Active, Passive, and Russian: The National Idea in Gay Men’s Pornography DAN HEALEY R ussia’s transition from a closed society under Communist rule to an open one under President Boris Yeltsin was marked by a rupture with the sexual values of the Soviet era. Those “traditional” Soviet values included a relative, but never absolute, silence about sex. Beginning in the late 1980s the last Communist leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, opened the floodgates to debate about sex with his policies of perestroika and glasnost. Russia experienced a belated discursive “sexual revolution” that accompanied the democratic wave of the late 1980s and early 1990s. That revolution gathered more speed when Communism collapsed in 1991, and Russia began a dash to capitalism. Debates raged in the Russian media over sex education in schools, family planning clinics funded by Westerners, the rise of AIDS and the need for safer sex, and the sexualization of television and cinema. Meanwhile, the state made basic reforms to sexual regulation. Homosexuality between men, banned by Joseph Stalin in 1934, was decriminalized in 1993, and a new criminal code enacted in 1997 redefined rape and the age of consent. 1 After 2000, conservative-nationalist critics, long upset by these trends but emboldened by the presidency of Vladimir Putin, denounced this sexual revolution. In the troubling context of cultural globalization, with its appeals to individuals across and beyond national borders, conservative-nationalists saw the nation and state as threatened from a hypersexualized marketplace and its new conduit, the internet. 2 Sexual values became a I am grateful to the Centre for East European Language Based Area Studies (UK), which prompted me to write this paper for its 2008 “Doing Culture” conference at Sheffield University; and to the History and English departments of Simon Fraser University and the University of British Columbia, who sponsored the paper’s presentation in Vancouver. Audiences at Columbia and Cambridge Universities also gave me lively feedback, as did Richard Taylor, Wendy Bracewell, and the Russian Review’s two anonymous peer reviewers. I also thank Brian Pronger, who showed me that porn studies could be serious work. 1 For summaries of these developments see Eliot Borenstein, Overkill: Sex and Violence in Contemporary Russian Popular Culture (Ithaca, 2008), 24–50; and Igor S. Kon, Seksual'naia Kul'tura v Rossii: Klubnichka na Berezke 2nd ed. (Moscow, 2005). 2 On cultural globalization see, for example, Martin Albrow, The Global Age: State and Society Beyond Modernity (Cambridge, England, 1996), 140–55; and Zygmunt Bauman, Globalization: The Human The Russian Review 69 (April 2010): 210–30 Copyright 2010 The Russian Review