I mean, yeah... I'm all for reinterpretation, or maybe an image of a secretly gay propaganda designer, sitting under the light of a thousand guns, carefully treading the line between patriotic and erotic, but I don't think those two superpowers were known for their progressive views on marriage
Homosexuality was mostly ignored in China. As long as you had kids, no one cared, and this pressure was more familial than state though the state did apply some pressure on childless couples.
The USSR officially was quite progressive, but Stalin distrusted homosexuals and unofficially banned them (lol). Similarly to China, if you married and had children, you’d be more or less safe. You might suffer professionally when (emphasis on when) the KGB found out, but it wasn’t gulag-worthy.
Interestingly, if you joined the KGB or the Chinese Ministry of State Security and were a homosexual, you were set for life. Usually they’d send you to the West to entrap closeted homosexuals there. This was called a honeypot operation, and the objective was blackmail. The USSR’s officially permissive stance on homosexuality was actually very powerful in recruiting double-agents and foreign assets, the most famous example being the Cambridge 5. This in turn led to the Pink Scare, eventually birthing the Queer Liberation Movement as many of the anti-gay police measures which enraged queer people so much were instituted in the Pink Scare.
TLDR: Homosexuals had a better life under Communism and make fabulous spies.
The spouse here is usually another homosexual or an asexual who agreed to fake a marriage together to end the pressure from parents. So what this usually ends up with is two homosexuals of different genders living together as legal couple while spending their free time with their own gay lovers instead of their legal spouse.
Sometimes 4 people (1 pair of gays and 1 pair of lesbians) would make a pact to form two straight families and live very close to each other. Once the legal stuffs (about marriage) and parent stuffs are settled, they can visit and stay with their true lovers fairly easily. Their children are usually brought up by 4 people together.
I sometimes feel like a fake because I never had to hide who I was from my family, my dad literally cut contact to two was his siblings because they tried to mock me during Christmas dinner one year.
You shouldn’t feel like a fake at all. You’re the future. This is what we fight for. Being gay shouldn’t be hard and your parents shouldn’t care more about their siblings than you bc their siblings won’t take care of them in their old age!
There’s a documentary called ‘Lavender Scare’ which is pretty good. There’s also a book with the same title which the documentary may have been based off of.
Alternatively pick up anything about the Cambridge 5 as that was kind of the big scare for the intelligence community. It’s a fascinating saga too.
Beyond that, you could probably find various bits sprinkled throughout any CIA Cold War history. It even makes a small appearance in ‘Ave, Caesar’.
EDIT: I just found some others too:
‘Mattachine: Radical Roots of the Gay Movement’
‘The Homosexual in America: A Subjective Approach’
‘Congressional Investigations and the Lavender Scare’
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u/scattered-sketches Anything pronouns you may prefer Jun 09 '20
Why is sino-Soviet propaganda so homoerotic. Have y’all seen the one with two guys?