“I was the father of the sexual revolution, and now I’m becoming the father of the sexual counterrevolution,” Vladimir Linderman told BuzzFeed News in the Latvian capital, Riga.
J. Lester Feder/BuzzFeed
RIGA, Latvia — In 1990, a new Latvian publication called MORE, which billed itself as "an independent erotic newspaper," published its first issue with a strong endorsement of LGBT rights on its front page.
Latvia was in the process of breaking free from the Soviet Union, and the article made the case for repealing the Baltic republic's Soviet-era law criminalizing homosexuality, known as Article 124, as part of "Latvia's path to Europe."
"There can be no free country that criminalizes sexual minorities," an activist who said he was from a group called the Latvian Association for Sexual Equality was approvingly quoted as saying. "This discriminatory article … only discredits Latvia in the eyes of the civilized world." The editorial, headlined "For Sexual Equality," ended with details of the organization's bank account should readers want to donate to its cause.
MORE became a sensation across the former Soviet Union. Never before in the USSR had there been a publication that dealt openly with sex. Its creator was Vladimir Linderman, who worked as a journalist and published a poetry magazine before the paper's launch. He was suddenly making serious money, but the cash was also attracting the attention of mafia bosses who demanded joint ownership of the enterprise. Linderman sold off the paper in the mid-'90s and went into politics. After Vladimir Putin came to power in Russia, Linderman moved to Moscow to become part of the leadership of one of the most stridently anti-Putin political movements, and spent six years dodging Russian police until he was ultimately deported back to Latvia.
That's why many Latvians found it ironic when Linderman, who is now 56, launched a campaign last December to collect signatures in support of a referendum on a Latvian version of Russia's "gay propaganda" ban. Kremlin allies throughout eastern Europe have pushed anti-LGBT legislation in the past couple years as part of their ideological battle with the West.
It was a shock to see Linderman acting as if he were the Kremlin's man in Riga. But Latvia is the logical next battleground in Russia's duel with the European Union. The country has the largest Russian-speaking population of any EU member state that was once part of the Communist world, and they get much of their news from television stations beamed across the country's long border with Russia.
The timing of Linderman's new campaign was also telling — he unveiled the effort just after an organization that runs EuroPride, a Europe-wide LGBT rights festival, announced it would hold its 2015 event in Latvia, when the Baltic state would assume the EU's rotating presidency. The decision to hold EuroPride as close to Moscow as possible was given a symbolic boost on Nov. 7, when Latvian Foreign Minister Edgars Rinkēvičs came out on Twitter, becoming the first openly gay official from a former Soviet country.
The story of Linderman's transformation from anti-Kremlin sexual radical to moralist crusader who many Latvians suspect of being a Kremlin agent isn't really about how Linderman changed his mind about homosexuality. During a two-and-a-half-hour interview with BuzzFeed News at a hotel in the Latvian capital, he suggested he actually didn't really have any strong feelings about homosexuality at all. Rather, his story is about how many people living in the former Soviet Union went from being desperate to escape Moscow's rule to yearning for its patronage. It is also a tale of how Putin used that desire to co-opt some of his most committed enemies and convince many living in the former Communist world that what once seemed so exciting about the West is now what is most terrifying about it.
"I dislike any ideology where I see signs of totalitarianism," Linderman said between cigarettes. MORE was his answer to Soviet repression, and his "gay propaganda" proposal is a response to what he sees as a "new totalitarianism" being pushed by liberal forces in the West.
"Sometimes, my biography confuses even me," Linderman said. "I was the father of the sexual revolution, and now I'm becoming the father of the sexual counterrevolution."
No comments:
Post a Comment