Before the FSB intervened, we were living our lives. We had our problems like anyone else, which were made worse by the owners of the apartment that we were renting, kicking us out when they saw that we shared a bed. Otherwise, Mike worked. Sometimes we went out to bars on the weekend. We had a few friends, but we had kind of left our previous life behind. The life we each had before we met each other. So we didn’t have a ton. But we went out, went to the movies. We liked to drive out into the country. Normal stuff.
People always say good relationships never come from a dating website. But look at us, we met online, and neither of us was looking for a relationship. It happens, there’s a spark. If you meet the person you want to live with, who you love, you have to fight for it.
TATIANA ERMAKOVA
“I had a career in Russia, a nice apartment, friends, family. I sacrificed all that to be with Ana.”
I was born and grew up in Saratov, Russia. It’s a provincial town, built on a mix of old-fashioned Orthodox Christian values (which condemned homosexuality as a sin) and Soviet beliefs (when most people thought that homosexuality didn’t exist in the Soviet Society at all).
Both of my parents worked, and I was on my own a lot. I was a good kid, though. I did my homework, stayed home, and didn’t get into trouble. I was also shy and sometimes had a hard time socializing. My father was a history professor at the university, and my mom worked for a non-profit organization.
They were educated, intelligent, and generally very good people, but they were still very homophobic. My dad always made sure to explain that “homosexuals are rich perverts who are so overindulged in pleasures that they turn to unnatural acts for entertainment.” I’m not sure why my father thought that all gays were supposed to be rich. Maybe he implied that average people like us would never need to even consider engaging in such acts. And my mom called homosexuality “a grave sin that brings nothing but shame and despair to a family.” It was the only education I received about same-sex love as a child. Needless to say, it caused me a lot of anxiety once the realization that I might be gay finally hit me.
That happened when I was 15. It was in 1994, right after Russia went through a series of democratic reforms. Russia was getting pretty liberal at that time, and they even started talking about same-sex relationships in the media, something that had never happened before. I remember watching a late-night talk show when they announced their next topic: “Lesbians.” The host talked a little bit about what lesbians were, and then she announced statistics, something that just shook me to the core: “On average, one out of ten women is a lesbian.” At that moment, I didn’t know a single girl who was a lesbian. But I surely knew nine straight girls. And it made me think that the tenth, the lesbian girl, could just as well be me. I know it was weird logic, but I’d had a crush on a girl from my class since I was thirteen, so it all suddenly started to make sense. It was like I discovered that I had an illness; maybe not a fatal one, but one without a cure. But then I started finding more information about lesbians, and it didn’t sound too bad. I remember reading an article in a magazine about Martina Navratilova (the tennis player) and Madonna (the singer), claiming that they were lesbians (or bisexual, in Madonna’s case). They were the only lesbians that I’d heard of at that time, and I was amazed by how talented, beautiful, and successful they were. I wanted to be just like them.
And I really wanted to find a girlfriend, but I was afraid to talk about it to the girls I knew. I always hid my sexual orientation in Russia, even when I went to the university. I didn’t meet anybody openly gay on campus. Even though singers and ballet dancers were allowed to be gay in Russia, ordinary people preferred to hide it the best they could. But I tried to concentrate on my studies and just not to think about it. I graduated and then enrolled in a post-graduate program, and got a job as an assistant professor at the International Economics Department, at Saratov State Socio-Economic University.
I was happy about my professional life, but my personal life was turning into a disaster. I was 22, and still single. My parents, who didn’t bother me about not having a boyfriend before, suddenly came to the conclusion that I was getting too old and it was time for me to get married. Russians usually marry young: my older sister got married when she was 18; my older brother married when he was 21. Graduation from college was considered to be “the time” to find a spouse and settle down. I didn’t come out to my parents, remembering their homophobic remarks and very anti-gay attitude. But most important, I didn’t want to disappoint them. And I knew that the announcement that they had a lesbian daughter would be devastating. They were always so proud of me, for being such a good student and a good daughter, and they did so much for me. I felt like I owed them to be straight.
My parents, all our other relatives, their friends, and even neighbors were putting a lot of pressure on me to find a husband. My mother had a long conversation with me, saying that it wasn’t normal not to be married or at least have a boyfriend at that age, and insisting that I must have some “emotional or physical retardation” if I wasn’t interested in men. She told me I had to either find a husband or see a doctor, so I decided to make my best effort and dated a guy my family had set me up with, but that failed miserably. We dated for all of two months, and then I told him the truth, that I was gay. He said I wasted his time, that he didn’t want to see me ever again, but promised not to tell anybody about why we broke up. I never wanted to date another guy after that. The whole experience was just too nerve-wracking, and I probably hurt the guy, too, or at least disappointed him. I didn’t want anybody to suffer.
In the months following that failed relationship, I felt even more lonely and empty than before. I decided that I had to find a girlfriend. That I deserved to love and be loved. In January 2002, I posted a personal ad online, but I chose a foreign dating site to do it. I didn’t want to use any local site and be exposed. I was teaching over two hundred students every semester: young people who were probably very familiar with all the local dating sites. If anybody at the university found out that I was gay, the news would spread immediately. I would be laughed at, humiliated, and would probably lose my job.
I got a few responses from women in different countries, from Europe and the U.S. But the only one I liked was a girl named Ana. She was from New York. We exchanged emails for a few months. Then we started talking on the phone, hours and hours of conversations. She was so smart, and funny, and easy to talk to. She was perfect, and I felt like she was the closest person to me in the whole world. She liked me very much, too. On the phone, I didn’t always understand her, and she didn’t always understand me, but we learned to adapt.
In May, she came to Russia to meet me in person. We met in Moscow. In person, she was even better than I imagined her to be. She was very pretty, with olive skin, long wavy brown hair, and the most beautiful smile I’d ever seen. When we first met I had no idea what to say to her. I was really shy, and broke, too. So for the days we were in Moscow I’d cook us little meals in the hotel, with food that I brought with me, on a little stove there in the room.