Challenging the logic of progressive timeline,queering LGBT successes and failures in Ireland and Russia

Abstract

This article offers a critical view of progressive timeline that is a characteristic trait of composing LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual, and trans*) world maps and, in general, of thinking about queerness globally. I regard linear narratives of time as the manifestations of power that assign progress to the imagined ‘West’ and backwardness to the ‘East’. In this effort, I, therefore, advance critical scrutiny of spatio-temporal notion of progress, but centre on time rather than space which has been the focus of previous studies. The discussion of the work of Muñoz and Edelman helps to propose criticism of progress inherent even in queer approaches to time. Conclusions from the review of this discussion are then used to study developments of ‘LGBT progress’ in two countries, namely Ireland and Russia. My analysis shows that evaluation of the countries’ experiences on the progressive timeline fails to account for nuances and heteronormativity still present in both contexts regardless of their spatial polarisation.

The sexualities map of the world such as the one produced by the International Lesbian and Gay Association (ILGA World, 2019) assumes that there are two poles of the Globe. One pole represents the most inclusive type of sexual citizenship, a sort of lesbian and gay heaven where same-sex marriage is allowed and other associated problems are fading away. Another pole is infernal as it represents the countries where lesbian and gay people are not allowed to marry and experience many types of violence. Scholars contributing to LGBT studies tend to reproduce this narrative, too – although in less obvious forms – by suggesting how temporal progression is coupled with geographical advancement from ‘West’ to ‘East’ or from ‘North’ to ‘South’ (O’Dwyer, 2018). Critics of the very fact of such division are many (Brown et al., 2010; Edenborg, 2018; Essig and Kondakov, 2019; Lalor and Browne, 2018). More specifically, queer approaches showed how integration of LGBT politics into the normative spatio-temporal logic of progress excludes problematic topics and communities to create an impression of that progress (Puar, 2007; Browne et al., 2020).

However, as Petrus Liu demonstrates, queer theory’s own assumed ‘Western’ origin makes this dichotomous geographical division its foundational premise. In Queer Marxism in Two Chinas, he tracks how foundational for queer theory authors such as Michel Foucault, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Judith Butler operate various forms of exclusion of the ‘East’ necessary to construct their arguments on the ‘West’ (Liu, 2015: 26–30). He calls for an understanding of queer theory as a global framework to remedy such exclusions. Rahul Rao’s observation that ‘queer’ has already been appropriated and re-signified in post-colonial contexts answers to the call by showing queer theory’s innovative enactments in non-‘Western’ places regardless of its canon (Rao, 2020: 27). In this article, I continue such critical attempts from within this global queer theory by focussing on inherent to its debates on temporality notion of progress. In doing so, I review the East/West divide only within the European context as I am looking at queer politics in Russia and Ireland. The aim of this endeavour is to enable nuanced analyses of queer experiences, instead of schematic mapping informed by geographical dichotomies. In terms of theory, my efforts will centre on revisiting the discussion of queer temporality and utopia by José Esteban Muñoz as opposed to Lee Edelman’s gloomy cancellation of the future.

The reproduction of progressivist narratives neatly applied to geographical locations, certainly, owes to both spatial and temporal aspects of the workings of power that make these narratives possible. Due to limitations of article length, though, my scrutiny of this spatio-temporal logic will somewhat shade the spatial aspect and concentrate on the temporal one. As Marianna Valverde suggests when discussing the chronotopes of law, a methodology that encompasses both space and time, occasionally temporality takes centre-stage, whereas in other situations, the focus is on the spatialisation practices (Valverde, 2015: 57). Without ignoring any one of these, I believe that my concentration on temporal progressivist narratives emphasises their relevance to the empirical example that I offer further. Space features at the background of my arguments. Thus, my purpose in this article is to advance the criticism in the temporal aspect of the spatio-temporal logic of progress.

Although my focus on the progressive timeline seeks to analyse the power relations that are connected with geographical spaces and construct representations of LGBT progression globally, I limit this analysis to Europe. I scrutinise two cases of legal developments of LGBT re-/progression in a ‘Western’ and an ‘Eastern’ state, Ireland and Russia. One of them, Ireland, seems to speed up to the ‘gay utopia’ and, hence, confirms its ‘Western’ positionality, while the other is rolling away from both the progress and the ‘West’. In reviewing these cases, I focus critically on the symbolic manifestations of progress that feature in both ILGA’s mapping and scholarly debates. Namely, I have selected threshold legal arrangements that are used to map LGBT progression: decriminalisation of homosexual intercourse, same-sex marriage recognition and hate crime legislation. The list is not exhaustive and can be extended (for example, gender recognition law is currently gaining its moment). My selection is justified by the symbolic meaning of these pieces of legislation to timelines as I discuss further. The decriminalisation breaks with the past. Same-sex marriage arrangements point to the gay utopian future. Hate crime law is stuck in the present as a largely unaccomplished endeavour.

When applying my critique of queer theory on these cases, I am not suggesting that Ireland does something wrong, while Russia’s regrettable downfall should be viewed as improvement. On the contrary, Ireland does express acceptance of its LGBT citizens in various legal forms, including same-sex marriage recognition. Russia, at the same time, legislates homophobia in its ‘gay-propaganda’ law. My point is that beyond this frontline narrative, there is quite a lot going on that can be easily overlooked if the notion of progress still stands on our way and law is taken as its primary indication. Hence, the review of Muñoz and Edelman’s conversation here is meant to offer a tool for exploring temporalities of the present that help criticising legal progress as an adequate and the only measurement of success. The comparison of Russia and Ireland done without aspirational bias to the ‘West’ shows that despite very different laws, these two countries exhibit a more complicated picture than polarised maps suggest.

Have We ever been queer?

The critique of progressivist timeline gains prominence in response to assimilationist politics of the LGBT movement in the US (Duggan, 2003; Eng, 2010; Walters, 2014). As the argument goes, relative successes of the movement on the legal front made an impression of progress, whereas what actually happened was absorption of LGBT politics by capitalist consumption, non-confrontational strategies and mainstream respectable lifestyles that, in turn, produced exclusions and further marginalisation of a larger queer community, especially already the most disregarded (Adler, 2018; Halberstam, 2005; Muñoz, 2019). The obsession with progress is understood as characteristic of the straight time, into which this LGBT movement is being incorporated by aspiring to a ‘gay utopia’, a normative neoliberal version of the future where rights are guaranteed on the premise of being good gay consumers. Hence, instead, critics proposed the queer time that runs in other directions – backwards and sideways – and such a perspective illuminates various possibilities of a different to assimilation project of the future (Cooper, 2014; Freeman, 2010).

An important observation to make here is that this ‘gay utopia’ and the critical responses to it are certainly two different things: while the assimilationist argument is clearly based on specific prescriptive ends (such as same-sex marriages), the queer critique is open to various possibilities of the future. Regardless of this important distinction, I further explore those normative impulses that underpin some queer critical approaches and that make them similar to the object of their critical efforts through continuous obsession with the future (even though an open-ended ‘queer’ future). I do so to offer analytical instruments focused on the present instead of utopian imaginations. Hence, I revisit one particular debate that occurred between Muñoz and Edelman to argue that many of queer critical attempts still reproduce progressivist logic despite claiming to challenge it. This is especially when they are taken outside of the US American context and considered in other locations.

In his Cruising Utopia, Muñoz somewhat provocatively establishes that ‘we are not yet queer. We may never touch queerness, but we can feel it as the warm illumination of a horizon imbued with potentiality. We have never been queer, yet queerness exists for us as an ideality’ (2019: 1). Siding with a positive view of the future in queer theory, he offers to understand queerness as a performative utopia, the very aspiration to which produces desirable outcomes in the present. Muñoz emphasises that his queer future does not entail assimilation to what he calls ‘traditional straight rationality’ as exemplified by the institution of marriage and, therefore, same-sex wedding is not on the agenda in this project (Muñoz, 2019: 21). Notably for my discussion, this means that he does have a specific picture of the future in mind and, therefore, on a certain level of abstraction, his queer utopia is not that different from the gay one. Since a version of future is offered as something to seek for, what we are dealing with here is also a version of a linear timeline, despite Muñoz’s claims to the opposite. The queer time in Cruising Utopia is presented as non-linear because it is ‘not based on prescriptive ends but, instead, on the significance of a critical function that resonates like the temporal interruption’ of straight time (Muñoz, 2019: 91). However, this interruption does not constitute a new non-linear concept of time itself; rather, it diverts straight time from developing in a certain heteronormative way and moves it towards developing in a queer lineage.

This concept of time is influential in other queer discussions, but I focus on it here not only because of its theoretical significance. I am interested in reviewing the dialogue that Muñoz explicitly conducts (2019: 92) with Edelman’s No Future (2004) whose understanding of time is interpreted by Muñoz as much less optimistic for the queer future. Muñoz rejects Edelman’s seemingly dark prediction by reading ‘no future’ as still a version of future that brings nothing but dystopia. In other words, Muñoz measures Edelman’s ideas against his own progressivist concept of time (the one that has a better future) and concludes that it betrays queerness by rejecting its futurity. Hence, Muñoz re-establishes a straight line of time by creating a different from heteronormative queerer linearity of progress. In other words, he stuffs a straight timeline with a new (queer) content without challenging its linear-progressive currency so prominent in the Western LGBT discourses overall and with political implications (Brown et al., 2010; Lalor, 2019; Puar et al., 2003). Even though this may have a value of its own, it does not challenge the concept of time that made us arrive to the point where we are. Therefore, Muñoz does not address the roots of the system that produces and reproduces the existing order of things in the name of ‘progress’. If his concept of time does anything in this respect, it rather reinforces the present as it is on the conceptual level by reproducing linearity of time, which Edelman considers per se heteronormative.

In contrast to Muñoz’s interpretation, I argue that Edelman’s idea was not exactly a prophetic depiction of a horrifying future for queers. Rather, he offered a conception of time where past, present and future have no particular meaning: a momentous time – if I can call it ‘time’ at all – that happens and disappears perhaps without even leaving a trace (Edelman, 2004: 30–31). And this is no trouble at all, because in Edelman’s version of time, leaving a legacy is not a meaningful action; rather, valuing what is happening at the moment bares full significance. Although timelines do not have to be either linear or non-linear and can embrace multiple temporalities, I argue that both linear and curved timelines necessarily reproduce the progressivist narrative when they are bound for some version of a positive future, and this obscures details of the present in methodological endeavours based on them. In a re-conceptualisation of time and peripheral spaces, Jack Judith Halberstam suggests that ‘marginal positionality’ coupled with a sort of ‘empowerment’ is what characterises queer time (Halberstam, 2005: 53). Edelman offers a similar idea by radically rejecting the concept of progressivist linear time. For him, linearity of time is inherently heteronormative as it is based on reproduction of such temporalities as legacy, inheritance and kinship based on the ‘cult of the Child’ (Edelman, 2004: 19). Thus, by rejecting the linear timeline, he also devalues concepts that organise and enact heteronormative performativity reinforced through legal instruments:

The embrace of queer negativity, then, can have no justification if justification requires it to reinforce some positive social value; its value, instead, resides in its challenge to value as defined by the social, and thus in its radical challenge to the very value of the social itself (Edelman, 2004: 6).

Within this approach, it seems meaningless to even ask the question of whether or not we have ever been queer. Muñoz, on the other hand, can straightforwardly ask this question and also give a definitive answer (we have not), because he operates within a straight timeline and has a vision of how queer futures might be imagined, as well as what is excluded from his versions of the future. His timeline is progressive: once the future is redefined as queer utopia, the past and present are outlined as gradual steps towards it. Hence, it is now possible to measure how much closer we are to the desired (even though never achievable) queerness. Since we think within linear timeline, we may now not only say that we have never been queer and that we are aspiring to be queer eventually, but also that we are currently a little queerer than we have previously been. Only this progressive development of gradually becoming queerer makes sense in this approach. Yet, because of it, it is not that different from the straight time Muñoz argues against or ‘gay time’ with same-sex marriage on the horizon he deprioritises, the difference being a rather open version of his utopian destination.

In sum, Edelman questions the possibility of pleasure that may be experienced from the very idea of linear progression that is the core feature of power games dividing the world maps (Lalor, 2019). His vision of time is, therefore, more nuanced as far as it emphasises the temporary instance at the expense of time’s continuous progression to the future. If there is indeed no future, then what we are currently experiencing gets a value of its own; but also, if we still stay with Edelman and others (Butler, 1990; Duggan, 2003; Warner, 1997), we find ourselves in the conditions that tend to reproduce heteronormative institutions to ensure perpetuation of heteronormativity itself. Using this approach, it is possible to argue that we have always been queer (cf., Taylor, 2016: 210), but queerness has always also been marginalised and that it takes various new forms and definitions in the moment depending on current circumstances of its marginalisation. Temporalities of maps that are built on the idea of progressiveness tend to ignore both the various forms that queerness takes and the conditions of heteronormativity that remain intact even in the places designated as progressive. Building these maps discounts distinct forms of queerness by relying on legal regulation of sexuality as its only expression. And it misses to account for heteronormative conditions by coupling Western legal norms with progress.

Queer approaches to timelines have been put forward in analyses of LGBT politics in various places, including Eastern Europe, which is usually regarded as lagging behind the West within progressivist thinking (Mizielińska, 2011). Thus, (Mizielińska and Kulpa, 2011: 15) propose an illustration that represents Eastern European sexual citizenship as a set of spin-offs, U-turns, and circling around on the background of a linear development of the ‘West’. By the very fact of this juxtaposition, they presume what the right progressive timeline is supposed to look like, even though the ‘West’, too, might be understood as having a convoluted LGBT history (Weeks, 1985). Hence, a progressivist timeline still informs such analyses in as much as a concept of the future is required to register certain legal developments as either progressive, or as setbacks, as either linear, or U-turns. Instead, I am interested in the ‘East’ and ‘West’ together as a timeless zone and, in this respect, I am proposing to get rid of the Western developments as the golden standard by cancelling the future. If we do not know whether or not we progress, then we can be more attentive to what is happening here and now.

A more nuanced approach values what it finds without being somewhat blinded by progressivist linear time. To give an example, post-socialist literature claimed that socialist countries in Eastern Europe were indeed different from the ‘West’, but not because they lacked something that the ‘West’ had, rather because they had it in a different form (Gal, 2002; Kondakov, 2019a; Voronkov and Zdravomyslova, 2002). For instance, the USSR has been accused of missing the time of sexual revolution in the 1960s. However, it turned out that this revolution had gone unnoticed because it took a form of less overt and explicit, but still transformative and impactful revolution of intimacy (Gradskova et al., 2020: 364). This kind of revolution was more hidden as people changed their sexual practices and recognised sexual diversity, but never had a chance to discuss it publicly or to institutionalise the changes in law. This more hidden form of transformation is invisible within the progressivist logic. It made the misleading impression of unchangeable stagnation (and, therefore, the USSR’s backwardness), whereas more accurate research tools would show a dynamic picture. This does not change the point that both the ‘West’ and the ‘East’ still reproduced heteronormativity in their sexual and intimate revolutions, but does trouble a highly problematic claim of West’s pleasured superiority derived from illusion of progression that eventually obscures other experiences.

This discussion of queer temporalities helps to look at these experiences and places differently through rejection of linear progression (rejection of a knowable future really). If the obsession with progress is stopped, then it might be possible to make sense of controversies and puzzles that are going on in a given context without measuring local experiences against a presumed (Western) standard. Rarely, things are so simple that it is easy to claim they signal progressiveness or backwardness. Most commonly, things are complex and simultaneously both, or if we reject measuring progressiveness, they are neither and, therefore, we have to come up with more accurate terms to describe the moment instead of assigning simplistic values to sophisticated processes. I am turning to do this using my analysis of legislation in Ireland and Russia – two countries from Western and Eastern edges of Europe. My analysis is intended to show the complexity behind polarising progressive narrative and propose a more accurate representation of geographical contexts than a progressive timeline offers.

Russia and Ireland: worlds apart?

My comparison of Russia and Ireland is partly explained by a purely personal investment: I was born in the USSR, which partly became Russia when I was growing up, and I moved to Ireland later for work. It gives me a distinctive personal experience that informs my analysis of both places. However, there are other reasons for this choice, especially if the basis behind this comparison is difference rather than commonality on the first glance. Ireland can be interpreted as the opposite of Russia in many crucial terms: physical geographical location (to the West of Europe as opposed to the East of it); religion (the division between Catholic and Orthodox churches in Europe is a significant axis of historical disagreement); territory (small versus vast and island versus mainland); population (in terms of numbers) and population composition (in terms of diversity), etc. Historically too, Ireland and Russia took quite different paths, with Ireland struggling for independence from the British Empire and its still-present influences, while Russia trying to play the role of an influential Empire itself to this day.

All these circumstances matter in regard to sexuality, because such contexts as population, territory, religion, historical and political experiences contribute to the formation of the issue under study in many complex ways. For instance, the very fact that Ireland strives for emancipation from religious dogmas may be interpreted as the rationale behind the support of issues related to LGBT rights agenda to diminish ‘religious homophobia’ (Reygan and Moane, 2014). On the contrary, after intensive anti-religious policies during the Soviet time, Russia may be said to promote the growth of religiosity that results in creation of a hostile to LGBT environment (Buyantueva, 2018: 470–471; Tolkachev and Tolordava, 2020). Furthermore, Ireland is a member of the European Union (a supra-national structure which claimed ‘Europeanness’ and its values only to itself), whereas Russia is not and actively challenges these values on the international arena as contradicting to its national traditions (Edenborg, 2021; Wilkinson, 2014). Most importantly, on the current maps of the world that are supposed to indicate LGBT rights progression towards the gay utopia, Ireland scores much better than Russia, and within Europe, these two countries occupy opposing poles. Not only does Ireland recognise same-sex marriages and proudly holds LGBT Pride Parades without violent state interventions, but it also appointed its own gay Taoiseach in 2017 – the Irish Prime Minister (Healy et al., 2016). Russia – quite the opposite of this – scores poorly in advancing the gay utopia due to the ‘gay-propaganda’ law (Kondakov and Shtorn, 2021; Utkin, 2021), police brutality during LGBT rallies (Stella, 2013) and the fact that neither its prime minister nor its president are knowingly gay, although one of them flashes signs of questionably grotesque masculinity that can be seen as one of the forms of queerness (Kondakov, 2018; Novitskaya, 2017).

Despite these differences, Ireland and Russia have something in common, too. Both territories are located on the European periphery – Ireland on its West end, while Russia crawls from Europe’s East end to the North of Asia. This location is both geographical and political, as well as flagging heterogeneity of what is referred to as ‘West’ or ‘East’. It is political in the sense that there are moments of time when peripheries are expected to embrace ideas originated at the core. In terms of sexual citizenship, Ireland and Russia coincidentally decriminalised male homosexual intercourse in the same year, 1993. This will serve as a point of departure for further comparative sketch. I shall now go through three larger themes in the LGBT rights agenda to outline this comparison: the decriminalisation of homosexuality, same-sex marriage debates and hate crime legislation. Two of them (the decriminalisation and marriages) serve prominently on the LGBT maps that track progress – one to indicate rupture from the ‘dark’ past and the other one to show commitment to the gay utopian future. Hate crime legislation, on the contrary, is usually not included as an indicator of LGBT rights success (perhaps, because this issue so far cannot depict Western position positively). In my analysis, I utilise the thinking beyond progressivist narrative to offer a more nuanced picture of what is going on now. My analysis is based on the available academic literature, and it is, therefore, a reflection of the versions of these two geographical locations limited by conducted and published research. These are imaginary versions of Ireland and Russia in as much as they are produced within the existent institutional academic context with all its limitations of methods, funding, instruments and theoretical biases.

Decriminalisation of homosexuality in 1993

There are many different ways in which decriminalisation can be inscribed into the progressive logic of Western superiority. Depending on where a particular country belongs, its experience appears to be interpreted as either successful ‘Western’ road to the ‘gay utopia’ or failing ‘Eastern’ collapse to the ‘dark ages’. This distinction seems to act performatively and, therefore, to entail striving to that particular version of future which one of those paths depict. For instance, Irish decriminalisation of homosexuality in 1993 is understood as the result of work put forward by the strong civil society, the LGBT movement, as will be shown below. In contrast, decriminalisation in Russia is read as occurring under pressure of the European Council, although this agency played an important role in both cases. As a result, the Irish case progresses towards more and more inclusive sexual citizenship as it is expected from a society already committed to the gay utopia. As for Russia, it only proves that without European institutions in place, any country falls into degradation. This vision of both places obscures important nuances.

Starting from the 1970s, in Ireland, the Campaign for Homosexual Law Reform targeted existent pieces of legislation ¹ that made certain forms of expression of male homosexual desire criminal (Flynn, 1997; O’Donnell, 2008: 2–3; Casey, 2018: 224). Protests, campaigning and legal suits were the activists’ strategies that led to eventual elimination of the law 20 years later in 1993. In this narrative centred on the contribution of the civil society, there is a logical progression line that starts with the march against criminalisation in 1974 (Casey, 2018: 224), goes on to the National Gay Conferences (Neary, 2017: 40; O’Donnell, 2008) and concludes with legal battles in the Supreme Court in 1984 and the European Court of Human Rights in 1988 (Flynn, 1995). The triumph of the campaign could be located in the presentation of the decriminalisation bill by the Minister for Justice to Seanad Éireann (the Senate) in front of David Norris, the plaintiff in the successful Strasbourg case:

I am not introducing this Bill simply because of the requirement of compliance with the judgment in the European Court of Human Rights in the case brought by Senator Norris although that requirement is certainly there. This Bill stands on its own merits as a fundamental development in human rights which will put an end to unwarranted intrusion over a very long period into the private life of adults (cit. in Flynn, 1997: 502).

Not only was the bill adopted, it was also signed into law by Mary Robinson, the then President of Ireland and Norris’ legal representative in the landmark Supreme Court and ECtHR cases (O’Donnell, 2008: 4). This picture makes decriminalisation logical and inevitable, inscribes Ireland into the family of progressive Western states, and shows the event’s rootedness inside both Irish society and European community with shared human rights values.

Russia decriminalised male homosexuality in the same year, 1993. However, the event had been described as the result of pressure from the West seeking to spread human rights values across an emerging new country setting up at the ruins of the USSR:

Decriminalization of gay male sex came … in an omnibus package of laws rushed through the Russian legislature by the Yeltsin administration. The influence of the “first generation” of Russia’s queer activists on the legal change was probably very limited. Instead, Russia’s “shock therapy” reformers were keen to enact as much legislation to comply with Council of Europe human rights standards as quickly as possible (Healey, 2018: 106).

In the logic of the spatio-temporal progressivist narrative, it is easily explicable: since Russia belongs to the East, it cannot really decriminalise homosexuality on its own, because it is drawn back by its outdated prejudices prevalent in both the political elite and general population. How then do we account for discrepancies between experiences and this vision? To begin with, Russia decriminalised homosexuality in 1917 (Healey, 2001: 3–4). The ‘West’ had quite a different standing on the matter at the time: it was simply not a value related to rights or any particular geographical space (some states never had homosexuality criminalised and others still punished their citizens for it). Perhaps, after all, it was just an exceptional time of revolutionary reforms and as soon as the political elite opined that people were better governed through repressions, criminalisation was brought back to the Criminal Code in 1934 (Healey, 2014: 176).

Neither should we ignore the discussions of decriminalisation of homosexuality in the 1960–70s USSR (Alexander, 2018; Chalidze, 1977: 228). It was not a massive popular movement that argued against criminalisation, but an expert community of lawyers seeking some consistency in the Soviet approach to crimes at the background of decriminalisation of homosexuality in other socialist states (Czechoslovakia, Hungary, East Germany and Bulgaria). As more information started to circulate with democratisation of the Soviet public discussions in the late 1980s (Essig, 1999), more evidence of the interest of the State in the decriminalisation surfaced. Parliamentarian deliberations reached a declaration by the Supreme Soviet (Russian parliament of the time) in 1991 that among other things proposed to decriminalise male homosexuality (The Supreme Soviet, 1991: Sec. IV.1, para. 3). Although little is known about this document, it is important to note this possibility of rootedness of the decriminalisation in local history. If Russia was a Western country, it is not improbable that all these instances would be flagged as evidence of its deep historical adherence to human rights for queers.

In terms of LGBT movement, another possible actor in decriminalisation debates, there were various groups of which we know that struggled against criminal prohibition of same-sex intercourse for men at least in the 1980s (Essig, 1999: 55–81) and even earlier, if campaigns around prosecuted under this law celebrities considered. On the other hand, the very possibility of political mobilisation around any issue at all was quite limited due to the government’s surveillance of people’s activities. Thus, any kind of political activism, including LGBT activism, was very much a hidden enterprise and in this sense is very hard to reveal in accurate estimation by available research tools (Kondakov, 2019a). Note, however, that by 1991 LGBT festivals amassed ‘tens of thousands’ of Soviet people (Essig, 1999: 133–134). Somehow these masses were prepared to go to a public queer event by then. A different narrative is feasible if a different perspective is applied to these matters showing how distinct histories can be assembled. Having the Western progression as a golden standard in mind, a different narrative is not only impossible, but also inexistent. If progressivist narrative is indeed performative, for Russia, it enacts quite a dystopian past and future.

If the progressivist timeline is not the only possibility, we may look at the developments in Ireland from a more critical perspective to understand which elements of the story are missing when contribution of the civil society is emphasised. Thus, the Irish Chief Justice of the Supreme Court claimed in 1984:

On the ground of the Christian nature of our State and on the grounds that the deliberate practice of homosexuality is morally wrong, that it is damaging to the health both of individuals and the public, and, finally, that it is potentially damaging to the institution of marriage, I can find no inconsistency with the Constitution in the laws which make such [homosexual] conduct criminal (cit. in Flynn, 1997: 496).

Although this sentiment was successfully appealed at the ECtHR (which, incidentally, did not uphold a unanimous decision in 1988), it took Ireland another 5 years to decriminalise homosexuality. What forces drew Ireland back from cancelling discriminatory legislation? Why are religious institutions and discourses evident in Justice’s argument so rarely discussed in this respect? Meanwhile, the police seemed to be reluctant to enforce the law criminalising male same-sex acts, but implemented other tactics of intimidation, including unjustified interrogation and composing personal dossiers (Casey, 2018: 221) – a practice very familiar to the Soviet and Russian police work (Kozlovsky, 1986: 156). ² Ireland’s practices outside of the Western community could, perhaps would, be used as evidence of the country’s backwardness on the progressive timeline. This is not my purpose, though. These two sequences juxtaposed demonstrate inaccuracy of the progressive timeline by obscuring many side-stories that should find a place in the common reservoir. Just like Muñoz in his depictions of progress to the queer utopia, LGBT mapping overlooks these nuances.

Same-sex marriage

Same-sex marriage has become the measure of LGBT success on the timeline to inevitable progress (Adler, 2018; Walters, 2014). Legislating marriage is an obvious indication of this progress with states that fail to do so equating failure in progressivist project overall. Ireland scores very well in this sense not only by having same-sex marriage law in place, but also by claiming the rank of the first nation to decide the matter by a popular vote in 2015 (Healy et al., 2016; Luibhéid, 2018; Neary, 2016, 2017; Tiernan, 2020). Russia, in turn, amended its Constitution by a referendum in summer 2020 that now insists on heterosexuality of the marriage. The progressivist narrative structures these occurrences in such a way that no questions can be asked: as a Western state, Ireland clearly enters the utopian future, meanwhile Russia is expectedly falling deeper down. Both statements are somewhat misleading, though, as the progressivist narrative obscures the details of the events and of the social organisation of sexuality as opposed to the legal one more generally. Thus, deciding same-sex marriage amendments by a referendum puts Ireland in a group of just several dozens of countries that have or have had heterosexuality of marriage in their constitutions in the first place. Claiming leadership among them is, probably, good as a political trope, but hardly gives any nuanced contextualised impression of what happened in 2015. Moreover, it reinforces the idea of importance of the marriage as an institution which position must be defended by the constitutional law. This idea played out regrettably in Russia whose constitution kept silence about sexual orientation of spouses before 2020. The result of the Russian constitutional referendum may be regarded as an expectable popular demand to strengthen legal basis of heterosexuality. Yet, the reality is more complicated: its recent constitutional amendment was administered during the major health crisis (the new Coronavirus pandemic) as voting ‘yes’ or ‘no’ for a pack of 206 edits at once, heterosexuality of marriage included. Even if this procedure could be seen as properly run, the question remains what exactly people were voting for among these many things.

Just like in the case of decriminalisation of homosexuality, when considering same-sex marriage issue, another evidence of progress in the ‘West’ must be the work of civil society that makes it happen. Emphasis on civil society as an agentic force of changes does not stand in Russia as an ‘Eastern’ location, regardless of activists’ participation in same-sex marriage debates there. Thus, Russian same-sex marriage agenda came around about the same time as in Ireland in the mid-2000s with the Marriage Equality campaign promoted through the LGBT Pride organisers’ venues (Kondakov, 2013: 411, 413). Heterosexuality of marriage was open to interpretation at the time. Activists from the Marriage Equality group brought the issue before the Constitutional Court in 2006. After an unsuccessful attempt to register a family, two gay men complained to the court that they were discriminated against when the registration was refused. The Court assumed a cynical formal equality position by saying that everyone could enter into a marriage, provided that they were of opposite sex, including a gay man if he wanted to marry a woman (Constitutional Court of the Russian Federation, 2006: 3), an argument certainly familiar in the ‘West’, too (Wilkinson and Kitzinger, 2020). Court’s vision of heteronormative order was further stabilised through 2013 federal ‘gay-propaganda’ ban based primarily on the definition of homosexuality as opposed to the family narrowly understood as a place for upbringing of children emerged as a result of sexual intercourse between spouses – the idea cemented by legalising ‘traditional family values’ (Muravyeva, 2014). Speaking of traditions, though, this narrative misses the Soviet experiment with same-sex families in the 1920s when the Bolsheviks deliberately recognised a same-sex union between two women (Healey, 2001: 168–169).

By prioritising same-sex marriage as the indication of progress, one can only witness that Russian legislators protect an outdated definition of marriage, whereas Irish ones expand it to include more people. However, the progressivist narrative that stresses the importance of achieving utopia overshadows the nuances of content, significance and practice of marriage law. For example, critics suggested that the Irish same-sex marriage law disadvantaged people with migrant background, signalled inequality between heterosexual and queer parenting, and reinforced intimacies assimilated to the heteronormative model (Bracken, 2017; Luibhéid, 2018). Russia does not recognise same-sex marriage, but if it did, queer people would be included into a much different regulation of intimacy (without a 2-year separation and a court procedure for a simple divorce and other strict requirements like in Ireland). Moreover, if marriage is understood as an indicator of heteronormativity, at the level of practice, Russian people flash a great deal of resistance to it by preferring not to register their relationship (Egorova and Shorygin, 2020) or by terminating marriages with ease. In Ireland, people enter into a marriage and stay there long term with 0.6 per 1000 of divorce rate in 2016 (Eurostat, 2019), partly because of strict divorce rules, partly because of great symbolic meaning of marriage. In Russia, on the contrary, people divorce more frequently than they marry in the same 2016 with divorce rate over 4 per 1000 (Scherbakova, 2017).

These considerations do not challenge Ireland’s accomplishments and are not here to do so. They indeed seem to suggest that Russian citizens adhere to family values less enthusiastically than not only the cynical Russian Constitutional Court or its conservative government, but also the Irish. Yet, this is not the point. The point is that the progressivist timeline cannot account for such nuances. Nonetheless, precisely such nuances show that using same-sex marriage legislation as one-fit-all measure of progress makes little sense. The progressivist narrative results in mapping different things which are referred to as ‘marriage’ across ‘West’ and ‘East’ pretending they are the same and signal the same level of questionable progression, whereas this seems like not the case.

Hate crime law

Hate crime legislation depicts a picture that confuses narratives of progression due to the current symbolic status of this law. It appears that having progressive legislation may not mean anything in particular in terms of both progressing on the LGBT timeline and preventing violence against LGBT people. In Ireland, there is no specific law that addresses bias-motivated violent crimes, although reforms are in the making as of 2021. The only relevant legislation cited in literature is The Prohibition of Incitement to Hatred Act 1989 that is believed to be ineffective or even harmful (Haynes and Schweppe, 2017a: 51). Because it is the only point of reference for gardaí (the police) to record hate crimes, it obscures the actual number of such offences (Haynes and Schweppe, 2017b: 25–26). Ultimately, it does not address the amount of violence experienced by queer people in Ireland (see, Barron, 2013: 25). The thing is that the 1989 Act prohibits just one element of bias-motivated crimes – expression of hatred – and, therefore, leaves unnoticed violent actions motivated by hatred such as injuries, murders, or destruction of property. On the other hand, the law explicitly includes sexual orientation as a protected characteristic.

In Russia, there are many pieces of legislation that explicitly protect people from hate crimes (Dubrovskiy, 2020; Verkhovsky, 2015), but no law references victims’ sexuality. Hate crime is an area of criminal law that has been very well developed over the recent decades and sexuality has been covered by it, but only in court practice and minimally (Kondakov, 2019b; Shtorn, 2018). To begin with, there is a separate Article 63 in the Russian Criminal Code that lists aggravating circumstances and states that they include ‘a crime motivated by political, ideological, racial, ethnic or religious hatred or enmity, or motivated by hatred or enmity towards any one social group’ (Kondakov, 2019b: 3–4). This latter term – ‘social group’ – may protect people attacked because of their sexual orientation as the Constitutional Court instructed:

The sphere of sexual self-understanding presumes objective variations of sexual identity and the possibility to choose any non-violent and non-threatening to life and health specific forms of sexual activities among adult people, including those that may be disapproved by the majority … The State must take actions against the breach of rights and interests of persons because of their sexual orientation and provide effective measures to protect and remedy their rights … This constitutional principle presupposes inter alia unacceptability of limitations of rights and liberties or establishment of privileges depending on membership in any one social group, which to this matter can mean the groups of persons with non-traditional sexual orientation (Constitutional Court of the Russian Federation, 2014: para 2.1). ³

If this was true, not only Article 63, but also a variety of criminal articles could have been enforced to protect people from sexuality motivated offences (Kondakov, 2019b: 4), including from intentional murder (105), various forms of violence (111, 112, 115, 116 and 117) and expression of hatred (282). All these Criminal Code articles repeat that motives of hatred to ‘any one social group’ are counted as aggravating circumstances. Nonetheless, research findings suggest that only four criminal offences were qualified as hate crimes against LGBT people in Russian courts in 2011–2016, whereas their actual number could have been as many as 297 (Kondakov, 2019b: 4, 7).

Such numbers in Ireland are quite similar. Amanda Haynes and Jennifer Schweppe (2017b: 12, 16) found overall five cases of hate crime in case law databases for all different kinds of the ground of hatred. Incidence reports on homophobic violence recorded by gardaí prove richer source for analysis, but still amount to a median number of 21 crimes a year in 2006–2014 (Haynes and Schweppe, 2017b: 18, 112) apparently not ending up in court sentences as hate crimes anyway. OSCE hate crime data for Ireland are extremely limited, too. Gardaí records are available from 2009 with a gap in 2015–2017, sentencing is available for 1 year (2013) only (OSCE n/d a). As for Russia, it does not officially record any hate motives except for racism and xenophobia, provides data from 2016 onwards and, puzzlingly, higher numbers of prosecution and sentencing than police incidence log (OSCE n/d b). In both OSCE country reports, civil society data suggest higher levels of bias-motivated crimes.

Hate crime legislation in these two cases challenges linearity of time and rather shows inconclusive circling around the issue of violence in both places. The progressive narrative does not yet fully include hate crime law as indication of approaching to the ‘gay utopia’. In result, Russia’s well-developed legislation and the absence of protection from violent hate crime in the Irish law do not challenge these countries’ positionality. This offers an opportunity to critically investigate both violence against LGBT people regardless of physical geography and hate crime legislation design in terms of its not necessarily fulfilled promise to combat this violence. As Ireland moves to update hate crime law (INAR, 2020), such investigation may prove crucial. As for my discussion in this article, it shows precisely that interpretation of certain laws as signs of progress originates in specific places. Namely, such interpretation originates in places already assessing themselves as progressive and taking pleasure in this progress, as Edelman suggested. Since hate crime law does not deliver this pleasure so far, it does not feature as an indicator of success, neither.

Conclusion

Progressive narratives structure the world in a very particular way. The idea of progress originates in the ‘West’ to reproduce its dominance and power position through establishing a golden standard of the future, to which the world must aspire. The very aspiration to it appears to drive the world in one direction, a version of future that satisfies Western positionality on the world map. The pleasure of progress is hard to escape, as Edelman observed. Not only political invocations such as ILGA’s, but scholarly work, too, tend to be informed by progressivist narratives. Although it may seem appropriate for the former case (still laying ground for exclusions), critical engagements such as queer theory may be expected to be more attentive to its inherent assumptions. I reviewed Muñoz’s ideas about queer utopia taken outside of the US American context and identified that progressivist narrative underpins his writing. Hence, the thinking that he exhibits fails to challenge the central feature of heteronormativity. On the contrary, my reading of Edelman’s queer time is that it devalues progress in the sake of progress. In result, I argued for this more nuanced way to see time as timeless, regardless of which future it depicts, because any version of future rather obscures the present than helps to analyse it.

This de-prioritisation of progress helps me to look at contextualised experiences of queerness that flash contradictory and inconsistent expressions. In particular, my discussion of Irish and Russian developments in regulation of sexuality showed that focussing on legal novelties tends to reinforce the progressivist narrative. Law serves as an indication of movement across the progressivist timeline regardless of a more complicated picture of the law’s content, context and practice. Discussions of decriminalisation of male sexual intercourse highlight civil society contributions in the ‘West’ and submission of local governments to international institutions in the ‘East’. Getting rid of the progressivist narrative would rather attain to intertwined character of these actors’ moves, as well as pose new questions about the place of institutionalised ‘traditions’ such as religious dogmas in the process. Same-sex marriage recognition turns in a political trope where countries are encouraged to compete for the title of the most progressive one. This political discussion pays little attention to particular ways, in which different designs of marriage law reinforce heteronormativity and how people resist to it by practicing other forms of intimacy and kinship. Hate crime norms that deal with protecting lives of queer people currently receive little courtesy in the progressivist logic. This opens a narrow window of opportunity to conduct a nuanced study of violence against LGBT people regardless of their places of residence. After all, biased murders do not respect the ‘East’/‘West’ division. In a nutshell, the progressivist timeline organises these issues in such a way that proves ‘flying’ towards a version of queer utopia defined by the most powerful, the ‘West’. Instead, in my analysis, I find traces of heteronormativity that condition queerness in both ‘West’ or ‘East’ and join the call for the global queer theory that smashes misleading spatial divisions established in the name of progress.