COLUMN ONE : Soviet Gays Try to End the Taboo : Despite glasnost, homosexuals continue to be ostracized and live in fear of being jailed for their sexual orientation. But a fledgling rights movement is out to change that.

As personal ads go, it was quite tame: “I’m 25, attractive and youthful and hope to meet a boyfriend (preferably a 30-year-old Muscovite) who still believes in love, loyalty and the beauty of human relations.”

But that it was signed “Andrei,” and appeared in the Soviet Union’s first gay newspaper, turned it into one more personal salvo in a new and still shaky assault on one of the harshest social taboos remaining in the era of glasnost , or openness. Of all the groups that the Kremlin’s liberalizing reforms have prompted to emerge from the underground of the totalitarian past, the fledgling gay rights movement is among the last.

“You have to take into account where we live,” Sasha, a Moscow gay activist, said. “Odd birds are always ostracized by the flock, only here it is 10 times worse.”

Sex between men in the Soviet Union is punishable by up to five years in prison under an article in the Russian Criminal Code, introduced in 1934 as dictator Josef Stalin tightened his hold on all aspects of life, including the most intimate.

By most accounts, Article 121-1 is rarely enforced and will probably be dropped from an upcoming new version of the criminal code. But while it is on the books, it helps keep fear among gay activists so great that only one in the entire Soviet Union, Roman Kalinin, uses his last name in public statements.

“I came to understand it would be simpler for me just to tell the truth,” the 24-year-old university student and editor-in-chief of Tema, or Theme, the gay newspaper, said. “Someone has to fight for the rights of homosexuals.”

In the last year, Kalinin has helped form the Moscow Lesbian and Gay Union, the driving force behind Tema, and joined with American activists to put together an international Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission. In Leningrad, lesbians are forming a feminist club, and gays in other major cities are taking the first cautious steps to create their own newspapers and associations.

Soviet lawyers, medical authorities and journalists have also begun to speak out for decriminalization of male homosexuality--there is no legal ban on lesbianism--but not a single national politician has taken up the cause. “No one will risk going along the slippery road of supporting homosexuals,” Kalinin said.

Although Soviet citizens enjoy new political freedoms, the economic side of life has gotten so bad, he added, that he fears spasms of violence against Jews, gays and other minorities. In a mild example of the backlash that gays fear, the Leningrad City Council appealed to the national legislature this fall to cancel Article 121, only to be immediately condemned by a popular television commentator for spending its time on “pederasts” instead of solving the food crisis.

Igor Kon, the Soviet Union’s best-known sexologist and an outspoken public defender of homosexuals, said there are no statistics on the incidence of homosexuality here, but that “it is probably about the same as everywhere--about 4% or 5% of males and 1% or 2% of females.”

Kon argued that given the widespread hostility toward “deviants” and abysmal ignorance of sex in general, it is more crucial for gays to work on educating people than on decriminalization. “They have to not only change the law, but change the popular consciousness,” Kon said. “Imagine America before Kinsey and before Freud.”

Alexander, a soft-spoken, 21-year-old Muscovite in fashionably torn jeans, said he had found that, “even if you want to explain yourself to people, you still can’t. They won’t understand. For so many years, they were told it was depravity, filth, scum.”

Almost all Soviet gays believe that they must conceal their sexual preferences, Alexander said, and there are no signs of any mass emergence from hiding.

The Soviet Union is at least 50 years behind America in its attitudes toward gays, according to Jim Toevs, a Tucson-based gay activist who visited Moscow last summer to help organize his counterparts here. Even half a century ago, America had gay bars and clubs, he said.

The closest thing Moscow has to gay bars are the large Sadko restaurant in central Moscow and the Okhotny Ryad cafe nearby, both of which cater to the Bolshoi Theater crowd in general.

Sasha said Moscow gays--or “light blues,” as they are known for no apparent reason--seeking new acquaintances are reduced to prowling public rest rooms, bathhouses and “the Route,” from the Bolshoi Theater to the House of Unions and along Pushkin and Tverskaya streets, all in the heart of Moscow. Other major Soviet cities also have their common meeting places, usually in highly central, populated spots.

Those who walk “the Route” suffer from police and KGB harassment and blackmail, but even worse are the gangs that victimize homosexuals without worrying about punishment because they know they will not be reported by men who could themselves be imprisoned for admitting their tastes.

A furious article in Tema describes how these gangs operate:

“These blackguards work in well-organized groups of three to 10 people with well-defined roles,” Tema says, recounting how a handsome youth serves as bait to an unsuspecting homosexual, who invites him home or goes to his place, only to be drugged or surrounded by toughs who beat and rob him.

“You can’t go to the police and say, ‘I wanted to go home with a boy,’ ” Sasha said, “because the police will just give it to you in the face with their ‘democratizers’ “--their truncheons.

“If there is homophobia in the United States,” he said, “and if in Britain it is very strong, and if in Germany it can still cost you your career, you can imagine what it’s like here.”

The weekly Sobesednik youth newspaper, in an issue early this year, quoted typical responses from young people to a survey on attitudes toward gays as “Homosexuals should be shot, they’re inferior” and “It’s an unpleasant phenomenon, they should be arrested.”

In the face of such hostility, Tema has focused on developing a sense of solidarity and pride among gays, as well as detailing the indignities they suffer. In hard-to-read computer print on heavy paper, the three editions put out so far have carried articles about “roosters,” the young men turned into dehumanized sex objects in Soviet prisons; about homosexuality in Russian history; about lesbian love, gay dignity and safe sex.

It was acquired immune deficiency syndrome that at first got the Soviet media talking about homosexuals several years ago. Now, along with lobbying for legal changes, Soviet gay activists plan to concentrate their efforts on AIDS education programs, hoping both to prevent the disease’s spread and to gain credibility among the general population by showing that the gay community can organize and get results.

“Public opinion must be changed by showing that homosexuals do AIDS prevention work a thousand times more than the government,” said Leonid Razin, a doctor who runs a laboratory that works on AIDS prevention, part of a growing anti-AIDS network in Moscow.

Kalinin said he hoped to start a Soviet version of ACT UP, the confrontational American group known for civil disobedience campaigns on behalf of AIDS patients.

A new AIDS hot line also went into action last month and has many gay callers, even though most of the Soviet Union’s AIDS carriers--there are about 500 of them, according to low official estimates--were infected by dirty needles in hospitals rather than sexually.

Sergei Trofimov, who runs the hot line and has done similar counseling work since 1981, said he sensed growing self-acceptance from gay callers, who used to be surprised that he would still want to speak to them after they identified themselves as such. “Now, they call up and just say, ‘I’m a homosexual and I have a problem,’ ” he said.

Razin said there was little opposition from medical and other authorities these days to Western-style AIDS programs, even with their elements of gay counseling.

But the political gay vanguard has run into some interference.

Kalinin’s parents have been harassed by the KGB, and his apartment was broken into and robbed, mainly of documents. He estimates that half of his mail does not reach him.

And although the more liberal Soviet press generally gives gays positive coverage, the more conservative media show signs of launching a counter-campaign. Shortly after Tema finally won official status as a newspaper this fall, the Communist Party daily, Pravda, vilified it as a panderer to necrophiliacs and child molesters.

Noting that Tema’s masthead said it was put out by the Assn. of Sexual Minorities, Pravda, quoting a dispatch from the state-run Tass news agency, also known as conservative, falsely claimed that the gay newspaper gave helpful hints on where necrophiliacs could find fresh corpses and how much a night with a child cost.

The Pravda article was aimed not so much against gays as against the radical Moscow Council, which had officially registered the newspaper under new press freedom laws that give any citizen the right to found a publication.

The real test for Kalinin and his comrades may come next summer, when they hope to organize a gay pride parade through Red Square.

Toevs said that recruitment of Western gay activists to participate is already under way, with flyers going out calling on people to “turn Red Square into a Pink Triangle,” the symbol of gay activism.

Sasha, who wears a pink triangle on his sweater but withholds his last name in Tema and other publications, is pessimistic about the parade’s prospects. He predicted that a counterdemonstration by a carefully orchestrated “outraged public” would block it.

And “even homosexuals who frequent the Bolshoi Theater would never march in public,” he said. “For there to be a gay parade as in the West, with hundreds of people--I, personally, don’t expect that in this decade.”