Talk:Gay rights in Russia

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An entry from Gay rights in Russia appeared on Wikipedia's Main Page in the Did you know? column on 20 February 2006.

1 Page needs work
2 Russia the only country?
3 Law repealed when?
4 Reparative therapy for gay men?
5 Rewrite

[edit] Page needs work

This page needs to seriously be changed. Dates are missing (years not even used in important places) and there is only one source. This page should be deleted completely and started from scratch.

Well, if you want, right it from scratch in the Gay rights in Russia/Temp, then we can have a discussion which version is better. I, personally, prefer evolutionary rather than revolutionary editing, but I would not force my views on you. abakharev 11:50, 7 March 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Russia the only country?

Is anyone certain that Russia was the only country in Europe in which homosexuality way legal; I am fairly certain that French laws against homosexuality were abolished durring the French Revolution.

You are right about the laws being abolished after the French revolution. Kind of embarrassing, as the (false?) fact was featured on the Wikipedia main page "Did You Know". Oops. The claim ("uniquely among European nations") was moved with the rest of the article from the socialism and sexual orientation page; if anyone wants to mine the history of that page and find who contributed it, they may be able to provide a source. As for France, this link explains:

"France, 1791 - In the aftermath of the French revolution and under the influence of the humanism of French Enlightenment philosophy, France became the first modern Western nation to decriminalize "unnatural acts" in 1791. ...

Though nominally legal, people caught engaged in same-sex activity or propositioning others were persecuted by police and the courts just as they had been before the revolution. Sometimes men caught propositioning one another were convicted of public indecency, but just as in pre-revolutionary times, convictions for specific crimes were rare. Instead, using their broad powers, police exiled or briefly imprisoned "pederasts".

Then homosexuality was criminalised in 1947. The thing is, I doubt most European countries in the 1920s has laws against homosexuality per se, but "public decency" and "obscenity" charges justified police raids on bars and other legal persecution, and generalised "sex offences" laws were used to prosecute people engaging in same-sex acts. So it's complicated. I don't know enough about the laws around Europe in the 1920s to offer an alternative wording for this sentence. One thing I do know is that in France and Germany (and probably the West in general), the 1920s was a peak of queer culture and visibility. So it's kind of disingenuous to suggest that the Soviets were going against the tide or acting in isolation. ntennis 12:10, 21 February 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Law repealed when?

Soviet Union fell in 1991. However, the page states "The law was not repealed until after the fall of the Soviet Union in 1993." I'm going to remove the year, until someone clarifies whether the law was repealed in 1993 or 1991.

Please sign your contributions to talk pages by adding -~~~~ at the end. Undoubtedly, some laws from the Soviet Union remained after its fall. -Seth Mahoney 01:39, 21 February 2006 (UTC)

The referenced BBC article confirms 1993 as the year of decriminalization - May 27th to be precise. The article used to say, "when Russia joined the Council of Europe," but the Council of Europe article says Russia joined in 1996. Can anyone straighten that out? -- Beland 15:28, 29 May 2006 (UTC)

i don't think that 'council-of-europe' sentence make any sense. you can easily remove it. -- tasc ^talk_deeds 15:31, 29 May 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Reparative therapy for gay men?

I was wondering if anyone could confirm this sentence:

Until the 1980s, gays and lesbians were routinely forcibly committed to hospitals for reparative therapy, which involved several months of psychotropic drugs.

The picture I got, mainly from Dan Healey's Homosexual Desire in Revolutionary Russia is that gay men were generally imprisoned for homosexual acts (when anything was done about it at all), while it was primarily gay women who were subjected to "reparative therapy" in the Soviet Union. -Smahoney 18:50, 24 June 2006 (UTC)

I don't have a reference for that, but I remember that doctors in early Soviet Russia were doing experimental hormone treatments on various types perceived to be sexually dysfunctional. The psychiatric treatments may have come later, parallel with other parts of the world. Here's a quote from GLBTQ.com:

"In the 1950s and 1960s, the range of mental health treatment services delivered by the criminal justice systems in Canada, the United States, Great Britain, South Africa, the Soviet Union, and elsewhere expanded dramatically. At the same time, there was a vast increase in arrests for homosexual offenses. Many homosexual and transsexual males who were arrested in this era were forced to undergo some sort of therapeutic treatment as part of a criminal court sentence, sometimes as an alternative to imprisonment or as a condition of parole. Since lesbianism did not generally fall under the purview of the criminal justice system, women were less likely to be subjected to aversion therapies as a result of arrest or imprisonment. However, they were subjected to such therapies as patients in psychiatric hospitals or clinics." [1]

There's also an artlce about soviets treating political dissidence as a psychopathology, and recanting as a successful treatment. Again, I don't know if this included any LGBT folk. Bloch, S. (1991). The political misuse of psychiatry in the Soviet Union. In Bloch, S. & Chodoff, P., eds. (1991). Psychiatric Ethics, 2nd Ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ntennis 02:27, 25 June 2006 (UTC)

We need to distinguish between reparative therapy forced on people vs. conducted on volunteers. --Uncle Ed 17:28, 29 January 2007 (UTC)