REPORTER’S NOTEBOOK : U.S., Soviet Homosexuals Hold a Summit of Their Own

The presidential summit is all well and good, said Brian Behan, a tanned resident of Los Angeles with a large cross dangling from his ear and a supply of Russian-language Safe Sex brochures in tow.

“But what we are doing is the first of its kind,” he said. “Summits are important, but this is historic.”

As the U.S. and Soviet presidents met, about 70 gay activists, most of them from California, ran an utterly unprecedented gay film festival and anti-AIDS conference in the center of Moscow, together with their counterparts in a Soviet gay rights movement that is just beginning to form.

On Tuesday, they handed out free condoms and staged a “kiss-in” among homosexual couples--a brave endeavor in view of the overt hostility toward homosexuals that predominates here--on a main thoroughfare of town across from the Moscow City Council.

And on Wednesday, they demonstrated on the steps of the Bolshoi Theater against the anti-sodomy laws in some American states and Article 121 of the Russian Criminal Code, under which sex between men is punishable by up to five years in prison.

One thing President Bush definitely did not know was how to make his earphone work--the one that was supposed to give him a simultaneous English translation of Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev’s remarks during their joint press conference Wednesday evening.

As Gorbachev launched into his opening speech, Bush began fiddling with the small plastic earpiece, then crushed it into his ear in an attempt to hear better.

After an aide came up to help with the annoying device, Gorbachev noticed the problem and pitched in.

“Do you hear me?” he asked Bush repeatedly. “Do you hear me now?”

“How about now?” he asked a little later. “Now?”

As an audible titter ran through the press corps, Bush finally managed to get the earpiece to work--and repaid Gorbachev for his help by allowing, at the end of the Soviet president’s speech, “What I heard, I liked.”

In another press conference difficulty, Bush took the punch out of what was supposed to be a major announcement by muffing his lines. He called for the Soviet Union and the United States to work together to convene a Mideast peace conference in October--only, in a typical slip of the tongue, he said “press conference” instead of peace conference.

Barbara Bush, meanwhile, was making her own silver-haired mischief on the airwaves, saying in interviews with the major American networks that she believes that her husband will run for a second term but that she herself sometimes yearns for the normality of life outside the White House.

“I love this life, and I wish I were a private citizen again,” she told ABC. “Push me, pull you, I can’t decide what I want to do.”

“It has nothing to do with health,” she told CBS of her doubts about a second term in the White House. “It has to do with: Will I still be able to bend over and work in my garden when he gets out of office, or will we be able to travel with our grandchildren, or will George be able to take me down the inland waterway in a boat?--that kind of thing, selfish things.” Mrs. Bush hastened to add, however, “I don’t think I can be that selfish.”

She said that her husband should run again for the country’s sake, telling ABC, “I think he has a lot left to do, and I think he has to.”

Most Muscovites greeted the summit with nonchalance, but the seven American ministers who held a prayer vigil on behalf of the summit’s success in the 17th-Century Church of the Resurrection left a deep impression on one particular worshiper.

“They were such good people,” said Masha, a middle-aged, near-toothless woman who helps out at the church, as she arranged long, thin tapers in one corner among the gold-framed icons. “They prayed from the heart.”

Masha would not give her last name, but she held back none of her emotions, her eyes brimming over as she described the inspiration she derived from one of the ministers’ descriptions of his long search for faith.

“I was very lucky to have met them,” she said. “It will be enough for my whole life.”

And could their prayers have changed the course of the summit?

“What they said was the truth,” Masha replied, “only it might not have reached everyone.”

The political atmosphere in Moscow is unquestionably far freer than it used to be, but a couple of Moscow’s finest provided disconcerting evidence that freedom of expression is still a relative and sometime thing--especially under one of the Soviet Union’s more dubious new laws: the ban on “insulting the honor of the president.”

On the raucous Arbat, the pedestrian mall where caricaturists and vendors of art and Russian crafts abound, Jessica Lee of USA Today was about to buy a pointed political cartoon to take home. It portrayed Gorbachev as a beggar holding out a giant hat with “For Perestroika” written on the rim.

Suddenly, a police officer appeared and confiscated the picture, slipping it into a bag and calling over another officer for consultations. The vendor was led quietly away.

But other vendors assured the visitors that the officers were merely after a payoff and that the arrested man would soon be back on the street.

Thus far, charges of insulting the president have held up in court only once; a man in Central Asia was recently sentenced to two years of corrective labor for selling calendars depicting Gorbachev naked.