Roll Over, Tchaikovsky! New Perspectives on Gender in Music Editorial Advisors Susan C. Cook Beverley Diamond A list of books in the series appears at the end of this book. Roll Over, Tchaikovsky! Russian Popular Music and Post-Soviet Homosexuality Stephen Amico University of Illinois Press Urbana, Chicago, and Springfield © 2014 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois All rights reserved Manufactured in the United States of America c 5 4 3 2 1 ∞ This book is printed on acid-free paper. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Amico, Stephen. Roll over, Tchaikovsky! : Russian popular music and post-Soviet homosexuality / Stephen Amico. pages cm. — (New perspectives on gender in music) Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 978-0-252-03827-3 (cloth : alk. paper) isbn 978-0-252-09614-3 (e-book) 1. Homosexuality and popular music—Russia. 2. Gay culture—Russia. 3. Popular music—Social aspects— Russia. I. Title. ml3917.r8a45 2014 781.64086’60947—dc23 2013043167 For my parents Contents Acknowledgments ix Notes on Transliteration, Translations, Attribution of Informants’ Quotations, and Audiovisual Resources xi 1. Introduction: Homosexual Bodies/ Embodied Homosexuality 1 2. Music, Form, Penetration 30 3. Phantom Faggots 63 4. Corporeal Intentions 103 5. Gay-Made Space 135 6. Conclusion: The Eloquence of Flesh 167 Epilogue 189 List of Interlocuters and Interviewees 205 Notes 207 Works Cited 271 Index 305 Acknowledgments It is not so much with a nostalgic nod to postmodern theory as it is from the experiential standpoint of having worked on this manuscript for several years that I must aver that no text can claim to be the creation of a single author. For while one name may appear on a cover or in a database indi- cating the production of a specific text by a specific person, it is only with the support—intellectual, emotional, financial, even physical—of numerous others that what often begins as nothing more than an inchoate mess of vague ideas can be transformed into a theory or an argument, into prose, into words on a page through which ideas can be shared with an audience. It is with much gratitude that I thank all of those others who assisted me in this project, from fieldwork to publication, from New York to St. Petersburg to Philadelphia to Amsterdam. The roots of this project lay in the research conducted for my doctoral dis- sertation while a PhD candidate in the ethnomusicology program at the City University of New York, during which time I was fortunate enough to have received financial assistance including a Richard Gillece Fellowship, the Ma- rio Cappeloni dissertation award, a Ford Foundation grant, a CUNY Writing Fellowship, and a David Schwartz Communications Fellowship. Additional research was conducted during a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Pennsylvania that was funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Without the financial support received during these years, it is unlikely this project would have come to fruition, and I am extremely grateful to both institutions and the funding bodies for their extraordinary generosity. Much like my ill-conceived (and necessarily aborted) attempt several years ago to organize my thousands of .mp3 files according to genre and