Building a GLBT literary tradition in Russia. (International Spectrum).

When I mentioned to a friend recently that I was writing an article for The Gay & Lesbian Review, the Moscow writer--who keeps his sexual orientation hidden from his fellow literati--sounded concerned. "Aren't you afraid to be published in a 'minority magazine'? For me this would be out of question," he said. His fear that publishing in a gay/lesbian journal would somehow stain his spotless literary reputation is typical of Russian gay writers, many of whom are still, if not totally in the closet, in a deep fog of confusion. Nevertheless, things have changed since Soviet times, and gay writers in Russia now have somewhere to turn. Indeed gay magazines and journals--as well as organizations and clubs--have been springing up.

As with other enterprises in Russia, gay and lesbian publications come and go. The majority of LGBT periodicals that flourished during and after Gorbachev's regime are now extinct. One publication that stands out for its quality is the gay literary almanac RISK, which dates back to 1995. RISK is published in Moscow by the critic and poet Dmitrii Kuzmin, who prides himself on catching all the "big fish" in contemporary Russian gay literature in his journal's net.

Some of the RISK's writers can boast rather unusual biographies. Sergei Kruglov, a poet whose poetry was marked by erotic same-sex overtones, went to a monastery and disappeared from sight. Dmitrii Volchek, a former dissident from St. Petersburg who writes novels that mix his fondness for Alistair Crowley and Nazi aesthetics with tender passages about loving men, has secured a position at a media outlet in Prague. Yaroslav Mogutin, a poet "a la Mayakovsky" who's acted in a Bruce LaBruce porn movie, interviewed Allen Ginsberg and Joe Dallesandro, lives in New York City and asked for political asylum in the U.S. Dmitrii Bushuev, a child prodigy from a Moscow suburb who wrote a novel about a young teacher's love for his pupil, eventually moved to Sweden, where he now manages a hotel. Alexander Ilianen, a former military officer who, in his distinctly Proustian prose style, reports everything that happens to him on a day-by-day basis, is now leading a bohemian life in St. Petersburg.

Even though the majority of the magazine's contributors are gay people, RISK does not try to project the image of a magazine "for gays only" but aims at a wider literary audience. Unlike some literary magazines in Russia, RISK provides an outlet for women of letters as well as men. (In many Russian journals, prose writing is dominated by men, while poetry is where women hold their own, apparently because poetry is seen as elusive and indifferent to material things, qualities traditionally associated with women.) Some women who've appeared in RISK include the emerging poet Natalia Starodubtzeva and the former expatriate media diva Linor Goralik, who left Russia for Israel and later returned to Russia. The latest issue of RISK has a collection of gay and lesbian poems translated from English. Among the poets are June Jordan and Elana Dykewomon.

Some of the prose writers in Russia emulate the "stream of consciousness" style of the underground gay writer Evgenii Haritonov (1941-1981), while others write more traditional ...