Needless to say, LGBT rights in most post soviet nations are pretty dire, but if the fall of the USSR never occurs in an ATL, how would things change? The USSR liked to portray itself as morally superior to the west, but in the early 2000s countries in western Europe were starting to legalize gay marriage and promoting LGBT rights, even some states in the US were doing the same. Would the USSR feel pressure from the west to promote equality to their LGBT populations? Or would LGBT rights be somewhat similiar to what they are now in Russia and other post-soviet states.
LGBT rights in a surviving USSR
- Thread starter sirjackalot
- Start date
AllThePresidentsMen
Banned
Assuming the USSR survives Gorbachev’s reforms without any major coups, LGBTQ rights will be somewhat ahead of IRL Russia, but behind Europe and the US. Maybe something like civil unions will be legal but actual gay marriage will still remain unrecognised by the government. But if the USSR survives after couping out Gorby, LGBT rights aren’t going to have such a great time.
In East Germany the last prosecution for homosexuality was 1956 and it was formally legalised in 1968 - in both cases, before West Germany.
In 1989 the East German State was producing films promoting the acceptance of homosexuality. So there is precedent for positive movement on LGBT rights in the Soviet Bloc without Gorbachev style reforms.
en.wikipedia.org
I mean, Lenin decriminalised homosexuality in 1917 and sold doing so as part of an anti-religious campaign. Stalin recriminalised it. No reason a surviving USSR couldn't copy Lenin.
In 1989 the East German State was producing films promoting the acceptance of homosexuality. So there is precedent for positive movement on LGBT rights in the Soviet Bloc without Gorbachev style reforms.
Coming Out (1989 film) - Wikipedia
I mean, Lenin decriminalised homosexuality in 1917 and sold doing so as part of an anti-religious campaign. Stalin recriminalised it. No reason a surviving USSR couldn't copy Lenin.
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I’m sure the Communist regimes have scope for growth on LGBT rights (after all Cuba isn’t putting gays in labour camps anymore) but positive portrayal of homosexuality in film doesn’t mean tolerance exists or is even forthcoming. The first major gay sympathetic films in the US came out in the seventies but America was still decades away from decriminalisation let alone legal equality or public tolerance and in a regime as suspicious of civil activism as Communism I don’t see that shift being faster.In East Germany the last prosecution for homosexuality was 1956 and it was formally legalised in 1968 - in both cases, before West Germany.
In 1989 the East German State was producing films promoting the acceptance of homosexuality. So there is precedent for positive movement on LGBT rights in the Soviet Bloc without Gorbachev style reforms.
Coming Out (1989 film) - Wikipedia
I mean, Lenin decriminalised homosexuality in 1917 and sold doing so as part of an anti-religious campaign. Stalin recriminalised it. No reason a surviving USSR couldn't copy Lenin.
As for copying Lenin that would require there to be anything to copy, failing to include homosexuality in the new criminal code did not mean that gays weren’t routinely fired from there job in state industries or that the secret police were not actively trying to entrap gays as ’counter revolutionary sodomizers corrupting the army and navy’ in Lenin’s own lifetime.
Even if they did decriminalise it again, I’m unsure they wouldn’t backslide a second time ala present day China.
I don't think it would be too dissimilar to modern-day Russia, maybe without the whole anti-gay propaganda law. Probably legalised but without formal recognition and a social shame attached.
I mean to be frank in the East German bits about producing films I wonder how much of that was for any sort of domestic " East Germans shouldn't hate homosexual" way and if a much much larger reason was the East German government believing it could help them recruit agents and sympathizers from Western countries. Sort of like how the Stasi invented out of whole cloth the " The CIA created AIDs to wipe out the gays" conspiracy which is still relatively popular today. In the Aids conspiracy theory part it was from a belief that many Gay men ( especially the White ones who went to the right colleges) were the perfect theoretical source for agents/ info sources. Just by being gay they already tended to have a quiet grudge against their often very homophobic societies, long before any intel agency contacted them t h ey had to get really good at living complete and total lies to virtually everyone all the time, if there were more masculine they were a hidden minority, there were a sizable number in the armed forces and if they went to the right colleges they were frequently able to join American intel agencies/ major defense contractors/ universities where they could either potentially steal research or stir up trouble/ or in various levels of politics and the secret service.In East Germany the last prosecution for homosexuality was 1956 and it was formally legalised in 1968 - in both cases, before West Germany.
In 1989 the East German State was producing films promoting the acceptance of homosexuality. So there is precedent for positive movement on LGBT rights in the Soviet Bloc without Gorbachev style reforms.
Coming Out (1989 film) - Wikipedia
I mean, Lenin decriminalised homosexuality in 1917 and sold doing so as part of an anti-religious campaign. Stalin recriminalised it. No reason a surviving USSR couldn't copy Lenin.
And frankly as far as the Stasi/ KGB were concerned if they found a potential agent they liked and he spurned them they could simply blackmail him for being gay and force him to work for them. Or if they initially worked voluntarily either motivated by money or ideology and later attempted to back out they could just blackmail them into compliance with a few pictures of them with another man.
Hence part of why the Stasi created and spread the false conspiracy theory that the CIA created Aids. A lot of Western gays were already pissed about the persecution they experienced from their own governments for a victimless crime ( Though of course many were also ardently patriotic in one form or another and if presented with a Stasi man would have sooner spat on him then betrayed their countries even with all the ways their country mistreated them.). The AIDs crisis ramped that resentment and anger up vastly. A lot of gay men ( like one of my closest family members) who lived through the worst of the epidemic even if they never caught it could often see in a matter of a few months virtually every true friend or former lover they had in the world ( The only ones they could be honest with about who they were.) go from seemingly perfectly healthy to rapidly sickening horribly in such a way its almost unimaginable and dying mere months later. For a long time no one had any idea what caused it or caused it to spread and besides scams and placebos their were not any treatments at all.
There weren't even ways to definitively test for it early on. And if a patient was lucky/ unlucky to actually find a hospital that would admit him ( many wouldn't) there was nothing they could do and thanks to multiple stigmas they were generally treated like very smelly live bags of toxic medical waste. When they died it wasn't unknown for the hospitals to just dump the body bags in the back alley. In order to say get an orderly to help carry the bodybag into a friends car you might have to bribe them like 500 bucks ( in 1980s dollars) to carry a body bag 15 feet.
Then if said Friend was lucky enough to find a crematorium with a shady enough owner they might have to bribe them like 5 or even 10 grand just to cremate body secretly at night ( So just a few dozen times a normal cremation cost). Getting your dead friends and loved ones openly buried or cremated was pretty often totally impossible.
All the while the vast majority of straight society didn't give a single damn. If they even mentioned the epidemic it was most often a joke about " Faggot Cancer sending those freaks to hell.". During the 8 years of the Reagan administration by a margin the single largest incident involving a relatively high ranking Administration official talking about t h e Epidemic consisted of a press conference where the Press Secretary and some reporters spent about 10 minutes cracking jokes about " Faggot Cancer".
That really bred a very very deep resentment against much of the US, the US gov, and the Reagan admin in a lot of ways. The Stasi took note of that and created and spread to the US ( especially in Gay communities.) and other parts of the West both ti stir up dissent and to potentially lay the ground for recruiting agents and sources.
Its sort of like the " CIA invented crack and spread it in black neighborhoods to destroy black communities" conspiracy theory ( though that one to my knowledge developed organically and wasn't any sort of espionage). It took into account widespread resentment against the US Gov and fear of the damage crack was doing among those communities and developed it into a " The CIA intentionally created crack for racist purposes and spread it in black neighborhoods". Which is more or less completely false though bolstered by a kernel of truth that the CIA for a while assisted in smuggling cocaine to fund covert wars in central America. Though to mt knowledge they never actually shipped the stuff themselves but merely used ties with various Central American groups and Govs to make sure that the Cartel owned and operated planes filled with cartel owned blow were not bothered as they flew across Central America. For that the smugglers paid the CIA a fee. Once they gotten to the Southern Mexican border the cartel shipments were on their own and had to cross Mexico without CIA aid. And not getting CIA help smuggling it into the US let alone getting assistance once inside the US to store it, cut it, distribute it to various cities and then handle internal sales and distribution in the US. And absolutely not inventing crack and helping to spread it entirely out of racist motives.
For the CIA assisting with the shipments through central America were directly pretty much entirely financially motivated to provide dark money to fund the Contras among others.
Crack was invented and spread pretty much entirely out of capitalist motives by gangs within the US. Then and now the real money has always been in providing higher quality powder cocaine to White middle and upper class addicts and recreational users. But the problem is that this constantly left gangs with the low quality dregs of powder cocaine that was difficult to sell to that market and even then commanded very low prices.
Crack changed that and allowed nearly everyone whod si much as flunked out of Highschool Freshman Chemistry to turn what would have been a small bag of low quality powder cocaine that could sell for say 5 or at most 10 bucks and turn into say 10 dime bags of crack which could sell for say five bucks a pop allowing a whole new market slice to be targeted ( namely the poor and working classes) and turn what would have been a difficult to sell waste product into a cheap and hard hitting new form which could be sold for less then its equivalent of even said low quality powder cocaine that was now massively profitable even with dose prices being smaller.
Basically think of Crack as like SPAM. A meatpacking plant/ slaughter house might make most of its money via selling whole hams and bacon while being left with various small chunks of pieces left on the shoulder that are really difficult to sell even at a loss. Spam allowed you to take those various small bits of pork left on the bone after the prime cuts have been taken and combine them into a single canned pork product thats say less profitable per unit then a ham but can be sold at lower prices and much higher quantities to sold making them profitable.
LGBT rights in Cuba today are not in such a bad place, at least from a legal perspective, with discrimination outlawed and the cost of gender reassignment covered by the government. Same-sex marriage is not yet legal, though from what I've heard it's very close to approving them. I'm willing to bet that, depending on which Eastern Bloc countries survive that LGBT rights would differ from country to country. A surviving DDR will probably be better when it comes to LGBT rights, Romania (with Ceausescu or some successor in charge) will probably be worse, the USSR itself I'm willing to bet will be somewhere in the middle.
Kick
Sounds full on conspiracy theory to me mate. Certainly thats what most people who live in former East Germany would call this (I was born in Germany). Also they would call this homophobic bigotry and hate speech.
The film is from the late 80's long after homosexuality was legalised in the US/UK etc and over a decade after it was removed from the DSM. So this is demonstrably nonsense.
How much of America is still stuck in a 1950's Cold War mindset?
There is a difference in that these films weren't financed by The State and therefore reflective of its ideology.
Well, it beats criminal trials which ended in prison sentences, which stopped happening thanks to Lenin. Incomplete progress is still progress.
Britain decriminalised homosexuality in 1967. It was still regarded as a mental illness until the next decade and LGBT people were still persecuted by British psychiatrists. In spite of this I doubt you would deny that Britain decriminalising homosexuality was major progress in terms of LGBT rights.
What I meant when I said 'copy Lenin' was that pro LGBT action was an easy sell under communist ideology because it can be depicted as a battle against religion and its poisonous influence. Ya know why the USSR recriminalised homosexuality? Because Stalin got in bed with The Russian Orthodox Church.
I am going to yake your comment very very very very lightly. I am a gay man. My uncle has been openly gay since the late 70s. During the worst of the Aids epidemic as he lost friend after friend after friend with many hospitals outright refusing to take Aids patients he turned his own Home into a hospice where he personally cared for his dying friends and ex lovers. At one point my father was in town and briefly stayed with his brother. While there an Ex lover of my uncles that father loved as being a truly exceptional person. A truly Brilliant archtitect and in general one of the kindest and gentlest human being imaginable. By the time my dad visited the advancement of his aids had robbed him of everything that mentally made him a exceptional human being. One night while my dad was there the confused ex lover crawled into bed with my uncle and said " Mommy please dont let them hurt me".
My dad was terrified that at that the poor man might unintentionally hurt my fathers brother to put him in a hospital that would accept him. To say that in his last days they treated him like a bag of medical waste is an understatement. My dad was a man who struggled with horrible depression his entire life. He told me that story exactly once. And when I looked into his face I saw a look of sheer horror I never saw before or after. qi believe that to my father forcing his brother to that man in a hospital was the single worst thing he had ever done and the action he felt the most guilt about even if it was motivated entirely by trying to protect the Brother he loved so much that when my uncle came out and most of the family refused to accept him my father permanently cut ties with all of them.
I have known a very very very large number of older gay men who survived those times. Among them the belief that the CIA created aids to kill off the gays. And if you had in any way bothered to look into the relevant openly available Stasi archives low and behold it shows in plain fucking language that they created and spread that conspiracy theory in order to attempt to create dissent and possibly lay the grounds for recruiting intel sources. The fact that Stasi made up the conspiracy theory is so wildly available that literally five fucking seconds would show about a billion sources.
And if had ya know actually bothered to talk to American gay men sho survived you would pretty easily find that the conspiracy theory is wildly prevalent.
I would suggest before say accusing people in these types of comments of both " Homophobia" and " Hate Speech" maybe just stopping to think for at least a few seconds or google.
I will leave now because quite honestly I am myself about five seconds from saying something that would get me banned in response that goes so far beyond insulting that I am honestly angrier from a single post then anything I can remember.
Bye Bye.
It would depend entirely on the governing instincts of the Nomenklatura. If they still have the same tendency to suppress any mass movement that they don't control (Soviet suppression of its domestic environmental movement is a great example of this) then you can be certain that an equivalent to OTL's laws against "gay propaganda" would still be implemented/retained.
I will clarify for anyone reading, banging on at length about how gays make such great traitors and spies because they have learned to be sneaky - that is the part which, in Germany, would be regarded as homophobic hate speech.
The idea that anything positive East Germany did re LGBT rights was really just a ploy to recruit said traitors abroad is what I (and most people from former East Germany) would regard as a conspiracy theory.
Ultimately, this thread is about the (former) eastern bloc, not America.
The idea that anything positive East Germany did re LGBT rights was really just a ploy to recruit said traitors abroad is what I (and most people from former East Germany) would regard as a conspiracy theory.
Ultimately, this thread is about the (former) eastern bloc, not America.
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Fair enough. The USSR was part of the Eastern Bloc, but I do take your point. I do think what East Germany did could indicate a direction the USSR might have gone in given that the USSR had so much influence over East Germany.
Edit: on a reread it does mention 'post soviet nations' in the first sentence of the OP so I think the entire eastern bloc is relevant.
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You DO NOT get to throw around these sorts of accusations because you are unhappy about an entirely reasonable and well laid out post.
The things you falsely accused someone of are considered to be extremely serious hereabouts. So is publicly accusing someone of them falsely.
Kicked for a week.
But the inverse of that wasn't true. Additionally, there were a number of structural differences between the USSR and its client states.
"post-Soviet states" is a terms for the former constituent republics of the USSR, not a synonym for the entire former Warsaw Pact.
As far as Stalin's re-criminalisation of homosexuality... something else occurred to me (apart from his semi-reconciliation with the Orthodox Church, which was a wartime measure to bolster patriotism etc...).
Stalin was obsessed with demographics - hence his falsification of the 1937 Census and the inflated numbers released in 1939 (and the concomitant shooting of several of those involved in the 1937 Census). If I'm not mistaken, he also re-criminalised abortion around the same time that homosexuality was re-criminalised.
Now, I know what you're thinking (I am too), that criminalising homosexuality is a stupid and futile means to attempt to increase fertility rates ("well, I can't be with another man/woman, so I'll just get married and pop out kids..." - said no one, ever
), but politicians and dictators alike frequently push stupid and futile things.There's a chance that if a surviving USSR averts the severity of the demographic collapse that OTL Russia saw from the 1990's (which is possible), that LGBT rights may be on a par with the West, or at least not far behind... if not, then the perceived need to grow the population could be used as an excuse (a stupid one, granted) for harsher policies toward homosexuality.