Subject: BOOK REVIEW: Gay life in Russia
From: [email-masked]
Date: Fri, 27 Sep 1996 19:52:24 -0400

WELCOME!
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Attached is an article for your periodical to consider for publication.

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David Tuller has written a new book about the lives of gay and lesbian people
in Russia. Cracks in the Iron Closet is great, and it tells some fascinating
stories. This review lets quotes from Tuller tell the story with only minimal
interruption. 

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"Gip Plaster is an independent writer for gay and lesbian publications around
the country. Reach him on-line at [email-masked]."

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Thanks for your time and cooperation!

ARTICLE BELOW:
by Gip Plaster

A REVIEW OF:
David Tuller: Cracks in the Iron Closet: Travels in Gay and Lesbian Russia;
Boston: Faber and Faber, 1996; 306 pp., endnotes, biblio., $24.95 cloth

 A dozen men and women held a press conference in Moscow to announce the
beginning of Russia's first major gay and lesbian organization. Only two of
the people there would reveal their names.
 It was the Russian equivalent of Stonewall, the riot by drag queens at a bar
in Greenwich Village that gained visibility for the gay and lesbian movement
here.
 The American event was nearly thirty years ago; the Russian one was in
February 1990.
 David Tuller's book, Cracks in the Iron Closet: Travels in Gay and Lesbian
Russia, takes an intimate look at lesbian and gay Russia, a world many don't
even know exists. By interviewing people he met during several trips to the
former Soviet Union, this gay American descendant of Russian lineage provides
a rare glimpse at perhaps the most misunderstood people of an often
misunderstood country.
 Tuller grew up as a pretty much typical Jewish boy in New York. Eventually,
he moved to San Francisco to pursue a pretty much typical American gay life.
 "Then I left for Russia," Tuller writes. "Where, to my surprise, I fell for
Ksyusha, a sexy dyke of extravagant emotions; and befriended a man who
fervently believed he was, inside, a lesbian; and met so many bisexuals that
I figured they couldn't all be making it up; and I learned the delicate
pleasures of donning pumps and a fabulous dress."
 Tuller says, "I experienced, in startling and unexpected ways, a different
kind of sexual freedom than I had found in the golden enclaves of New York
and San Francisco."
 He records in Cracks in the Iron Closet that he came to an understanding of
Russians as a people different than Americans and who won't fit the American
model of the gay and lesbian community. They don't fit any model, really.
 "Ah, yes. For a moment I had been in danger of mistaking this place for a
country in which rules of logic and reason tethered experience to some
recognizable semblance of reality," Tuller writes. "But despite its thin
veneer of Western trappings, despite its gay discos and cafes and new
millionaires, this was Russia still."
 He also found that many of the stereotypes of Russia are often true. He
found it a place where people drank more vodka than he had ever seen. He did
find, though, a diverse lesbian and gay community -- or at least a collection
of lesbian women and gay men who aren't very sure about organizing into a
community or about being out.
 "I spend time with people, not with anarchists or Trotskyites or lesbians,"
Tuller's Russian friend Lena said. "And I don't want to fight for the rights
of lesbians -- they never repressed lesbians here because no one knew that
they existed ... You know, I've lived with Sveta all my life, and no one's
ever said a word against it. But after all, I don't go into a bakery and say,
'Hi, I'm a lesbian, give me bread.'"
 Her opinion is a common one, Tuller writes.
 "Well, Americans think they can save us," Sveta told Tuller. "They think
that they're the Messiah. Or Superman. An as for the American gays and
lesbianki, maybe you can help then with your book, David, because they think
they are ... the Supergays and the Superlesbianki."
 Tuller has been a reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle since 1988, and
he helped found the National Gay and Lesbian Journalists Association. Using
his skills as a reporter, he records the stories of his experiences in a
country that stubbornly declines to conform to the American mold. His
experiences in Russia forced him to reexamine what it means to be gay and
challenged his views of himself. (He writes honestly about falling in love
with a woman while in Russia, something that is unsettling, at the least, for
any gay man.)
 Russia spans eleven time zones and occupies parts of two continents. It is,
of course, a diverse place, and Tuller doesn't claim to have seen it all, but
his experience provides a unique glimpse into the closet of Russia that only
sees small crack of light from the outside. 
 Tuller is careful not to judge the world with which he fell in love and from
which he learned a new kind of gay pride -- from these people who value their
individualism in a society that still forces conformity.
END