In July, Pulitzer Prize-winning art critic Jerry Saltz posted two images on Twitter, neither of which were explicitly profane, but both of which carried clear sexual undertones. In one, an advert for Fox News, host Sean Hannity kneels facing US president Donald Trump’s crotch (identifiable through his infamous red tie). In another, Hannity stands behind Trump, staring down with a tense grimace. ‘Hey! What’s @SeanHannity doing to King Turd,’ Saltz tweeted. Saltz later deleted the tweet and apologized ‘for sharing an image that many found offensive and homophobic.’
今年7月，普利策奖获得者艺术评论家杰里·萨尔茨在推特上发布了两张照片，这两张照片都没有明确的亵渎，但都带有明显的性暗示。在福克斯新闻的一则广告中，主持人肖恩·汉尼提跪在美国总统唐纳德·特朗普的裤裆前（通过他臭名昭著的红色领带可以辨认出来）。在另一张照片中，汉尼蒂站在特朗普身后，表情紧张地盯着下方。“喂！“SeanHannity对King Turd做了什么，”Saltz发推文说。萨尔茨后来删除了这条推文，并为“分享了一张许多人认为冒犯和仇视同性恋的照片”而道歉。

The previous month, The New York Times published a satirical animation of pastel sketches, set to twee music and snippets of Trump speeches, titled ‘Trump and Putin: A Love Story’. In the episode, Trump’s ‘not-so-secret admiration for Vladimir Putin plays out in a teenager’s bedroom, where the fantasies of this forbidden romance come to life.’ Their tongues twist together as they ride on the back of unicorn; Putin is stereotypically shirtless. Unlike Saltz’s (admittedly more reprehensible) tweet, The New York Times video is still easy to find.
上个月，《纽约时报》发表了一部由粉彩草图组成的讽刺动画，配上精心设计的音乐和特朗普演讲的片段，标题为《特朗普和普京：一个爱情故事》。在这一集里，特朗普“对弗拉基米尔·普京的不那么秘密的崇拜在一个十几岁的孩子的卧室里上演，在那里，这段被禁止的恋情的幻想变成了现实”。当他们骑在独角兽的背上时，他们的舌头扭在一起;普京是典型的赤膊。与Saltz的推文（诚然更受欢迎）不同，《纽约》的视频仍然很容易找到。

The depiction of Trump and associates engaging in homosexual relationships has understandably roused the ire of several LGBTQ+ commentators, with the frequent outcry that ‘being gay isn’t a punchline’. Recently, transgender writer Lee Hurley took to The Guardian to protest exactly this issue, with visual reference to a mural by Lithuanian graphic artists Mindaugas Bonanu and Dominykas Čečkauskas (which went viral in 2016), which features Trump and Putin locked in a kiss. ‘Trump and Putin, like so many others, may fear being gay but every time you joke that they are, you reinforce the validity of that fear, not only to them, but to the rest of society,’ Hurley wrote.
可以理解的是，特朗普和他的同事们参与同性恋关系的描述引起了几位LGBTQ+评论员的愤怒，他们经常强烈抗议“同性恋不是一个笑点”。最近，跨性别作家李·赫尔利（Lee Hurley）在《卫报》上抗议这个问题，并在视觉上参考了立陶宛平面艺术家Mindaugas Bonanu和Dominykas Čečkauskas的壁画（2016年病毒式传播），其中特朗普和普京锁定在一个吻中。“特朗普和普京，像其他许多人一样，可能害怕成为同性恋，但每次你开玩笑说他们是，你都加强了这种恐惧的有效性，不仅对他们，而且对社会其他人，”赫尔利写道。

Dmitri Vrubel, My God, Help Me to Survive This Deadly Love, 1990. Courtesy: Wikimedia Commons; photograph: Joachim Thurn
1990年，迪米特里·弗鲁贝尔（Dmitri Vrubel）出版了《我的上帝，请帮助我在这致命的爱中生存》（My God，Help Me to Survive This Deadly Love）。

A more complicated context emerges when one recalls that Bonanu’s artwork in Lithuania is based on the famous 1990 mural by Russian artist Dmitri Vrubel on the Berlin wall, titled My God, Help Me to Survive This Deadly Love. Leonid Brezhnev and Erich Hönecker kiss one another on the mouth – the original photo of the pair kissing in exactly the same fashion was snapped by Régis Bossu in 1979.
当人们回忆起博纳努在立陶宛的作品是基于1990年俄罗斯艺术家德米特里·弗鲁贝尔在柏林墙上的著名壁画《我的上帝，帮助我生存这致命的爱》时，一个更复杂的背景出现了。勃列日涅夫和埃里希·赫内克亲吻对方的嘴–这对情侣以完全相同的方式亲吻的原始照片是由雷吉斯·博苏在1979年拍摄的。

That kiss was an expression of socialist brotherhood, not homosexuality. But when I spoke to Bonanu in Vilnius last year, I asked him specifically about how his image might be read. Bonanu told me that people from the LGBTQ+ community in Lithuania had even asked to use his picture for their own campaigns. There was no intentional homosexual undertone, but he was very happy with people adopting the idea. ‘If people want to see some LGBT theme […] that’s okay,’ he told me. ‘But I think there’s nothing gay about them. They are kissing, right, like a Soviet Union thing; I think it’s more about the past. But a lot of people especially in the US don’t know the history.’
那个吻是社会主义兄弟情谊的表达，而不是同性恋。但当我去年在维尔纽斯与博纳努交谈时，我特别问他如何解读他的形象。Bonanu告诉我，立陶宛LGBTQ+社区的人甚至要求在他们自己的竞选活动中使用他的照片。这并不是有意的同性恋暗示，但他很高兴人们接受了这个想法。他告诉我，如果人们想看一些同性恋、双性恋和变性者主题的电影，那没关系，但我认为他们一点也不同性恋。他们在接吻，对，就像苏联的事情;我认为这更多的是关于过去。但很多人，尤其是美国人，不知道这段历史。

‘Local LGBTIQ+ people have never interpreted the mural as ‘homophobic’,’ activist and former policy coordinator with the Lithuanian Gay League Tomaš Ilja told me. ‘For us the mural had a message that the city is changing to become more open, that two guys can kiss each other in public, even if they are Putin and Trump.’ In fact, Ilja said, he felt the mural was widely perceived as brave and groundbreaking. With a national history of Soviet domination (the country was occupied in the aftermath of World War Two by the USSR, until 1990) it had another symbolic undertone: ‘the fact that Brezhnev’s kiss was on the Berlin Wall, makes this association and implication of ‘cool’ and ‘free’ even more contextual,’ he said.
立陶宛同性恋联盟（Lithuanian Gay League）的活动人士、前政策协调员托马托·伊利亚（Tomaeti Ilja）告诉我，”当地的LGBTIQ+人群从未将这幅壁画解读为’恐同’。对我们来说，这幅壁画传达了一个信息，即这座城市正在变得更加开放，两个男人可以在公共场合亲吻对方，即使他们是普京和特朗普。“事实上，Ilja说，他觉得壁画被广泛认为是勇敢和开创性的。他说，这个国家有着苏联统治的历史（二战后，直到1990年，这个国家一直被苏联占领），它还有另一个象征性的含义：“勃列日涅夫的吻是在柏林墙上，这一事实使这种”酷“和”自由“的联想和含义更具背景性。”

Still from The New York Times’s ‘Trump and Putin: A Love Story’, 2018. Courtesy: The New York Times
还是出自《纽约时报》2018年的《特朗普和普京：一个爱情故事》。图片来源：纽约时报

Queering a straight man – whether Trump or Putin – as an insult, remains a shallow, offensive act. But the context and intention can shift in surprising ways. In the now-‘West’-facing Lithuania, the very act of displaying such an image in public might be interpreted as a sign of acceptance. Even further east, the conflict between self-sacrifice and media visibility intensifies. Just this weekend, in Russia’s ‘northern capital’ St. Petersburg, 25 LGBTQ+ activists were detained. Among those arrested was Alexey Sergeev, an activist with Russia’s ‘Alliance of Straights and LGBT for Equality’. Video footage I viewed from the event showed Sergeev being seized by police and hauled into a van, rainbow flags visible through the grim windows.
把一个直男–无论是特朗普还是普京–当作一种侮辱，仍然是一种肤浅的冒犯行为。但背景和意图可以以令人惊讶的方式发生变化。在现在面向“西方”的立陶宛，在公共场合展示这样一个形象的行为可能被解释为接受的标志。甚至在更远的东方，自我牺牲和媒体曝光率之间的冲突也在加剧。就在这个周末，在俄罗斯的“北方首都”彼得堡，25名LGBTQ+活动人士被拘留。被捕者中包括俄罗斯“异性恋和LGBT联盟”的活动家阿列克谢·谢尔盖耶夫。我从活动中看到的视频片段显示，谢尔盖耶夫被警察抓住，拖进一辆货车，从严峻的窗户可以看到彩虹旗。

‘For us it is a big problem to get into the media to raise LGBT themes after the law on the ‘prohibition of propaganda’,’ Sergeev told me in an email. It’s important not to underestimate the impact of visibility in Russia, whatever the tone. ‘When Russia-24 showed a bad story about our trip to the ‘city without gays’, Svetogorsk, despite the distortion of facts and unsightly rhetoric, our group grew by 500 people,’ Sergeev said. ‘A huge TV audience of Russian news, among whom there are LGBT people, learned that there is such an alliance.’
“对我们来说，在”禁止宣传“的法律颁布后，进入媒体提出LGBT主题是一个大问题，”谢尔盖耶夫在一封电子邮件中告诉我。重要的是不要低估俄罗斯能见度的影响，无论语气如何。谢尔盖耶夫说：“当俄罗斯24台播放了一个关于我们前往”没有同性恋的城市”斯韦托戈尔斯克的糟糕故事时，尽管歪曲了事实，言辞不堪入目，我们的团体还是增加了500人。“俄罗斯新闻的大量电视观众，其中包括LGBT人群，了解到有这样一个联盟。