Originally published October 11, 2000, in the Chicago Free Press.
GAY HISTORY MONTH during October not only prompts us to learn about gays and lesbians who made notable contributions to our culture, it also makes us wonder how gays and lesbians lived in the past - how they thought about themselves, how they met and socialized with one another, how they coped with hostility.
One of the most neglected gay pioneers is the Russian writer Mikhail Kuzmin (1872-1936), poet, novelist and composer, who published the first openly gay novel of modern times, "Wings," in 1906.
Happily, there is now a handsome new illustrated biography, "Mikhail Kuzmin: A Life in Art" by John Malmstad and Nikolay Bogomolov (Harvard University Press, 1999).
Making good use of Kuzmin's extensive diary, his biographers are able to follow his daily life in St. Petersburg, his literary activity, his friendships and affairs, his role in Russia's cultural avant-garde, and his witness to the Soviet destruction of Russian modernism.
But the new biography does more. Al Malmstad notes in a recent article, "Kuzmin's diary makes clear that a gay subculture existed quite openly in Petersburg at the time."
There were, of course, no gay organizations as such, but there were "well-known cruising areas, ... taverns and cafes where gay men socialized, and bathhouses that specialized in a gay clientele."
The bathhouses, real ones, were common in large cities when many homes lacked bathing facilities. People could bathe, or be bathed by an attendant, and have something like a Finnish sauna.
Some of the baths became known as friendly to gay men and provided "attendants," who might provide sexual services for a fee. Contemporary gay slang referred to the baths in French as "pays chauds" - "warm climes," "warm regions."
Kuzmin wrote of one bathhouse visit in his diary, "In the evening I had the urge to go to a bathhouse simply to be stylish, for the fun of it, for cleanliness."
The attendant sent to him, one Alexander, was "tall, very well-built (with) ... light-colored eyes, and almost blond hair." The man was only 22, but had worked at the baths, he said, for eight years.
"Obviously, they fixed me up with a professional," Kuzmin noted. Nevertheless, Kuzmin returned to the same bathhouse several times to see him again.
At one point, Kuzmin and two friends determined to visit every bathhouse in Petersburg, but they got only part way through an initial list of 25 before their enthusiasm began to ebb.
There were other meeting places as well. "Petersburg streets and parks were no strangers to young men of uncertain profession who picked up money by hustling," Malmstad writes.
The extensive gardens behind the Tavrichesky (or Tauride) Palace was the city's most popular gay cruising area and Kuzmin visited often, seeking "escapades," as his gay friends called their encounters.
He had a brief affair with a hustler he met there and dismissed his friends' disapproval by commenting, "You don't talk, after all, about (the poet) Merezhkovsky and Nietzsche during rendez-vous and merry escapades. He is jolly, kind, and well-built, and that's that."
Nevsky Prospect, the main civic and business avenue, seems to have been a late evening cruising place for gay men as well as female prostitutes. "Several young men - professionals were strolling on Nevsky," Kuzmin once noted in his diary.
There seem to have been something like gay bars as well. The composer Tchaikovsky mentions visiting gay taverns in Moscow and no doubt similar taverns existed in Petersburg, although we lack specifics.
Cabarets, however, were a conspicuous part of the city's cultural life, and several were home to the gay-friendly cultural avant-garde.
Perhaps the best known cabaret was the "Stray Dog," (1912-1915) which offered lectures, plays, poetry readings, musicales and improvisatory "performance art." Kuzmin, who visited often, wrote and composed a considerable amount of material for presentation there.
Much of Petersburg's civic and social life, though, consisted of large numbers of private "salons" and social circles where people met regularly to read and discuss. Dostoevsky noted this particular feature of Petersburg life 60 years earlier in 1847:
"It is a well-known fact that the whole of Petersburg is nothing but a collection of an enormous number of small 'circles' each ... (with) its own rules, its own logic and its own oracle."
Some of these circles, especially those with artistic interests, often included gay men - actors, artists, musicians, poets and would-be poets, their lovers and just plain hangers-on.
The openly gay impresario Sergei Diaghilev formed one such circle around his magazine "World of Art" and it was to that group that the young Kuzmin first read "Wings" in 1905 to the excited acclaim of the substantially gay audience.
Later on he was invited to participate in another circle called "Tavern of Hafiz," named after the Persian poet of erotic lyrics. Although not quite a gay circle, it was dominated by people who were or might have been gay.
From all this, we can recognize a kind of gay community coalescing in Petersburg a century ago, perhaps on the verge of assertive visibility. But that possibility was crushed by the Soviet revolution of 1917.