed
In the USSR, homosexuality is classified as Burgeois immorality, a mental illness, citing Marx and Engels private letters in which their homophobic views are on full display. Yet homosexual life flourishes here, why is it easier in some ways to be a homosexual in the USSR than the US and the non communist world in general?
The drive
MOSCOW — Yuri, a 27-year-old dancer with the Bolshoi Ballet, guided his yellow Lada through the broad avenues of Moscow with the confidence of a man who knew every hidden corner of the city. The Summer air hung warm over the capital, though the car's struggling air conditioner did its best to keep pace. An Orthodox icon swung gently from the rearview mirror as he drove, weaving through evening traffic with one hand resting casually on the wheel while he smoked a cigarette with the other.
He slowed near a former bathhouse tucked behind a row of concrete apartment blocks. "We used to come here all the time," he said, nodding toward the building. "Before they shut it down two years ago."
The government closures are part of the Soviet response to the growing AIDS crisis, a problem officials here acknowledge carefully and discuss publicly only in the language of epidemiology and "social hygiene." Yuri laughed softly at the memory. "You should have seen the lines before opening. Around the corner every night." Then his expression faded. "A few of my friends have already been taken for quarantine since the testing started."
He said it matter-of-factly, as if discussing a workplace transfer.
"I'm negative, thank God," he added quickly. "But they test me every six months because I'm considered high-risk."
By "high-risk," Soviet authorities mean men who have sex with men.
Homosexuality occupies a strange legal and political limbo in the Soviet Union. Official ideology condemns it as a form of bourgeois decadence and psychological deviance, drawing selectively from the private letters of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, whose own disdain for homosexuality is well documented. Yet the legal code itself is contradictory. The state condemns and outlaws homosexuality, but the act of sodomy itself is neither illegal or legal, and is considered separate from homosexuality, enforcement often depends less on sexuality itself than on whether one attracts public attention.
As Yuri explained it, "The government doesn't care what you do quietly. It cares if you organize, protest, or embarrass them."
We turned onto Tverskaya Street as workers poured out from offices, factories and metro stations into the cool Moscow evening. The streets around Red Square bustled with life. Couples lingered outside cafés. Men in Letterman jackets, a recent fashion craze, smoked beneath neon bar signs. A row of small hotels advertised rooms by the hour.
"Love hotels," Yuri said with a grin. "We stole the idea from Japan."
He pointed toward one with obvious pride. "Some genius opened the first one after visiting Tokyo during the Olympics in the '60s. He said he realized it was easier than bringing someone home to 'study Marxism-Leninism' or 'watch a movie.' Now they're everywhere."
He laughed again, this time with the knowing cynicism shared by gay men in every country. "I didn't find out about them until my last year of high school."
As we drove, Yuri casually identified bars and coffee shops where gay men gathered. None advertised themselves openly. There were no rainbow flags, no political slogans, no signs announcing liberation. But there were signals understood by those who needed to understand them.
"If you know, you know," he said, tapping ash from his cigarette out the cracked window.
I asked about the uniformed militsya patrolling nearby sidewalks. Yuri looked genuinely puzzled by the question.
"What about them?"
One officer disappeared through the entrance of a bar Yuri had just identified as a popular gathering place.
"His shift probably ended," Yuri said with a shrug. "Some of them like to indulge as well."
That contradiction — official condemnation coexisting beside quiet tolerance — lies at the center of Soviet gay life. Unlike in the US, there are no public campaigns against homosexual teachers, no Anita Bryant rallies, no evangelical crusades demanding moral purification. Soviet society does not encourage public moral debate because public debate itself is tightly controlled, especially since the end of the thaw in the early 70s.
In America, gay men face hostility from churches, employers, landlords, and increasingly from conservative political movements that use homosexuality as a cultural battleground. In the Soviet Union, the pressure comes from the state alone — and the state's primary concern is order.
Outing someone as homosexual is illegal, accusing someone of being homosexual is seen by the Soviet legal system as slander and disturbing the public order, the punishment for which can range from a fine up to a year in a labor camp. So long as homosexual life remains discreet, apolitical, and invisible, authorities often appear willing to tolerate it.
But Yuri warned that tolerance ends where organization begins.
"The things you told me about Stonewall?" he said, his tone suddenly serious. "That would never happen here."
He paused at a traffic light near Red Square, watching pedestrians cross beneath giant red banners hanging from government buildings.
"The OMON would crush it immediately."
De-facto vs De-jure
Ask almost any Soviet citizen about homosexuality and the reaction is immediate: discomfort, disapproval, sometimes outright revulsion.
"It is unnatural," said Lyudmilla, a 32-year-old supervisor in a neighborhood vigilance committee in Moscow. "Women are not meant to sleep with women, and men are not meant to sleep with men. Men and women are supposed to build families and have children for the revolution."
The official Soviet position leaves little ambiguity. Homosexuality is routinely described in medical literature as a psychological disorder and in political rhetoric as a symptom of bourgeois immorality. Newspapers rarely discuss it except in cautionary or satirical terms. Publicly, Soviet society insists homosexuality barely exists.
Privately, it exists everywhere.
For all its condemnation, the Soviet system leaves considerable room for homosexual behavior so long as it remains discreet and politically passive. A homosexual man or woman who maintains the outward obligations of Soviet life — marriage, work, children, ideological conformity — is often left alone.
And Moscow is hardly unique.
In Leningrad, Yerevan, Jugashvilgrad, Stalingrad, and virtually every major city in the Soviet bloc, gay and lesbian communities exist beneath the surface of public life. They gather in cafés, schools, bathhouses, parks, workers' dormitories and, increasingly, through the Soviet Union's primitive videotex network, GOSTelekom.
"You can find someone easily if you know where to look," said Roman, a 42-year-old engineer living in Leningrad who previously worked in both Western Europe and the United States. "Frankly, people here are less upright about it than Americans or the Europeans beyond the Rhine."
Others were even more blunt.
"They are shameless about it," Timur, an Uzbek factory technician who moved to Moscow in 1980, told me with a laugh. "Moscow is a gay haven."
What is perhaps most surprising to an American observer is that many Soviet men who have sex with other men do not consider themselves homosexual at all.
In the United States, homosexuality has increasingly become understood as an identity — social, political, and personal. In the Soviet Union, the distinction is often viewed differently. Sex between men may satisfy a need or desire, but many Soviet citizens do not believe the act itself defines a person.
Nor, many insist, does it diminish masculinity.
Among many Soviet men, particularly in working-class and military environments, the "active" partner in a homosexual encounter is frequently not considered homosexual in any meaningful sense. Only the passive partner risks social feminization or ridicule.
The distinction may sound bizarre to Americans who often hear language of gay identity and liberation politics, yet it creates a strange kind of flexibility. Men drift between heterosexual and homosexual behavior without necessarily attaching permanent labels to themselves.
Whether that ambiguity can survive the slow arrival of Western ideas about sexual identity remains unclear.
When Yuri reached adolescence, he realized he was attracted to boys in his school. Like gay teenagers almost everywhere, he initially believed himself completely alone.
"I thought I was the only one in the country," he recalled. "Then I got older and realized there were others at school. Then during military service I discovered there was an entire hidden society."
That hidden society has roots in one of the Soviet Union's oldest revolutionary traditions.
Beginning in the 1920s, during Stalin's consolidation of power, ambitious young communists who wanted to join the party were required to participate in what became known as the "Down to the Countryside" movement. Students, young party aspirants, and the children of Soviet officials were dispatched to farms, mines, logging camps, and remote industrial settlements to work for a year and learn the virtues of labor from workers and peasants and ensure the party retained it's Proletariat character.
Officially, the program was designed to harden privileged youth through discipline and collective work. In practice, it often produced something else entirely.
Young men and women were separated into same-sex barracks and settlements during their stay. Relationships formed. Rumors spread. Entire social networks emerged quietly beneath the ideological language of labor and sacrifice.
A few years ago, the satirical magazine Krokodil ran a widely discussed piece mocking homosexuality within the back to the countryside brigades, joking that "it is easier to find a lover there than to become a Party member."
Everyone I interviewed laughed when I mentioned the article.
"Because it's true," said Samira, a 27-year-old Party member from Moscow and one of the few Soviet lesbians willing to speak openly with a Western reporter.
She met her current partner, Svetlana, while working at a mine in Norlisk.
"You go to the countryside, work in a mine, cut timber, harvest potatoes, work on a fishing boat" she said with a shrug. "Sometimes you find love."
Officially, Samira is married to a fellow Party member named Ruslan. On paper, they share an apartment and have fulfilled their social obligations. Unofficially, Samira lives with Svetlana. Svetlana's husband, Faisal, lives with Ruslan nearby.
No one involved seemed particularly troubled by the arrangement.
"It's simply how life works," Svetlana explained. "You marry. You have children. Everyone fulfills their responsibilities. Then you live your real life quietly."
She smiled before adding, "Our children are friends. We all have dinner together on weekends."
Versions of this story surfaced repeatedly during my interviews.
"Everyone in my life knows my real preferences," Yuri told me one evening as we drank in his apartment. "My parents know. My friends know. My wife knows."
He paused, smiling at the absurdity of the performance.
"I know that they know. They know that I know that they know."
Then he shrugged.
"As long as nobody causes embarrassment, nobody cares."
A haven for foreigners, a prison for others
Many gay expatriates say they feel safer in the Soviet Union than in the countries they left behind.
Marcus, a 28-year-old aspiring actor from Indiana who has lived in Moscow since 1980, described the Soviet capital less as an ideological destination and more like an escape hatch.
"The USSR gave me my life back," he told me one afternoon in the cafeteria of the Radio Moscow complex where he now works as a sound technician.
Back in 1977, Marcus had begun building a modest career in local radio. He had appeared in several commercials and hoped eventually to move to Los Angeles. Then a friend revealed he was gay.
"My parents threw me out. I lost my job. Suddenly everybody treated me like I was a leper."
He moved to New York, taking temporary work wherever he could find it. There he began an affair with Viktor, a Soviet trade representative who eventually convinced him to emigrate.
"People think moving to the USSR means you love communism," Marcus said with a laugh. "I moved here because America made it very clear it didn't want me."
Today Marcus is officially married to Oksana, a lesbian translator employed by a state publishing bureau. The arrangement satisfies Soviet social expectations while allowing both to maintain discreet relationships of their own. Marcus lives comfortably by Soviet standards, studies Russian in the evenings, and hopes eventually to become an on-air radio host.
"I wrote to my parents after the wedding," he said quietly. "They told me they had no son who was both a communist and in a sham marriage."
He shrugged with the exhausted resignation common among many gay expatriates I interviewed.
"Normally going back into the closet sounds tragic," he continued. "But the closet here doesn't feel like the closet back home. It's more like a huge room full of other people."
Marcus is hardly unique.
As more gay Americans and Europeans from outside the Soviet block settle in Soviet cities — particularly Moscow, Leningrad, and Tbilsi — Western ideas about homosexuality have begun filtering quietly into Soviet life through imported books, magazines, music, underground VHS tapes, and foreign broadcasts.
Much of that material circulates through the sprawling semi-legal world of samizdat, the Soviet underground self-publishing network.
Officially, Soviet authorities condemn samizdat as ideologically suspect. In practice, the system surrounding it has become something far more sophisticated.
Former dissidents, academics, and even several Party officials described a tacit arrangement in which the KGB often allows underground cultural circulation to continue precisely because it provides the state with an invaluable map of unofficial social networks.
The objective is not necessarily immediate repression.
It is observation.
"The KGB does not always stop dissidents," one Moscow academic told me. "First they catalog them."
Infiltration of samizdat circles appears widespread. Several people I spoke with believed KGB informants frequently helped reproduce or distribute underground material themselves. The goal, according to former officials and dissidents alike, is to identify social connections long before they evolve into organized political movements.
The Soviet security apparatus has learned that selective tolerance can produce more useful intelligence than the blanket terror of the early Soviet state.
Instead of mass arrests, punishment is often administrative, quiet, and deeply personal.
A promotion disappears without explanation. An apartment request stalls indefinitely. A travel visa is denied. A university placement quietly evaporates.
Occasionally a superior offers a carefully worded warning.
"We have found you to be ideologically suspect."
Everyone understands what the sentence really means:
We know who you are.
We know what you are doing.
Know your place behave yourself.
"It's psychological management," said one Soviet journalist in Leningrad. "The state wants obedience, not martyrs."
For many Soviet homosexuals, this unspoken arrangement feels preferable to the open hostility they associate with life in the West.
"As long as we do not create problems, we are left alone," Svetlana told me during a dinner gathering attended by her husband, her lover Samira, and several friends in similarly arranged marriages.
"It is a fair bargain," she insisted. "An American I met once told me homosexuals there lose their jobs, lose their families, get beaten and sometimes murdered in the streets. That would never happen here."
She paused before adding with unmistakable disdain, "Americans should learn how to mind their own business."
Not everyone agrees.
Anatoly, a Soviet émigré now living in San Francisco, described the Soviet system not as liberation but as a more refined form of repression.
"What is the point of tolerance," he asked me, "if you can never openly exist?"
After returning to Leningrad in 1971 from a scholarship program at UCLA, Anatoly attempted to organize what he described as a small "homosexual discussion circle" focused on mental health, literature, and legal reform.
"We weren't planning revolution," he insisted. "We just wanted the right to admit we existed without risking psychiatric confinement."
The meetings lasted less than a month.
"One morning there was a knock at my apartment," he recalled. "Two men in suits politely asked me if they could come in for a chat. They flashed their KGB badges and guns."
"They sat in my kitchen." Anatoly said. "They offered instant coffee powder and cigarettes and apologized for interrupting my day."
"They were extremely polite," he remembered. "That was the frightening part."
The officers then produced photographs: Anatoly entering meetings, kissing his lover, speaking with foreigners, attending private gatherings. They knew the names of everyone who had attended the discussion circle, his lover, his boss, his parents, his siblings.
"They told me not to import American degeneracy into the Soviet Union," he said. "Then they explained that the second meeting would be held within an interrogation room if I continued, that I would be sent to a mental hospital if I insisted."
There were no raised voices. No threats shouted across the table.
Only certainty.
"I left the country that same week," Anatoly said quietly. "And I never came back."
The reckoning
Since the beginning of the AIDS epidemic in 1978, however, the strange equilibrium surrounding Soviet gay life has begun to shift.
At first, Soviet officials believed the disease was confined largely to international aid workers, translators, military advisers, and SovAID volunteers returning from Africa. The illness was discussed in the dry language of epidemiological containment, presented as an African disease carried in as a result of Soviet struggle against American imperialism in Africa.
By 1981, it had become impossible to maintain that illusion.
The virus had entered the homosexual community.
"One of my friend's former lovers died in February," Yuri told me quietly one evening as we drove through western Moscow. "It's terrifying."
For the first time since I had met him, his usual irony had disappeared.
"My father was among the soldiers who entered Dachau near the end of the war," he continued after a long silence. "When I started seeing photographs of some AIDS patients… it reminded me of the pictures he kept."
He stared ahead at the road while he spoke.
"That frightened me more than anything."
We eventually reached the outskirts of the city near a cluster of gray concrete buildings surrounded by tall fencing and birch trees stripped bare by the lingering winter cold. Yuri pointed toward one of the complexes.
"It used to be a psychiatric hospital," he explained. "Now it's an AIDS sanatorium."
Outside the entrance waited three people: a young woman named Raisa, a pale man in his late twenties named Fyodor, and an older man carrying a notebook whose name was Viktor.
As we parked, Yuri quietly explained the arrangement.
Fyodor, he admitted before opening the car door, had once been his lover. Raisa was Fyodor's wife.
Both carried the AIDS virus.
Fyodor had recently developed what Soviet doctors classify as ARC — AIDS Related Complex — a precursor stage involving chronic illness and immune deterioration. Because of his diagnosis, Soviet regulations now required him to remain under supervision whenever outside the sanatorium grounds.
The older man, Viktor, was his assigned minder.
Viktor's role was both medical and administrative. He accompanied Fyodor during approved outings, monitored who he spoke with, kept records of his movements, and reported back to sanatorium officials. Without Viktor present, Fyodor would not be permitted outside at all.
Raisa occupied a different category within the Soviet quarantine system. Since she carried the virus but showed no symptoms, she remained under what authorities call "conditional freedom." She could move through Moscow freely during the day but was required to report back nightly for observation and testing, she was to report who she spoke to, if she had sexual contacts to give names, these would then be cross referenced, failure to report would mean excursions would be restricted for a month, with the potential of permanent imprisonment if this pattern continued.
But, long as Viktor accompanied them, the couple could remain outside overnight.
Without him, Fyodor's absence would trigger an immediate alert.
Failure to return to the facility initiates a graduated enforcement process: first administrative warnings, then police searches, followed by temporary confinement. Repeated violations can result in imprisonment under public health statutes introduced earlier this year.
The system reflects the distinctly Soviet approach to the epidemic: expansive, bureaucratic, and relentlessly organized.
Before the virus itself was identified in late 1981, Soviet doctors relied on symptom-based diagnoses. Patients showing severe immune collapse alongside opportunistic infections such as Kaposi's Sarcoma or Pneumocystis Carinii Pneumonia were registered with local clinics, their addresses recorded, and instructed to report weekly for monitoring.
Many simply disappeared back into ordinary life.
Then, in April 1982, Soviet researchers finalized a working blood test several months ahead of most Western expectations.
The government reacted with startling speed.
Mandatory mass testing was announced nationwide. Factories, universities, military bases, hospitals, and Party offices established screening programs almost overnight. In a carefully staged television appearance, Premier Mikheil Stalin publicly submitted to testing himself, declaring that "socialist society has nothing to fear from scientific truth."
The gesture reassured many Soviet citizens.
It also revealed the scale of the crisis.
Within weeks, officials quietly acknowledged infection clusters in Moscow, Leningrad, Odessa, Tbilisi, and several military districts. Internal memoranda reportedly estimated infection rates far higher than originally believed, particularly among homosexual men and international travelers.
After the May Day celebrations in 1982, the government announced the creation of a national AIDS sanatorium system.
Under the policy, all citizens diagnosed with HIV infection — symptomatic or otherwise — became subject to mandatory medical registration and quarantine protocols of varying severity.
To Western civil libertarians, the policy sounds draconian.
To many Soviet citizens, it sounds entirely reasonable.
"People trust the state here," Viktor told me as we stood smoking outside the facility gates. "Americans think freedom means everyone does whatever they want. Here freedom means society survives."
Behind us, through the sanatorium windows, figures moved slowly beneath fluorescent lights.
Most looked around my age.
The Red Closet
By Randy Shilts
The names used in this article are Pseudonyms in order to protect the identities of those interviewed
In the USSR, homosexuality is classified as Burgeois immorality, a mental illness, citing Marx and Engels private letters in which their homophobic views are on full display. Yet homosexual life flourishes here, why is it easier in some ways to be a homosexual in the USSR than the US and the non communist world in general?
The drive
MOSCOW — Yuri, a 27-year-old dancer with the Bolshoi Ballet, guided his yellow Lada through the broad avenues of Moscow with the confidence of a man who knew every hidden corner of the city. The Summer air hung warm over the capital, though the car's struggling air conditioner did its best to keep pace. An Orthodox icon swung gently from the rearview mirror as he drove, weaving through evening traffic with one hand resting casually on the wheel while he smoked a cigarette with the other.
He slowed near a former bathhouse tucked behind a row of concrete apartment blocks. "We used to come here all the time," he said, nodding toward the building. "Before they shut it down two years ago."
The government closures are part of the Soviet response to the growing AIDS crisis, a problem officials here acknowledge carefully and discuss publicly only in the language of epidemiology and "social hygiene." Yuri laughed softly at the memory. "You should have seen the lines before opening. Around the corner every night." Then his expression faded. "A few of my friends have already been taken for quarantine since the testing started."
He said it matter-of-factly, as if discussing a workplace transfer.
"I'm negative, thank God," he added quickly. "But they test me every six months because I'm considered high-risk."
By "high-risk," Soviet authorities mean men who have sex with men.
Homosexuality occupies a strange legal and political limbo in the Soviet Union. Official ideology condemns it as a form of bourgeois decadence and psychological deviance, drawing selectively from the private letters of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, whose own disdain for homosexuality is well documented. Yet the legal code itself is contradictory. The state condemns and outlaws homosexuality, but the act of sodomy itself is neither illegal or legal, and is considered separate from homosexuality, enforcement often depends less on sexuality itself than on whether one attracts public attention.
As Yuri explained it, "The government doesn't care what you do quietly. It cares if you organize, protest, or embarrass them."
We turned onto Tverskaya Street as workers poured out from offices, factories and metro stations into the cool Moscow evening. The streets around Red Square bustled with life. Couples lingered outside cafés. Men in Letterman jackets, a recent fashion craze, smoked beneath neon bar signs. A row of small hotels advertised rooms by the hour.
"Love hotels," Yuri said with a grin. "We stole the idea from Japan."
He pointed toward one with obvious pride. "Some genius opened the first one after visiting Tokyo during the Olympics in the '60s. He said he realized it was easier than bringing someone home to 'study Marxism-Leninism' or 'watch a movie.' Now they're everywhere."
He laughed again, this time with the knowing cynicism shared by gay men in every country. "I didn't find out about them until my last year of high school."
As we drove, Yuri casually identified bars and coffee shops where gay men gathered. None advertised themselves openly. There were no rainbow flags, no political slogans, no signs announcing liberation. But there were signals understood by those who needed to understand them.
"If you know, you know," he said, tapping ash from his cigarette out the cracked window.
I asked about the uniformed militsya patrolling nearby sidewalks. Yuri looked genuinely puzzled by the question.
"What about them?"
One officer disappeared through the entrance of a bar Yuri had just identified as a popular gathering place.
"His shift probably ended," Yuri said with a shrug. "Some of them like to indulge as well."
That contradiction — official condemnation coexisting beside quiet tolerance — lies at the center of Soviet gay life. Unlike in the US, there are no public campaigns against homosexual teachers, no Anita Bryant rallies, no evangelical crusades demanding moral purification. Soviet society does not encourage public moral debate because public debate itself is tightly controlled, especially since the end of the thaw in the early 70s.
In America, gay men face hostility from churches, employers, landlords, and increasingly from conservative political movements that use homosexuality as a cultural battleground. In the Soviet Union, the pressure comes from the state alone — and the state's primary concern is order.
Outing someone as homosexual is illegal, accusing someone of being homosexual is seen by the Soviet legal system as slander and disturbing the public order, the punishment for which can range from a fine up to a year in a labor camp. So long as homosexual life remains discreet, apolitical, and invisible, authorities often appear willing to tolerate it.
But Yuri warned that tolerance ends where organization begins.
"The things you told me about Stonewall?" he said, his tone suddenly serious. "That would never happen here."
He paused at a traffic light near Red Square, watching pedestrians cross beneath giant red banners hanging from government buildings.
"The OMON would crush it immediately."
De-facto vs De-jure
Ask almost any Soviet citizen about homosexuality and the reaction is immediate: discomfort, disapproval, sometimes outright revulsion.
"It is unnatural," said Lyudmilla, a 32-year-old supervisor in a neighborhood vigilance committee in Moscow. "Women are not meant to sleep with women, and men are not meant to sleep with men. Men and women are supposed to build families and have children for the revolution."
The official Soviet position leaves little ambiguity. Homosexuality is routinely described in medical literature as a psychological disorder and in political rhetoric as a symptom of bourgeois immorality. Newspapers rarely discuss it except in cautionary or satirical terms. Publicly, Soviet society insists homosexuality barely exists.
Privately, it exists everywhere.
For all its condemnation, the Soviet system leaves considerable room for homosexual behavior so long as it remains discreet and politically passive. A homosexual man or woman who maintains the outward obligations of Soviet life — marriage, work, children, ideological conformity — is often left alone.
And Moscow is hardly unique.
In Leningrad, Yerevan, Jugashvilgrad, Stalingrad, and virtually every major city in the Soviet bloc, gay and lesbian communities exist beneath the surface of public life. They gather in cafés, schools, bathhouses, parks, workers' dormitories and, increasingly, through the Soviet Union's primitive videotex network, GOSTelekom.
"You can find someone easily if you know where to look," said Roman, a 42-year-old engineer living in Leningrad who previously worked in both Western Europe and the United States. "Frankly, people here are less upright about it than Americans or the Europeans beyond the Rhine."
Others were even more blunt.
"They are shameless about it," Timur, an Uzbek factory technician who moved to Moscow in 1980, told me with a laugh. "Moscow is a gay haven."
What is perhaps most surprising to an American observer is that many Soviet men who have sex with other men do not consider themselves homosexual at all.
In the United States, homosexuality has increasingly become understood as an identity — social, political, and personal. In the Soviet Union, the distinction is often viewed differently. Sex between men may satisfy a need or desire, but many Soviet citizens do not believe the act itself defines a person.
Nor, many insist, does it diminish masculinity.
Among many Soviet men, particularly in working-class and military environments, the "active" partner in a homosexual encounter is frequently not considered homosexual in any meaningful sense. Only the passive partner risks social feminization or ridicule.
The distinction may sound bizarre to Americans who often hear language of gay identity and liberation politics, yet it creates a strange kind of flexibility. Men drift between heterosexual and homosexual behavior without necessarily attaching permanent labels to themselves.
Whether that ambiguity can survive the slow arrival of Western ideas about sexual identity remains unclear.
When Yuri reached adolescence, he realized he was attracted to boys in his school. Like gay teenagers almost everywhere, he initially believed himself completely alone.
"I thought I was the only one in the country," he recalled. "Then I got older and realized there were others at school. Then during military service I discovered there was an entire hidden society."
That hidden society has roots in one of the Soviet Union's oldest revolutionary traditions.
Beginning in the 1920s, during Stalin's consolidation of power, ambitious young communists who wanted to join the party were required to participate in what became known as the "Down to the Countryside" movement. Students, young party aspirants, and the children of Soviet officials were dispatched to farms, mines, logging camps, and remote industrial settlements to work for a year and learn the virtues of labor from workers and peasants and ensure the party retained it's Proletariat character.
Officially, the program was designed to harden privileged youth through discipline and collective work. In practice, it often produced something else entirely.
Young men and women were separated into same-sex barracks and settlements during their stay. Relationships formed. Rumors spread. Entire social networks emerged quietly beneath the ideological language of labor and sacrifice.
A few years ago, the satirical magazine Krokodil ran a widely discussed piece mocking homosexuality within the back to the countryside brigades, joking that "it is easier to find a lover there than to become a Party member."
Everyone I interviewed laughed when I mentioned the article.
"Because it's true," said Samira, a 27-year-old Party member from Moscow and one of the few Soviet lesbians willing to speak openly with a Western reporter.
She met her current partner, Svetlana, while working at a mine in Norlisk.
"You go to the countryside, work in a mine, cut timber, harvest potatoes, work on a fishing boat" she said with a shrug. "Sometimes you find love."
Officially, Samira is married to a fellow Party member named Ruslan. On paper, they share an apartment and have fulfilled their social obligations. Unofficially, Samira lives with Svetlana. Svetlana's husband, Faisal, lives with Ruslan nearby.
No one involved seemed particularly troubled by the arrangement.
"It's simply how life works," Svetlana explained. "You marry. You have children. Everyone fulfills their responsibilities. Then you live your real life quietly."
She smiled before adding, "Our children are friends. We all have dinner together on weekends."
Versions of this story surfaced repeatedly during my interviews.
"Everyone in my life knows my real preferences," Yuri told me one evening as we drank in his apartment. "My parents know. My friends know. My wife knows."
He paused, smiling at the absurdity of the performance.
"I know that they know. They know that I know that they know."
Then he shrugged.
"As long as nobody causes embarrassment, nobody cares."
A haven for foreigners, a prison for others
Many gay expatriates say they feel safer in the Soviet Union than in the countries they left behind.
Marcus, a 28-year-old aspiring actor from Indiana who has lived in Moscow since 1980, described the Soviet capital less as an ideological destination and more like an escape hatch.
"The USSR gave me my life back," he told me one afternoon in the cafeteria of the Radio Moscow complex where he now works as a sound technician.
Back in 1977, Marcus had begun building a modest career in local radio. He had appeared in several commercials and hoped eventually to move to Los Angeles. Then a friend revealed he was gay.
"My parents threw me out. I lost my job. Suddenly everybody treated me like I was a leper."
He moved to New York, taking temporary work wherever he could find it. There he began an affair with Viktor, a Soviet trade representative who eventually convinced him to emigrate.
"People think moving to the USSR means you love communism," Marcus said with a laugh. "I moved here because America made it very clear it didn't want me."
Today Marcus is officially married to Oksana, a lesbian translator employed by a state publishing bureau. The arrangement satisfies Soviet social expectations while allowing both to maintain discreet relationships of their own. Marcus lives comfortably by Soviet standards, studies Russian in the evenings, and hopes eventually to become an on-air radio host.
"I wrote to my parents after the wedding," he said quietly. "They told me they had no son who was both a communist and in a sham marriage."
He shrugged with the exhausted resignation common among many gay expatriates I interviewed.
"Normally going back into the closet sounds tragic," he continued. "But the closet here doesn't feel like the closet back home. It's more like a huge room full of other people."
Marcus is hardly unique.
As more gay Americans and Europeans from outside the Soviet block settle in Soviet cities — particularly Moscow, Leningrad, and Tbilsi — Western ideas about homosexuality have begun filtering quietly into Soviet life through imported books, magazines, music, underground VHS tapes, and foreign broadcasts.
Much of that material circulates through the sprawling semi-legal world of samizdat, the Soviet underground self-publishing network.
Officially, Soviet authorities condemn samizdat as ideologically suspect. In practice, the system surrounding it has become something far more sophisticated.
Former dissidents, academics, and even several Party officials described a tacit arrangement in which the KGB often allows underground cultural circulation to continue precisely because it provides the state with an invaluable map of unofficial social networks.
The objective is not necessarily immediate repression.
It is observation.
"The KGB does not always stop dissidents," one Moscow academic told me. "First they catalog them."
Infiltration of samizdat circles appears widespread. Several people I spoke with believed KGB informants frequently helped reproduce or distribute underground material themselves. The goal, according to former officials and dissidents alike, is to identify social connections long before they evolve into organized political movements.
The Soviet security apparatus has learned that selective tolerance can produce more useful intelligence than the blanket terror of the early Soviet state.
Instead of mass arrests, punishment is often administrative, quiet, and deeply personal.
A promotion disappears without explanation. An apartment request stalls indefinitely. A travel visa is denied. A university placement quietly evaporates.
Occasionally a superior offers a carefully worded warning.
"We have found you to be ideologically suspect."
Everyone understands what the sentence really means:
We know who you are.
We know what you are doing.
Know your place behave yourself.
"It's psychological management," said one Soviet journalist in Leningrad. "The state wants obedience, not martyrs."
For many Soviet homosexuals, this unspoken arrangement feels preferable to the open hostility they associate with life in the West.
"As long as we do not create problems, we are left alone," Svetlana told me during a dinner gathering attended by her husband, her lover Samira, and several friends in similarly arranged marriages.
"It is a fair bargain," she insisted. "An American I met once told me homosexuals there lose their jobs, lose their families, get beaten and sometimes murdered in the streets. That would never happen here."
She paused before adding with unmistakable disdain, "Americans should learn how to mind their own business."
Not everyone agrees.
Anatoly, a Soviet émigré now living in San Francisco, described the Soviet system not as liberation but as a more refined form of repression.
"What is the point of tolerance," he asked me, "if you can never openly exist?"
After returning to Leningrad in 1971 from a scholarship program at UCLA, Anatoly attempted to organize what he described as a small "homosexual discussion circle" focused on mental health, literature, and legal reform.
"We weren't planning revolution," he insisted. "We just wanted the right to admit we existed without risking psychiatric confinement."
The meetings lasted less than a month.
"One morning there was a knock at my apartment," he recalled. "Two men in suits politely asked me if they could come in for a chat. They flashed their KGB badges and guns."
"They sat in my kitchen." Anatoly said. "They offered instant coffee powder and cigarettes and apologized for interrupting my day."
"They were extremely polite," he remembered. "That was the frightening part."
The officers then produced photographs: Anatoly entering meetings, kissing his lover, speaking with foreigners, attending private gatherings. They knew the names of everyone who had attended the discussion circle, his lover, his boss, his parents, his siblings.
"They told me not to import American degeneracy into the Soviet Union," he said. "Then they explained that the second meeting would be held within an interrogation room if I continued, that I would be sent to a mental hospital if I insisted."
There were no raised voices. No threats shouted across the table.
Only certainty.
"I left the country that same week," Anatoly said quietly. "And I never came back."
The reckoning
Since the beginning of the AIDS epidemic in 1978, however, the strange equilibrium surrounding Soviet gay life has begun to shift.
At first, Soviet officials believed the disease was confined largely to international aid workers, translators, military advisers, and SovAID volunteers returning from Africa. The illness was discussed in the dry language of epidemiological containment, presented as an African disease carried in as a result of Soviet struggle against American imperialism in Africa.
By 1981, it had become impossible to maintain that illusion.
The virus had entered the homosexual community.
"One of my friend's former lovers died in February," Yuri told me quietly one evening as we drove through western Moscow. "It's terrifying."
For the first time since I had met him, his usual irony had disappeared.
"My father was among the soldiers who entered Dachau near the end of the war," he continued after a long silence. "When I started seeing photographs of some AIDS patients… it reminded me of the pictures he kept."
He stared ahead at the road while he spoke.
"That frightened me more than anything."
We eventually reached the outskirts of the city near a cluster of gray concrete buildings surrounded by tall fencing and birch trees stripped bare by the lingering winter cold. Yuri pointed toward one of the complexes.
"It used to be a psychiatric hospital," he explained. "Now it's an AIDS sanatorium."
Outside the entrance waited three people: a young woman named Raisa, a pale man in his late twenties named Fyodor, and an older man carrying a notebook whose name was Viktor.
As we parked, Yuri quietly explained the arrangement.
Fyodor, he admitted before opening the car door, had once been his lover. Raisa was Fyodor's wife.
Both carried the AIDS virus.
Fyodor had recently developed what Soviet doctors classify as ARC — AIDS Related Complex — a precursor stage involving chronic illness and immune deterioration. Because of his diagnosis, Soviet regulations now required him to remain under supervision whenever outside the sanatorium grounds.
The older man, Viktor, was his assigned minder.
Viktor's role was both medical and administrative. He accompanied Fyodor during approved outings, monitored who he spoke with, kept records of his movements, and reported back to sanatorium officials. Without Viktor present, Fyodor would not be permitted outside at all.
Raisa occupied a different category within the Soviet quarantine system. Since she carried the virus but showed no symptoms, she remained under what authorities call "conditional freedom." She could move through Moscow freely during the day but was required to report back nightly for observation and testing, she was to report who she spoke to, if she had sexual contacts to give names, these would then be cross referenced, failure to report would mean excursions would be restricted for a month, with the potential of permanent imprisonment if this pattern continued.
But, long as Viktor accompanied them, the couple could remain outside overnight.
Without him, Fyodor's absence would trigger an immediate alert.
Failure to return to the facility initiates a graduated enforcement process: first administrative warnings, then police searches, followed by temporary confinement. Repeated violations can result in imprisonment under public health statutes introduced earlier this year.
The system reflects the distinctly Soviet approach to the epidemic: expansive, bureaucratic, and relentlessly organized.
Before the virus itself was identified in late 1981, Soviet doctors relied on symptom-based diagnoses. Patients showing severe immune collapse alongside opportunistic infections such as Kaposi's Sarcoma or Pneumocystis Carinii Pneumonia were registered with local clinics, their addresses recorded, and instructed to report weekly for monitoring.
Many simply disappeared back into ordinary life.
Then, in April 1982, Soviet researchers finalized a working blood test several months ahead of most Western expectations.
The government reacted with startling speed.
Mandatory mass testing was announced nationwide. Factories, universities, military bases, hospitals, and Party offices established screening programs almost overnight. In a carefully staged television appearance, Premier Mikheil Stalin publicly submitted to testing himself, declaring that "socialist society has nothing to fear from scientific truth."
The gesture reassured many Soviet citizens.
It also revealed the scale of the crisis.
Within weeks, officials quietly acknowledged infection clusters in Moscow, Leningrad, Odessa, Tbilisi, and several military districts. Internal memoranda reportedly estimated infection rates far higher than originally believed, particularly among homosexual men and international travelers.
After the May Day celebrations in 1982, the government announced the creation of a national AIDS sanatorium system.
Under the policy, all citizens diagnosed with HIV infection — symptomatic or otherwise — became subject to mandatory medical registration and quarantine protocols of varying severity.
To Western civil libertarians, the policy sounds draconian.
To many Soviet citizens, it sounds entirely reasonable.
"People trust the state here," Viktor told me as we stood smoking outside the facility gates. "Americans think freedom means everyone does whatever they want. Here freedom means society survives."
Behind us, through the sanatorium windows, figures moved slowly beneath fluorescent lights.
Most looked around my age.
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