Quote Originally Posted by Throbert McGee View Post
And, by the way, naturally I wondered why the door was painted with голубая краска -- as opposed to some other color. Three possible reasons:

(1) голубой fits the meter because it has three syllables and is end-stressed

(2) Figuratively, голубой can mean "idyllic, impractical, head-in-the-clouds, dreamy" (and this meaning goes back to the 18th century, AFAIK)

(3) Mikhail Kuzmin was apparently bisexual. English Wikipedia claims that he had a brief sexual affair with an artist named Sergei Sudeikin after befriending Sudeikin's wife, the actress Olga Glebova. Russian Википедия does not include this bit of gossip about Kuzmin's personal life, but it does note that Kuzmin's 1906 novel «Крылья» was the "первая в русской литературе повесть на гомоэротическую тематику." (Of course, regardless of the poet's sexual orientation, homoerotic themes would've been "a hot topic" among Russians in literary/artistic circles of that era, because Oscar Wilde's sodomy trial had only been about 10 years earlier, and was internationally scandalous. So the fact that Kuzmin included such themes in Wings does not necessarily mean anything about his personal life -- it may have simply been his way of commenting on Wilde.)

HOWEVER, regardless of Kuzmin's own orientation, it's not clear to me whether голубой had already acquired the slang sense of "gay" when Kuzmin wrote this poem in the 1920s -- obviously, the reference to "light blue paint" cannot have (homo)sexual significance if the word голубой didn't have such a meaning at the time!
(4) He had a blue doors in his house

According to this article the term was used since about 1970s, maybe 60s.