This year he turns 40, but he is still afraid to come out in church, during confession. He has little hope of finding a new job, and not very much faith in becoming a successful activist, especially since the police refused to open an investigation into his assault at the protest. “I regret nothing,” said Alexander, insisting we quote him on that.
I work in Moscow city government and I’m fully aware that after this interview is published, I may be fired. They don’t need a scandal on the eve of the mayoral election, so they will probably ask me to quietly submit a resignation letter, try to portray me as unprofessional, or worse, cut all ties with me. I haven’t told anyone that I’m gay. If someone at work makes some joke about fags, I just grin like an idiot. In my regular life, I have to control my gaze so that it doesn’t linger over some beautiful man for a suspiciously long time. I’ve trained myself in self-control since childhood, but this causes constant internal pressure. I lead a double life, and it has me climbing the walls.
I grew up in a small town in the Far East and realized that something was awry when I was around 13 or 14, when everyone became interested in girls and I didn’t. I wanted to get close to boys. There was nothing outwardly sexual about my desires. I didn’t understand what was happening to me. The hardest was between the ages of 14 and 16, when your hormones are raging and you’re losing your mind from such strong desire that you couldn’t even express it. This internal conflict, the conflict between you and society, tears you apart. There was no one around I could talk to. That was when I first started considering suicide. When, twenty years later, I started volunteering for an LGBT hotline, I found out that gay teens are four times more likely to commit suicide than their heterosexual peers.
I was almost 20 when I first saw Ya + Ya [“I + I,” a mimeographed gay magazine published in Moscow in the early 1990s] magazine at a kiosk. There was an advertisement for a gay hotel on the cover. I could tell that it was for people like me. I just froze in front of the kiosk, deeply conflicted: I was afraid that the lady would immediately figure out why I was buying that magazine. I ended up having to buy a pack of pens to cover it up.
I found some ads that appealed to me in the magazine and I wrote to this guy who lived in Minsk. This was a different time, it was a paper letter. It’s not like now where you message someone online and half an hour later you’re in bed with them. The letter took two weeks to get there and then the response took two more weeks to get to me. It could get stuck somewhere along the way. I desperately awaited the response and spent a lot of time worrying. We corresponded for a year and finally Volodya came to see me. I was 20 and nine months. He was a year older.
This was the first time I’d ever been in love. He was pretty experienced. On the fourth day of his visit, he decided to count how many partners he’d been with, which he couldn’t do without the assistance of a spelling dictionary with a list of men’s names. It turned out that I was number seventy-seven in the course of his twenty-two years of life. This didn’t stop me because I really loved him.
Our relationship was doomed from the start. We were very different in terms of our experience, opinions, and goals. He was, after all, a citizen of the capital, the capital of Belarus. He tried to expand our social circle and figure out where the other gay people hung out. We combed the town but never found it. I bought him a return ticket to Minsk. “Go home,” I told him. “I can’t watch you suffer here.” Six months later I went to see him, and then I left, and then I went back again. This went on for another three or four years. It took another three or four years to get over him. I never cheated on him. Now, in hindsight, I think that perhaps I should have. I’m not positive that it’s great to be faithful in this kind of a situation. I don’t know. In any case, at the time I felt like it was the right thing to do.
I come from a regular Soviet family. My father was a heavy drinker. He’d beat me and my mother. I want to say this, so that no reader will make the leap that abusive fathers necessarily lead to gay sons. He beat my brother, too, and he’s straight. So that’s not the reason. But there’s no question that my life at home was no picnic. When he came to be with me, my boyfriend and I rented a separate apartment. I applied to college in Vladivostok just to get out.
In the dorms, I met Lena, who I later ended up “playing house” with. Lena was older and worked for the best regional paper. She really wanted to get me to switch over from my work in television. Instead, I was drafted. I tried hard to get some form of alternative military service. I told them that I was a pacifist and that my rights were protected by the constitution. At the enlistment office, they said that the constitution was one thing, but there wasn’t a corresponding federal law, so I would have to choose between the army and prison. I chose prison. I would have been there for a long time if it hadn’t been for Lena. When she found out I was in prison, she got me out with the right phone calls. She really was an awesome journalist.
After that, Lena confessed that she was in love with me. I was forced to tell her the truth. She was, I think, the first person I ever came out to. I’m a strong person, but she is even stronger, so this didn’t stop her. She suggested we do an experiment.
Lena is four-and-a-half years older than me. She’s not beautiful, but she is incredibly charming, and very professional. I really value that in a person. She’s a real talent. But she also likes to take risks, and I mean this in a negative way, because the risks she takes often lead to disaster. At least in my experience, that’s what happened.
Lena divorced her husband with whom she had a one-and-a-half-year-old child. We took Lena’s sister, who was in ninth grade, and moved to Volgodonsk to start over. For a year, as I’ve already mentioned, we “played house.” This was a very hard time. I was in a bind: she was a person I owed a lot to. On the other hand, I felt guilty because I couldn’t return Lena’s feelings. On top of it all, she drank, which had started before we even met. She got pregnant. With twins. They were mine. And we—I can’t even say that it was “we,” she was the one who made the decision—she decided she needed to get an abortion. The tests showed that she had kidney problems. This was during the 1998 financial crisis. We were these fucking awesome professionals and now we found ourselves penniless with her kid and younger sister. We worked, but they didn’t pay us. By that time, we’d tortured each other so much. We just couldn’t be together anymore.
I consider all of this my sin. When I was baptized a year later (even though I’m gay, I believe in God), I repented having allowed Lena to make a very hard decision on her own and get an abortion. Sometimes I think about how old my children would have been. Since then, a few women have asked me to father their children, and I want to, but it has never worked out. It’s a sad story.
I don’t remember how soon after the abortion Lena and I stopped sleeping together. It probably doesn’t matter. What matters is that for me, having sex with her was always like rape. I’m in good health: I could probably be aroused by a lamppost if I wanted to be. That’s just a matter of using your imagination. Nonetheless, having sex with a woman felt unnatural. Just because a man is aroused doesn’t mean he wants intimacy. Physiology and emotions are separate things. At a certain point, we decided that we would keep living together but stop pretending to be a couple. We got a new job and told people we were brother and sister. We stopped being friends because, as it turns out, certain deeds can kill a friendship.
After that I got into a relationship with a man, and we even exchanged rings, but then he went to China and never came back.