Roll Over, Tchaikovsky!: Russian Popular Music and Post-Soviet Homosexuality

337 Pages·2014·2.084 MB·English

by  Stephen Amico

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