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Jan. 8th, 2023 07:27 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
skygiantsI asked osprey_archer if I could crib some of her research notes on the Soviet Union while she was here a few months back; she gave me an extensive and helpful reading list but the first that I have actually managed to acquire and read was David Tuller's Cracks in the Iron Closet: Travels in Gay and Lesbian Russia, which I found simultaneously deeply fascinating and deeply frustrating.
This is one of those nonfiction books that's half broad cultural analysis and half memoir/personal journey, which is a format I find pretty variable; sometimes it is delightful and sometimes I unfortunately learn too much about the author in the process to trust their opinions on the cultural analysis part. To a certain degree this did in fact turn out to be the case with David Tuller. I am really genuinely pleased for him that he went on a meaningful personal journey and made deep personal connections in Russia and along the way learned that sexuality and gender were a spectrum and that bisexuality and trans identities were real and should be respected! This seems like important personal growth! However I am not sure that a guy who fully admits that he went in with a base attitude that there were straight people and gay people and everyone else was lying or confused was ... the guy ... to write a nuanced cultural history about queer identity in the former Soviet Union ... I mean I am aware it was the nineties, and the nineties were a different time, And Yet.
And on the other hand, the personal accounts as presented in this book through the author's conversations with the people he met were really compelling! The part that was most compelling to me (and most specifically what I hoped for when I picked up the book) is when he starts getting into the way that Soviet state policy has informed the development of queer culture and the challenges that creates around building trust and community, all the political infighting turned up to eleven -- there's a particularly harrowing [to me] story that he recounts in which one organizer lends him an unpublished manuscript, and then he gives it back to another organizer who promises to return it to her, but he is unaware that in the meantime the two organizers have had a falling out and accused each other of being KGB informers and so the first organizer calls him in a panic to ask if he can get the manuscript back, which he can't because the other friend keeps calmly reassuring him that there's nothing to worry about. As far as I or the book is aware she never did get her unpublished manuscript back, although at least nobody ended up arrested.
In addition to this, Tuller's closest friends group in Russia all hang out in a dacha that appears to have been chock full of lesbian drama, which he chronicles in great detail, and he does also travel outside of the cities to get a sense of what queer life is like there. And I do find the mosaic model -- putting together a bunch of deeply personal and individual stories and see what kind of picture emerges from them -- to be a really valuable one for conveying a sense of cultural complexity; on the other hand I don't necessarily trust Tuller to be a reliable narrator so one does take all the stories with a certain grain of salt.
I am also still in the market for nonfiction books about the late phases of the Soviet Union, specifically Jewish and/or queer life therein, so if you have recs please let me know!
osprey_archer if I could crib some of her research notes on the Soviet Union while she was here a few months back; she gave me an extensive and helpful reading list but the first that I have actually managed to acquire and read was David Tuller's Cracks in the Iron Closet: Travels in Gay and Lesbian Russia, which I found simultaneously deeply fascinating and deeply frustrating. This is one of those nonfiction books that's half broad cultural analysis and half memoir/personal journey, which is a format I find pretty variable; sometimes it is delightful and sometimes I unfortunately learn too much about the author in the process to trust their opinions on the cultural analysis part. To a certain degree this did in fact turn out to be the case with David Tuller. I am really genuinely pleased for him that he went on a meaningful personal journey and made deep personal connections in Russia and along the way learned that sexuality and gender were a spectrum and that bisexuality and trans identities were real and should be respected! This seems like important personal growth! However I am not sure that a guy who fully admits that he went in with a base attitude that there were straight people and gay people and everyone else was lying or confused was ... the guy ... to write a nuanced cultural history about queer identity in the former Soviet Union ... I mean I am aware it was the nineties, and the nineties were a different time, And Yet.
And on the other hand, the personal accounts as presented in this book through the author's conversations with the people he met were really compelling! The part that was most compelling to me (and most specifically what I hoped for when I picked up the book) is when he starts getting into the way that Soviet state policy has informed the development of queer culture and the challenges that creates around building trust and community, all the political infighting turned up to eleven -- there's a particularly harrowing [to me] story that he recounts in which one organizer lends him an unpublished manuscript, and then he gives it back to another organizer who promises to return it to her, but he is unaware that in the meantime the two organizers have had a falling out and accused each other of being KGB informers and so the first organizer calls him in a panic to ask if he can get the manuscript back, which he can't because the other friend keeps calmly reassuring him that there's nothing to worry about. As far as I or the book is aware she never did get her unpublished manuscript back, although at least nobody ended up arrested.
In addition to this, Tuller's closest friends group in Russia all hang out in a dacha that appears to have been chock full of lesbian drama, which he chronicles in great detail, and he does also travel outside of the cities to get a sense of what queer life is like there. And I do find the mosaic model -- putting together a bunch of deeply personal and individual stories and see what kind of picture emerges from them -- to be a really valuable one for conveying a sense of cultural complexity; on the other hand I don't necessarily trust Tuller to be a reliable narrator so one does take all the stories with a certain grain of salt.
I am also still in the market for nonfiction books about the late phases of the Soviet Union, specifically Jewish and/or queer life therein, so if you have recs please let me know!
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Date: 2023-01-09 01:07 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-01-09 01:17 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-01-09 02:10 am (UTC)Third, plus bonus points for actually including recipes as opposed to just using them as an organizing metaphor.
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Date: 2023-01-15 05:23 am (UTC)(I am excited ... to write it .... in theory .......)
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Date: 2023-01-09 01:07 am (UTC)It may have been the nineties, but in the nineties, a lot of people who were not this guy managed to know otherwise!
(The manuscript story, wow.)
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Date: 2023-01-15 05:23 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-01-09 02:00 am (UTC)I might feel differently about it now, but as a college student I found Tuller's personal journey revelatory. It stretched my understanding of The Spectrum of Gender and Sexuality - not that I shared his exact "there are Straight People and Gay People and Never the Twain Shall Meet" thing, but in the sense that the none of the people he met fell neatly into any American category, really. It highlighted the instability of categories and the way that people perhaps trim their own identities to try to fit the categories available to them.
And the fact that he went to the Soviet Union and the Soviets taught him something that blew his tiny mind blew my tiny mind. It's such a reversal of the expected Western narrative about the American bringing freedom/enlightenment to the rigid dogmatic Commies.
IIRC there's a bit at the end where the Iron Curtain has fallen and American LGBTQ+ groups are sending representatives to Enlighten the Benighted Russian Queers and what actually occurs is mutual incomprehension on both sides. Months in, one of the organizers tells Tuller (clearly astonished by the revelation) that the Russians have all this trauma about groups? and forced togetherness? and ideological correctness?? and it's like... how do you intend to spread Enlightenment when you, yourselves, are this dense about the basic realities of the lives of the people you are trying to Enlighten.
I had entirely forgotten the manuscript drama and I GUESS in real life you can't turn your misfit friends into a crack heist team to at least TRY to retrieve the manuscript from the apartment of the former-friend-who-is-possibly-a-KGB-informer.... but nonetheless I feel that he should have tried just a bit harder to get the manuscript back. (Was it the only copy?)
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Date: 2023-01-15 05:32 am (UTC)And yeah, I do respect quite a bit that he talks pretty frankly about what his assumptions were and how the fluidity and complexity of gender + sexual expression that he encountered pushed him to question and explore those! I definitely also remember the bit where he meets with the other LGBTQ representatives who are holding what sounds like truly agonizing workshops -- it's such a sort of microcosm of what I do and don't like about Tuller as a narrator, because on the one hand he's right and he's put in the time and effort and is making some very solid points! and on the other hand he does sort of drip disdain for Young Queers in a way that's like, hmm, if you went to try and do a sociological study of them, would you also find your Horizons Broadened?
I REALLY FEEL HE SHOULD HAVE TRIED HARDER TO HEIST THE MANUSCRIPT BACK. It does seem to have been the only copy! You guard that with your life!
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Date: 2023-01-09 03:04 am (UTC)Something I read a while back and enjoyed was Lisa Dickey's Bears in the Streets, which is a nonfiction account of three trips across Russia each a decade apart. It's not about Jewish and/or queer life there per se, but both come up for discussion (also the author is married to a woman), and it's generally a good read.
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Date: 2023-01-15 05:33 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-01-09 05:53 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-01-15 05:33 am (UTC)