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Just this weekend, in Russia’s ‘northern capital’ St. Even further east, the conflict between self-sacrifice and media visibility intensifies. In the now-‘West’-facing Lithuania, the very act of displaying such an image in public might be interpreted as a sign of acceptance. But the context and intention can shift in surprising ways. Queering a straight man – whether Trump or Putin – as an insult, remains a shallow, offensive act. Still from The New York Times’s ‘Trump and Putin: A Love Story’, 2018. 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. ‘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. ‘Local LGBTIQ+ people have never interpreted the mural as ‘homophobic’,’ activist and former policy coordinator with the Lithuanian Gay League Tomaš Ilja told me. But a lot of people especially in the US don’t know the history.’ They are kissing, right, like a Soviet Union thing I think it’s more about the past. ‘But I think there’s nothing gay about them. ‘If people want to see some LGBT theme that’s okay,’ he told me. There was no intentional homosexual undertone, but he was very happy with people adopting the idea. Bonanu told me that people from the LGBTQ+ community in Lithuania had even asked to use his picture for their own campaigns. But when I spoke to Bonanu in Vilnius last year, I asked him specifically about how his image might be read. That kiss was an expression of socialist brotherhood, not homosexuality.
![trump ur the big gay meme trump ur the big gay meme](https://hips.hearstapps.com/hmg-prod.s3.amazonaws.com/images/hbz-trump-nuclear-button-tweet-index-1514996415.jpg)
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. Courtesy: Wikimedia Commons photograph: Joachim ThurnĪ 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. ‘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.ĭmitri Vrubel, My God, Help Me to Survive This Deadly Love, 1990. 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. 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’.
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Unlike Saltz’s (admittedly more reprehensible) tweet, The New York Times video is still easy to find. 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.
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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’. Saltz later deleted the tweet and apologized ‘for sharing an image that many found offensive and homophobic.’ ‘Hey! What’s doing to King Turd,’ Saltz tweeted. In another, Hannity stands behind Trump, staring down with a tense grimace. 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 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.