It happened gradually, this idea to move to the States. It wasn’t just one moment. After the Soviet Union fell apart, we started watching American movies, and started to get a sense that there’s a different life out there. My grandmother would tell my mom all these horror stories about how bad it really is the U.S. That it’s not like in the movies. But my mom was looking to get out. She was applying for the green card lottery in the U.S., and looking for job postings at hospitals around the world. She’s a doctor.
So the way we ended up in the U.S. is that my Mom was a mail-order bride. She married my stepfather, and we found out once we got here that he was a crazy Christian fundamentalist nut, a Republican, really conservative. So that forced me to stay in the closet when we lived with him.
Then, gradually, he started to change a few years later, and we couldn’t figure out what it was. I remember the first big surprise was when I moved into my own place, and my mom and my stepfather came by and he brought me a pumpkin. It was around Halloween. And we thought that was weird, because he used to say that Halloween was Satan’s holiday. So my mom and I were both like: “Wow, what’s changed?”
Then he came out as transgender to my mom, and eventually had the full sex change. And to give an idea of who my mom is, she stayed living with him for a few more years after that, as a friend, and she would go out singing karaoke with him and his trans friends.
So my life kind of turned into a Pedro Almodóvar movie. Now I’m working on a film about it all. Semi-autobiographical. Not sure how much mainstream appeal it will have, but I have some producers and a budget, and we’re talking about Carrie Fisher playing my grandmother.
About two years after they got married was around the same time I met Shawn. Back then, I was so desperate to have a boyfriend. I wanted to find out what that’s like. But I had no experience whatsoever.
At 18, I couldn’t go to bars, and I didn’t have gay friends my age. Also, I was super embarrassed about my accent. Conversationally, my accent was still really thick. I could tell sometimes people would just pretend to understand me, but they couldn’t really understand me. I was so excited to be in America. I felt that I was with people I wanted to meet, but the language barrier was really frustrating.
We met online. I responded to his personal ad on this website, Gay Seattle. I was super shy back then, and with my thick accent, really insecure. Online seemed to be the way to go. It was more comfortable. I was 18 and he was 34. I lied in my reply: he had posted a quote from some book on his profile, was asking people if they knew where it was from. So I bullshitted my way through it, told him I’d seen the quote before, that it was on the tip of my tongue. We chatted on the phone for a week or so. Then he went away for Christmas. Then we actually met for New Years. We spent the night together, and he asked me to move in the next morning. I didn’t officially move in; I kept paying the rent on my place, but I was basically at his place all the time.
I was super inexperienced, so it was just exciting to have somebody. Shawn was very well adjusted, just a good, solid man. He didn’t drink, he didn’t do drugs, he kept his life together. I think that’s what drew me to him. Also we liked each other for who we were. Back then, I felt like “the other” all the time. Most people didn’t know what to do with me, but the guys who were interested always had some kind of Russophile/foreigner fetish. Shawn is black so he’s had a similar experience with the majority of gay guys not being interested in him because he’s black, and most of the rest interested in him only because he’s black. It was refreshing to be with someone who didn’t care that I was foreign or Russian.
My mom was happy for me. Well, maybe she thought it was a bit too fast, but she loved Shawn. When I moved in with Shawn it was around the same time that I stopped writing to my grandmother. She was still back in Russia. She’d always been very supportive about everything in my life, but she didn’t know I was gay. But after I moved in with Shawn, I stopped writing to her, though I did send her a photo once of Shawn and me, and it’s funny, she wrote back, and basically addressed Shawn, saying, “Whoever you are who kidnapped my grandson, let him read my letters!” So I finally wrote back and told her everything. That I was going to university to study art, which for her was probably as bad as me being gay. And that I was gay. And that my boyfriend was black. And I told her I totally understand if she doesn’t want to be supportive, but this is my life and she has the choice to be a part of it or not. And she wrote back and said she wanted to keep being a part of it.
The last time she came to visit she stayed with Shawn and me. It was really cute, she really loved Shawn. He had tried to learn a little bit of Russian in school some years ago, and he knew a couple of phrases. But he made the mistake of saying those to her, so she assumed he spoke Russian and she would just come to him and talk and talk and talk to him for hours at a time. I told her, “He doesn’t understand anything you say,” and she would say, “You don’t know, he speaks some Russian.” She left Vladivostok a while ago and moved back to the city where she was from, right near Sochi, where they’re having the Olympics.
My grandmother and I are still old fashioned. We still write hand-written letters to each other. And it’s quite funny: now she writes me about how intolerant other people in Russia are and how she’s trying to reform them. And she used to be the most closed-minded person herself.
Before Shawn and I broke up, I changed my name and took his last name. I knew I would change my name eventually. My father never really played a positive role in my life, and I thought it was sort of a stupid convention, but I waited until I become an American citizen. I was going to make something up, but I was with Shawn for eight years, so I decided to legally change my last name to his: Hurley. And people were already calling me Wes and Wesley since Americans couldn’t pronounce Vasili, so it just gradually became my first name. I’m with a new partner now. He lives with me here with his dog. His name is Shawn too. The new boyfriend, not the dog. The dog’s name is Archie.
OLGERTA & LIZA*
“I had grey hair, but I felt like a 15-year-old boy.”
Olgerta and Liza met five years ago at the Moscow Gay and Lesbian Archive. Created in the beginning of the 1990s, it holds several thousand items on the history of the LGBT movement in the Soviet Union and Russia. Almost fifteen years ago, Olgerta founded the radical feminist magazine Ostrov [“Island”], which comes out once every three months with a print run of two hundred copies. She can often be found in the Archive. Liza moved to Russia from Europe thirty years ago, and in Moscow she worked as a translator and teacher. She’d recently been through a difficult break-up, ending a long-term relationship, and that evening, her friends had invited her to the Archive to “talk about books.”
LIZA
I was told that all the guests had to bring a present. So I brought something for the host and got comfortable in the kitchen. The first thing I noticed about her were her hands. The way they looked just floored me. I watched how they held a teacup, and thought about how I wanted to give myself over to these hands. I was smitten.