About

"Fraternal Kiss" Parodies are spoofs based on a 1979 photograph of the Soviet Union's general-secretary Leonid Brezhnev and East Germany's communist party leader Erich Honecker sharing a kiss on the lips in the traditional manner of socialist fraternalism.

Origin

On October 7th, 1979, French photographer Régis Bossu took a black-and-white photograph of Leonid Brezhnev, the General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, and Erich Honecker, the General Secretary of the German Democratic Republic's Socialist Unity Party, kissing one another at an event celebrating East Germany's 30th anniversary as a Communist republic (shown below, left) in East Berlin. In 1990, Russian painter Dmitri Vrubel created a graffiti painting tribute to Bossu's photograph on the Berlin Wall in a mural titled My God, Help Me to Survive This Deadly Love (shown below, right).

Spread

In November 2011, the global fashion brand Benetton launched the Unhate Foundation to promote a "culture against hate."^[4] As part of a marketing campaign for the foundation, the brand released a series of pictures featuring political and religious figures kissing one another, including United States President Barack Obama and Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez (shown below, left).^[5] On September 30th, 2012, Tumblr user thespacegoat^[6] posted a photoshopped image of 2012 Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney engaged in a fraternal kiss with his running mate Paul Ryan (shown below, right). Within four years, the post gained over 35,000 notes.

During Spring 2013, a photoshopped picture of Obama kissing British Prime Minister David Cameron began circulating online (shown below, left). On April 1st, Snopes^[1] published an article titled "Kissing Bug," which determined that the image was a fabrication. In late 2014, the Kazakhstan-based advertising firm Havas produced a poster depicting Russian poet Alexander Pushkin kissing Kazakh composer Kurmangazy Sagyrbayuly to promote the Studio 69 nightclub (shown below, right). In December, the firm was fined $1,700 for advertising "banned goods and services" due to the poster's controversial depiction of a homosexual act.^[3]

In May 2016, artist Mindaugas Bonanu painted a mural of 2016 Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump in a fraternal kiss with Russian President Vladimir Putin (shown below).^[2] On May 24th, the weareeuropeuk Instagram^[7] feed posted a photograph of a similar mural in Bristol, England, featuring Trump kissing former London mayor Boris Johnson (shown below, right).

Search Interest

External References