Gay communist spies and KGB honey traps - The surprising history of the Lavender Scare

[rallamajoop]

Poking through the old slashfic archives for The Man from UNCLE, one soon notes that where other fandoms have hooker AUs, MfU has the popular Illya Kuryakin: Gay KGB Honey Trap fanon backstory. Like so many old 90’s slash tropes, this one seems to have waned in popularity in today’s (at least theoretically) more culturally sensitive times, which

Comments

[rallamajoop]

Well, depressing as the Lavender Scare absolutely was, there are a few brighter spots mixed into the bigger picture. I do think there's an excellent case to be made that Mr. Waverly would come from that generation of British spies where it was an open secret that many of their colleagues (and half their bosses) were homosexual, and no-one found it noteworthy or objectionable. There can be fun to be had playing with parodies or subversions of 'realistic' historical homophobia too. And I'm still a little floored that all those gay-KGB-honeytrap-Illya fics have so much plausible historical basis (for better or worse).

It's certainly not a subject I'd want anyone to feel obligated to address in fic, when UNCLE was so deliberately conceived to be a light-hearted exercise in escapism. I wouldn't even know how you'd fuse a lot of this stuff with the canon UNCLE universe in any particularly organic way. My own tolerance for stories built around 'realistic' depictions of historical prejudice and misery tends to be on the side of low, so I do get where you're coming from in just not wanting to engage with it all. But non-fiction which offers some insight into the history and the psychology involved obviously works on different principles with me, since this is pretty much how me and fic research tends to go these days: start out reading up on some minor detail, get sidetracked, then spend six weeks buried in references on some completely tangential subject simply because it's all so interesting! But there's probably worse ways to learn about history. ;)

[fiorenza_a]

I do read and enjoy the more realistic fic - I just have no yen to write it.

Although, in its own way, some of my own fic can be quite dark and downbeat. Just not historically so.

I do keep an old mini-atlas to hand though - I try to be as nebulous about place as the series often was, but I like to keep a handle on my Cold War borders.

It was Waverly's generation who decriminalised homosexuality in the UK in 1967 - the Govt will be celebrating that next year. Many things straight couples would take for granted remained illegal - but at least you could no longer be sent to prison or chemically castrated for simply trying to live as a gay man.

I don't know if you ran across this in your researches: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-37438800

Still a long way to go though - both Northern Ireland and the CofE are still to get with the programme.

I'm hoping by the time I'm picking up me pension it'll all look irretrievably silly - like votes for women. No one questions that now.