skygiants

I 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up to eleven -- there's a particularly harrowing [to me] story that he recounts in which one organizer lends him an unpublished manuscript, and then he gives it back to another organizer who promises to return it to her, but he is unaware that in the meantime the two organizers have had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!