Books
ISBN 978-1-933254-61-6
Published by: Ugly Duckling Presse
"What is the attitude of bourgeois society to homosexuals? Even if we take into account the differences existing on this score in the legislation of various countries, can we speak of a specifically bourgeois attitude to this question? Yes, we can. Independently of these laws, capitalism is against homosexuality by virtue of its entire class-based tendency. This tendency can be observed throughout the course of history, but it is manifested with especial force now, during the period of capitalism’s general crisis."
— from a 1934 letter to Stalin from Harry Whyte, a British communist living in Moscow
Moscow documents gay cruising sites in Soviet Moscow, from the early 1920s to the USSR's dissolution in the early 1990s. Photographed in 2008 in a simple but haunting documentary style, these sites of the bygone queer underground present a hidden and forgotten Moscow, with a particular focus on Revolutionary Communist sites appropriated by queer Muscovites. The book concludes with the first English-language publication of a 1934 letter to Joseph Stalin in which British communist Harry Whyte presents a Marxist defense of homosexuality in light of its re-criminalization in the USSR.
Available on Amazon or the Ugly Duckling Presse website.
Selected Bibliography:
Tom Wilkinson, www.architectural-review.com/reviews/cr… Cruise Control: Moscow's Homosexual Hang-outs|, The Architectural Review, 13 June 2014
Mary Di Lucia, Yevgeniy Fiks: 'Gay History Must Become Part of Russia's Official History, TURNONART, November 2013
Feran Mateo, Cartographia Sovietica del Moscu Gay, La Vanguardia, September 18, 2013
Alek D. Epstein, Impossible Identity: The Absent Gay Art and the Field of Contemporary Art in the Country of Winning Homophobia, Neprikosnovenniy Zapas, No. 4 (90), 2013
Feran Mateo, Cuando el camarada Lenin se llamaba tía Lena, Rusia Hoy, September 17, 2013
Anastasiia Fedorova, Soviet Cruising, Dazed Digital, August 12, 2013
Agata Pyzik, Cruising past: photographer Yevgeniy Fiks resurrects Moscow’s forgotten gay history, The Calvert Journal, July 17, 2013
Viktoriya Kupchinetskaya, Hidden meeting spots of Soviet gays: Moscow's repressed history, Golos Ameriki, June 6, 2013
David Blomenberg, How Life in Shadow-worlds Usually Goes, The Lit Pub, June 15, 2013
Vladislav Davidzon, Bookforum talks to Yevgeniy Fiks, May 6, 2013
Yevgeniy Aronov, Unreliability of Love, Radio Free Europe/Svoboda, April 3, 2013
Zach Zavich, April Reviews: Jena Osman; Yevgeniy Fiks, The Kenyon Review, April 2, 2013
Nora Fitzgerald, foreignpolicy.com/2013/03/26/gay-in-the…, Foreign Policy, March 26, 2013