The Baltic Pride and more specifically the march For Equality, which after much  legal battle for the first time took place in Lithuania last Saturday reminds me the title of a collection of Jean Baudrillard’s essays The Gulf War did not Take Place. Here he argues that what we in fact saw was a mediated version of the idea of war – an incessant flow of abstract images rather than actual warfare, which changed the way war is understood nowadays. I would also argue that the mediated nature of the war maintained a distance with the actual happenings. Similarly with the Baltic Pride. 600 policemen surrounded and isolated 350 people who were marching for an hour or so from a few thousand protesters who gathered to see gay people live for the first time in Lithuania’s history. Yet apart from the policemen and the journalists no one in fact saw sexual minorities LIVE. What Lithuanian and global society saw was a mediated image of LGBT people and their fierce opponents, which turned the Baltic Pride into a peculiar  spectacle.

However, because of that everyone could perfectly see the discrepancies between these two camps. And had both sides stripped off their symbols (LGBT folks – signature rainbow flags and their opponents – neo-nazi and pseudoreligious overalls), the rest of those who for many reasons watched the Baltic Pride as it happened on numerous Internet sites, Facebook updates, etc., would undoubtedly choose to spend the afternoon with the former ones.

350 people who marched on Saturday (and there would have been more had the security restriction been less tight) were spaced across the river from the capital’s centre. They were marching within a fence, which the police were claiming was charged with electric shock in case upheaval breaks out. In fear of violent clashes opponents of the march were not allowed to approach the Baltic Pride and remained on the other bank of the river and within what was considered a safe distance, which in fact rendered the individual people marching in the Baltic Pride virtually invisible. The participants of the march claim that they felt as if they were marching in an empty field without any spectators. The tight security made the presence of the opponents armed with smoke bombs and insulting posters almost equally invisible. The wooden DIY cross erected in haste across the river from the people marching was one of the many markers that articulated opposition towards the Baltic Pride and sexual minorities in the country in general.

Much of what took place was mediated, screened in juxtaposition and hence projecting the bottomless schism dividing the Lithuanian society nowadays. Even the MP Rokas Zilinskas, who a few weeks ago, following his agreement with major anti-gay movement figures that there is no need to celebrate homosexuality in public, made a pilgrimage to the European Parliament attempting to repudiate international accusations about state-backed homophobic practices in Lithuania, joined the Baltic Pride on Saturday. Now wonder – the opposition looked pretty damn scary. When you consider that he is the only openly gay MP in the country and a previous  celebrity (a news anchor of a major TV station), I wonder on which side of the closet Mr. Zilinskas is going to finally choose to be gay.

In fact, Mr. Zilinskas is a rare case of LIVE homosexuality in Lithuania, shame that not the most inspiring one though. LGBT people virtually do not exist in the country’s public life – neither in popular culture, nor in high culture, literature, or the streets. Recent polls show that only about 10 percent of the population know somebody belonging to a sexual minority in person. For the rest they remain virtual, with their identity constructed in the images and news flows that appear after Prides in various Western countries. Hence, before the Baltic Pride the opponents were anticipating a spectacular parade of  degenerates, reverberating what was happening the Western countries in the 1970s.

The expectation of a spectacle on the banks of the River Neris was greeted with even a more striking spectacle. A few hours before the march one of the leaders  of the Catholic Church in Lithuania Alfonsas Svarinskas held a mass outside of the Cathedral in the heart of Vilnius. As people knelt to pray the saints and the Virgin to protect the country from genocide (quote!) and becoming the next Sodom and Gomorrah, this show turned out to be even more theatrical than the march which was about to begin in a few hours. I could mention that this overtly devote exposition of religiosity comes at a time when the Lithuanian Catholic church is responding to the child sex abuse scandal in the Catholic Church with mute silence.

As the anti-gay crusade was building up with neo-nazi and nationalist supporters appearing next to women with children in strollers, the Baltic Pride commenced and just like the flagman of the LGBT movement in the country Vladimiras Simonko was promising, it was quite unlike what the Western countries mostly associate with the Pride – no nudity or pink camp. Which made the opponents of the Baltic Pride look like a gruesomely grotesque projection of Lithuania’s current state, conducted by namely three chauvinists – two of them members of the Parliament. Those who were expecting degenerates and greeted the Pride with Molotov cocktails, posters saying ‘Gays killed my friend’, ‘Down with homonazi’, as well as the strollers with the   babies, appeared as monstrous symbols of everything we would not like to associate with humanity. Contrastingly, gay people who previously virtually did not exist in Lithuania’s public life and their supporters appeared as peaceful citizens who did not have to perform hostility against the system anymore as the homophobic system became a caricature of itself without much impetus.

More importantly, I would argue that if it wasn’t for a neo-nazi avant-garde, which embraces every opportunity to back violence as a response to Otherness, and a handful of what by now is called Parliamentary Taliban (namely, MPs Petras Grazulis and Kazimieras Uoka), more people could have had the chance to (finally) see gay people live and understand that Lithuania has never been homogenous unlike the local Taliban is claiming and that different cultures and subcultures have coexisted here previously and still can. Instead, what most of the country saw was mediated LGBT movement as well as mediated anti-gay movement, which both no matter how difficult it is to acknowledge for some do exist. Perhaps the fact that both by and large still remain mediated (as most of the population followed the Pride in various media and hence can easily disassociate themselves from the chauvinist hostility of the anti-gay movement, expressed by those few thousands who gathered next to the bars charged with electric shock), makes it easier to estrange oneself from the events of the last Saturday. Yet in fact what we still have to learn is how to face both of them live.

Acknowledgement

My humble gratitude goes to those who despite fierce hostility managed to pull the Baltic Pride together. And I hope DELFI.LT don’t mind for spreading their photographs – they deserve to be seen.

Grutas Park (Lithuania). 2009. (cc) Lina Zigelyte. The banner above the screen says 'We consider cinema as the most important art form (Lenin)'.

Just looked through the layout of my previous blog, which I started after enrolling to Media and Performance Studies at Utrecht University and realised that the design very eloquently expressed my messy state of mind after the first few months in the programme. It looks like something good has brewed after these almost two years in the Netherlands and I hope this blog is going to express this in the months to come while the picture above from Grutas Park in Lithuania serves as a teaser. More news to follow soon.

Some have stated that the tours bring the much-needed funds to the impoverished and most violent areas of Los Angeles. They also create jobs, which are currently desperately needed in the region. Another argument in favour of the tours is that people can see the reality of the everyday life of the locals and compare it with what they saw in the movies. As another slogan says, YOU NO LONGER NEED TO IMAGINE.

Do they make the inhabitants of impoverished areas look like zoo animals? We’ve done that before with psychiatric hospitals, haven’t we? Is there a way to make the tours more engaging? Perhaps a little walk, a chance to speak with the locals might spice up authenticity. Theme parks, museums – that is so passe. Back in 1970s Dean MacCannell argued that tourists were increasingly looking for a more authentic reality of others, as they faced lack of authenticity in their own life. Guess, the premise is still valid.

St. Petersburg metro. Narva station

Heavily ornamented ceilings are supported with marble and decorated glass columns. It is said that the only publicly available images of Joseph Stalin are gazing at the onlookers here. As they sink into the void on 100-metre-long escalators, city dwellers face a glass booth with a watchful female warden monitoring the mass submerging into her territory. I wonder why they are always female… Now and again the woman warns the frivolous ones to stop fooling around and respect the order of the underground palace of Socialism.

To be continued…

Kazansky Cathedral

The tourist pulls his suitcase through the marble of Kazansky Cathedral. He halts. Reaches for the camera. Starts recording. His target is a group of women praying in front of an icon. A painterly sight. The women bow their heads covered in headscarfs, cross themselves in sacred darkness, whisper their prayers and piously kiss the glass covering one of the many saints framed in the sanctuary.

The spectacle would tickle many a tourist to freeze the moment. Interestingly, the tourist is filming, as if venturing to capture the ritual rather than the moment in the moves of the women venerating the icon: the lips breathing out the prayer, the sign of the cross they mark themselves with, the bow, the shadow-play in front of the candles radiating in the dark, the kiss, the bow, the cross..

The tourist is a lucky one. It’s service time and there are plenty of believers filling the church. Some are older like the women he is shooting. Others – younger. His undercover undertaking does not last long, though. A warden promptly notices the tourist shooting the believers. Gently rebuking he orders to hide the camera and the tourist rattles through the marble of the church in search for grandeur and intimacy.

Petersburg Panorama from Isaac Cathedral

Canova. Cupid and Psyche

I am not sure how covered homoeroticism is in sculpture, but this sculpture Cupid and Psyche by Antonio Canova (1808, The State Hermitage Museum in Saint Petersburg) certainly raises some queries on gender. The description can be found here, while I am certain it portrays Cupid as dual – perhaps a boy, yet also quite feminine, voluptuous and mysterious. In a word, homoeoriticism in marble.

Gazing at Rembradt's 'Return of the Prodigal Son'

This week contained quite a lot of visual hedonism. Another visit to the State Hermitage Museum on Wednesday morning was a fascinating experience not only for the quantities of artwork exhibited there, but for the fact that this museum is an extraordinary space, itself representing artwork, a frame, and a painting, as my housemate remarked.

The only other museum experience I could compare to this one was my visit to the Vatican Museums in the Vatican. The Hermitage is fascinating because of perspectives opening up in this immense space. A number of corridors allow to see through five or sometimes even more halls, which reminded me of the time I was small and used to play with a folding mirror in the hallway of my apartment. By folding two mirrors so they reflect each others images I was gazing into the infinite projection. The Hermitage is similar in this way and place one into the infinity of the work of art rather than in front of works of art.

Peter's Hall. The hand appeared accidentally, yet quite befittingly.

French, Japanese, Russian, German, English languages all blend in together into a unison of curiosity and pathos as if suggesting the atmosphere of the Babel Tower. Thus, the museum almost becomes a world separate from the world surrounding it.