Description
Literary Nonfiction. Art. Photography. LGBT Studies. MOSCOW documents gay cruising sites in Soviet Moscow, from the early 1920s to the USSR's dissolution in the early 1990s. Photographed in 2008 in a simple but haunting documentary style, these sites of the bygone queer underground present a hidden and forgotten Moscow, with a particular focus on Revolutionary Communist sites appropriated by queer Muscovites. The book concludes with the first English-language publication of a 1934 letter to Joseph Stalin in which British communist Harry Whyte presents a Marxist defense of homosexuality in light of its re-criminalization in the USSR.
What is the attitude of bourgeois society to homosexuals? Even if we take into account the differences existing on this score in the legislation of various countries, can we speak of a specifically bourgeois attitude to this question? Yes, we can. Independently of these laws, capitalism is against homosexuality by virtue of its entire class-based tendency. This tendency can be observed throughout the course of history, but it is manifested with especial force now, during the period of capitalism's general crisis.
—from a 1934 letter to Stalin from Harry Whyte, a British communist living in Moscow
Author Bio
Yevgeniy Fiks was born in Moscow in 1972 and has lived and worked in New York since 1994. As a "post-Soviet artist," his works build on research into Cold War narratives to explore the dialectic between Communism and "the West," addressing the Red and Lavender Scares during the McCarthy era, Communism in Modern Art, and African, African American, and Jewish diasporas in the Soviet Union. His artists books include Lenin For Your Library? (ante projects), Communist Guide to New York CitySoviet Moscow's Yiddish-Gay Dictionary (Cicada Press), and MONUMENT TO COLD WAR VICTORY (The Cooper Union, 2018). His work has been shown at the Biennale of Sydney, Thessaloniki Biennale of Contemporary Art, and Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art and has received reviews in The New York Times, ARTFORUM, and other periodicals.
Author City: NEW YORK, NY USA