I very much like this suggestion from AoSHQ Guest Blogger 2nd Amendment Texan, but it may call for a degree of subtlety that the activist gay community has not previously demonstrated.
Since there is real danger of being arrested in Russia right now for showing any obvious signs or symbols of gay pride, Russian gays, gay supporters, and free speech advocates of every stripe could adopt the “Our army is the army of liberation for all workers in the world” image, a famous WWII Russian Army propaganda postcard. It depicts a Russian red army soldier liberating German-occupied land, with a grateful peasant giving the Russian solider a kiss directly on the mouth. In the spirit of the anti-communist Poles utilizing “2+2=4”, the protesters in this arena could adopt this classic icon – well known in Russia – as their unofficial logo.
What will the Russian government do? Claim that a 75 year old, well loved Russian iconic image is and was always a symbol of gay equality? That the state sponsored communist artist, Victor Koretsky, was being subversive? While we should put nothing past a state that wants to exert power over a minority group, I suspect that utilizing this image will allow protesters to be heard while also allowing the Russian government to save some face and not enforce the law on those displaying the Koretsky image. As seen with its declining to prosecute anti-gay crimes, the Russian government knows how to pick and choose what to prosecute and what to ignore.
I would wager Throbert has an opnion on this matter.
Subversive. The placement of the gun proves it.
How do we know that wasn’t Throbert under a different name suggesting this? 😉
If this poster was encouraging Soviet soldiers to fight for their “devy” back home, nothing except the sex of the peasant would have to change. This little aberrant interpretation has the opportunity to go memetic. And I am absolutely okay with that. I wouldn’t mind sharing a bowl of hot borscht with either of those fine gentlemen. 😉
Linked to this on FB, just to frak with all the libs on my friends list.
Heh! I was initially puzzled by the caption on this one, which (to me) reads something like:
Which seems to me like a weird thing for Stalin to say. (Among Soviet leaders, Khrushchev was probably the one best known for his Dubya-esque grammatical lapses, not Stalin.)
After 30 seconds of Googling, I figured out why the spelling is weird and the last word was utterly meaningless to me: ’cause it’s actually Belarussian, not Russian. (Linguistically, by the way, Belarussian is considered to be intermediate between Russian and Ukrainian — that’s why I could make out some of the words, but not all of them.)
What it actually says, anyway, is: “Our army is an army for the liberation of workers.”
I’d assume that Stalin originally said this in Russian, and that the quote was translated into the various minority languages of the USSR for local use.
In case anyone was wondering, the full lip-on-lip kiss between two men looks just as ghey to modern Russians as it does to Westerners.
Even cheek-kissing as a greeting between men may be seen as affected and Eurogay-ish nowadays — unless you’re a father sending your only son off to war, or you’ve just been reunited with a childhood friend you haven’t seen in 20 years, etc. And maybe they do the double/triple cheek-kiss in certain religious contexts, too. In any case, however, it implies great emotion and solemnity — so if I saw Russian men under 50 years old doing cheek-kisses to express a casual “hello/goodbye,” I’d tend to assume that they’re secret members of the Rainbow Community.
Throbert, it would still be funny to be walking around with this and say, “What, you have a problem with Great Patriotic War posters?” 🙂
Sean — as a commenter on the AoS thread pointed out, the 1939 date on the poster suggests that it’s meant to commemorate the occasion when the Soviet Army “liberated” a chunk of eastern Poland by annexing it into the Belarussian S.S.R. (which occurred in early October 1939).
So this was technically BEFORE the Great Patriotic War, when the neutrality pact between Stalin and Hitler was still nominally in effect.
But even though one has to put scare quotes around “liberated” because it was actually a territory-grab by the Stalinist Commies, the event still theoretically involved a bunch of Slavs being rescued from an impending German occupation, so in that sense, I’d assume that some of the untouchable sanctity of “BOB” [Cyrillic abbreviation for the Great Patriotic War!] would be attached to it.
Which is to say, the funniness could backfire because anti-gay Russians would inevitably accuse the gheys of belittling the heroic sacrifices of the BOB — despite the inconvenient fact that the poster actually has no direct connection at all with Hitler’s May 1941 invasion.
I can tell you right now via my Russian relatives: they are laughing at the USA. Big time. We have a man-child in office who is no more than a Chicago thug who thinks he can govern unilaterally.
Regards,
Peter H.