Is it just me or is the answer to most of these recent videos simply ‘you’d die’?

Khan made lots of kids tho. This one did it just for the love of the game.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margaret_Howe_Lovatt

You are in some deep seated denial if you don’t think homosexuals express affection through kissing.

I expected more than defaulting to disingenuity. Straight men kissing is not the same as gay men kissing. Implying that Soviet politicians expressed their homosexual desires by kissing is an insulting level of trivialising homosexuality.

Yeah, I’m sorry if the size and depth of the document scared you off.

And - more disingenuity, along with childish pretentiousness. The text doesn’t say anything specific in support of your claims. The “depth” required to prove LGBT culture existed in USSR is miniscule, the general methodological considerations that the PDF discusses are irrelevant here.

I’m arguing the homosexual urge is strong and universal. Russia is no exception. And that, when the political moment allows for it, the expressions of queer love flourish.

I don’t remember anyone claiming otherwise. What was being discussed was how the state deals with that urge and, implied, how we evaluate states with regards to how they dealt with it.

Liberals want to deny that this golden age of free love and open queer expression occurred, because it flies in the face of their orthodoxy. But it happened repeatedly over the history of the USSR. Soviet peoples openly expressed their queer love and accepted the queer love of their neighbors. Soviet governments bent in the face of it, even as the reactionaries fought against it.

This is pure fantasy. You are free to provide actual documentation from that age and prove me wrong - not meta-methodological pontificating of academics but actual traces of that time period from USSR - but as I’ve studied Russian and had some interest in their culture, as well as spent some time in Russian online queer spaces, all I’ve seen is historical silence or erasure, even during the supposed “golden age”. I would be sincerely glad to be proven otherwise, I’d be glad to see that LGBT history hasn’t been as uniformly bleak as it seems to me now.

You don’t need perfect liberal conditions to enjoy a queer society.

Maybe. The point is simply that USSR was very far from a queer(-positive) society either way, with a possible window of greater freedom for a short while that doesn’t seem to have left any serious traces in practice.

Hell, quite a bit of modern western history suggests liberalism is as much a threat to queer expression as any socialist government.

And - standard defaulting to “liberal societies are equally bad tho!”. Right after desperately trying to prove socialism created a queer “golden age”, as if you don’t believe your own claims about it yourself.

Russia and the surrounding states are filled with these people and will continue to be filled with these people, whether you choose to acknowledge them or not.

This has nothing to do with the topic. We’re talking about USSR’s sexual politics, not current LGBT activism in Russia.

Kissing as a sign of friendship/goodwill is not a sign of homosexuality or of acceptance of homosexuality. It is deeply tasteless to use it as an example of being “super gay”.

How do you explain the continued prevalence of gay culture in a country that has so militantly sought to oppress it?

Your claim about the “prelevance” of gay culture in USSR is based on a link to a lengthy and wordy PDF of an introduction and one chapter from an academic volume. It is a vague theoretical/methodological text about studying not just USSR but Central and East Europe during and after socialism. I don’t intend to scrutinise the pages and pages of the Foucaultian language to wring out some potential proof for your claim, what is needed is actual documentation. In fact I’m wondering if you yourself have read and understood the PDF.

If by “gay culture” you mean cultural output with LGBT themes, that effectively didn’t exist in USSR (or at least in Russia, that I’m slightly more familiar with). We can go look for specific examples to check that. If by “gay culture” you mean gay people managing to survive away from the public eye and having some small communities, that’s an unacceptably low bar. By that logic you could make excuses for just about every repressive regime that didn’t completely eradicate its “enemies”.

If you’re arguing against the idea that USSR was the most henious country against LGBT in history, yeah, that’s likely not true. But nobody was claiming that. OP text is (I believe) a reaction to the current touting of the progressive sexual victories in the earliest years of the Union while making little mention of their reversal and the overall bleak situation for most of the country’s history.

I live in a country with a relatively similar political climate as Poland (highly religious, post-communist, wannabe central Europe). And I used to use the same argument when I was surrounded by more conservative people. The argument is IMO frequently invoked not by people who are truly worried about children (which I’ll write about below), but by conservatives who need a civilised, “agnostic” argument for their homophobic stances. But ofc it’s better to assume good intentions, at least if you don’t know anything about the person using the argument (as e.g. here).

The biggest problem with the argument is that it’s purely reactive and, under the hood, disingenuous. Children bully each other horribly already for a million stupid reasons - their shoe brand, their phone brand, their behaviour, etc. or just so, for no detectable reason at all. They also bully their teachers and professors. What is done against all this? Absolutely nothing, as far as I see (and I’ve seen and heard plenty while I was growing up). It is never brought up as a problem in public discourse, nobody seems to care too much. Bullying somehow becomes a big problem and relevant for the lawmaking only when gay parents are a possibility.

In general, from what I’ve seen, bullies will find just about any reason to target a kid. Adding one more to the roster seems borderline trivial. E.g. a lot of existing bullying is class-based - my younger sister was mildly ostracised in the primary school for a while because she wore the clothes my mother sewed for her, without a brand or anything, suggesting we don’t have the money to buy “proper” clothes. Should we, then, try to separate poor kids from the rich kids, so the poor don’t get bullied? Or just forbid poor kids from going to school?

Thus, instead of doing anything against the actual problem – that is, bullying as such – the laws of the state, the fundamental right of a child to a family, etc. should all buckle down before some child bullying? A child should be denied growing up with a potentially good and loving family with LGBT parents, and instead be adopted by a potentially inferior heterosexual family (assuming the adoption centres have some sort of system to judge the adopters in advance), or stay without a family at all indefinitely, because someone could/will bully them based on their most intimate and safe space, that is their family? Just as it would be monstrous to forbid poor kids from going to school to “protect” them from bullying, it is monstrous to propose “to protect some kids from bullying, we’ll deny them from having a family”. The whole argument is actually (or should be) an argument for aggressively rethinking and reworking your educational system , parenting and culture in general.

because why should these children be victims of war that is not even theirs to fight

Under the current system they’re also victims and involved in this same war - a part of their potential adopters is denied by default, and they stay without a family for longer. Are they not victims here? (Not to get into the issue of measuring potential benefits of having a family against the potential negatives of bullying, it’s purely arbitrary and depends on the given culture too.)

On the other hand, I do think the whole discussion has been derailed by overly focusing on this as an LGBT issue rather than an issue of children without families. So there’s some merit at least in the general approach of the argument you present (the children are those whose well-being is most important here), but it leads to the wrong conclusion, usually because it’s invoked by people who really just want to get to that conclusion one way or another, rather than helping the kids.