I have two older brothers and it’s like we’re from different worlds. For them all of this is bizarre and disgusting. Whenever they’re drunk, they start in on me, “Faggot! How could you!” It’s never gotten physical. They find ways to overcome their feelings. My mother is fine with it. I don’t know why. She even went to Central Station, the gay club, for her birthday once. She really empathizes with transsexuals. Whenever she sees them on TV, she’s on the verge of tears.
I had tried to hide my sexual orientation. There was a time when I did drag performances at clubs. Naturally, I kept my wardrobe in my closet. When my mother asked me about the costumes, I tried to tell her they belonged to my stripper friend who was keeping them here because she couldn’t keep them at home. She saw through me, of course.
On Sundays I go to the Catholic Church. I became a Catholic four years ago, after I left Nashi. A guy took me to the church and it made things easier for me. I met people who are a lot less judgmental about everything. Pastors openly tell me that they don’t believe in what I do, and they try to re-educate me, but when they see that it’s pointless, they accept me as I am. There are a lot of gay people in the Catholic Church. Although they take a pretty hard line stand against it, a lot of gay people go there. Some go because they are trying to fight their homosexuality. The guy who took me there is trying to root it out of himself. He’s gone into the seminary to become a priest. There are a lot people like him. For them, Catholicism is a weapon against being gay. For me, it was a place where I found understanding, shelter, and peace. Several weeks ago, I even became the godfather to a friend’s daughter.
I’ve noticed that over the past six months, I’ve become embarrassed to tell people I’m gay, even though I haven’t hidden it since high school. I decided that if people from the LGBT community didn’t hide, it would change perceptions of homosexuality. If you put yourself in the position of the humiliated and insulted, other people will use this against you. But there is progress. If not for this situation, we wouldn’t be having these conversations and everything would be just as it was. Thank you, Duma deputies. You provided a good impetus for public discourse.
A version of this interview was originally published in Afisha magazine Issue 339 (February 25, 2013). It was updated by the author and reproduced here by permission of Afisha
LENA & NASTYA
“My parents said, ‘We’re just going to make her disappear.’”
The fact that Nastya and Lena, 24 and 22 respectively, are accomplished corporate lawyers is perhaps the least surprising part of their story. They met eight years ago in Kirov, a city an overnight train ride from Moscow, and since that night they’ve gone through every sort of hell to stay together.
LENA
It’s all rather prosaic: we met on the Internet. My best friend had transferred to the school where Nastya went, and I started hanging out on their online forum.
NASTYA
You wrote that you needed some songs by Psichea.
LENA
You’re embarrassing me.
NASTYA
It’s this awful band, you know, “aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah-boom-boom-boom-boom,” but I just happened to have an entire disk of theirs that a classmate had given me. I wrote: “Come to our school and I’ll give it you.” That’s how we met. Lena was 14 and I was 16. I was in eleventh grade and she was in the ninth.
I realized I was gay when I was about 13. It was an uneventful discovery. I said, “Well, all right,” and proceeded to live with this knowledge. I didn’t tell anyone, of course. Lena was the first person I told. But at first, we just hung out and talked on the phone a lot.
LENA
And then Nastya hinted that she had another girlfriend.
NASTYA
It was just this girl I was also hanging out with. It’s not like we had a relationship. But I found out she was in love with me back then. But Lena was intrigued and we started talking even more. It was tricky: I had my own phone line that my parents had put in for me, so I was free to spend as much time on the phone as I wanted, but Lena’s father didn’t allow her to talk for hours. So we had to correspond. But her father kept deleting ICQ [an instant messenger program] as well, so we would meet up in these awful online chat rooms to talk, even though we lived in the same city. So we were on one of those chats when I asked Lena if she thought she might be able to have a relationship with me. It took me a long time to get an answer out of her, but when I finally got to “yes,” I was terrified. I’d never had a relationship with a girl before, even though I knew that was what I wanted. Plus, I worried that I was older and may have pressured her. So I retreated. But we kept talking.
In May, about five months after we first met, we went for a walk in the botanical gardens. There’s this little river there with a bridge over it. And there we are standing on this little bridge and Lena says, “Kiss me.” I said, “I can’t, you have to understand blah blah blah.” And she’s like: “That’s it. In that case, I’m leaving and not coming back.”
LENA
I just said “That’s it” and walked away. I was walking and thinking: this is it. If she doesn’t come after me now, I’m not even going to talk to her.
NASTYA
I was terrified, both of having to kiss her and of the possibility that she’d walk away and never come back. So I ran after her and we went back to the bridge, which was sort of secluded, and I kissed her.
LENA
And then these two women sitting on the hill above us—
NASTYA
They start hollering: “What’s going on, would you look at that!” So we had to beat a retreat. And that’s how our relationship started.
LENA
Then Nastya went to university in Moscow and I stayed back to finish high school. Nastya had this five-term system at university with a week in between terms, so she would come home. And I kept going to preparatory courses and such in Moscow, so we saw each other about once a month. Two years later I got into the same university, also in the legal department.
NASTYA
I was living in an apartment my parents had bought for me in Moscow, though it wasn’t legally in my name, and when Lena came, we started living there together.
LENA
I started out living in the dorms but kept shuttling back and forth between the dorm and the apartment, and this was hard, especially because the dorm was in a suburb. So I told my father I didn’t want to live in the dorm anymore and rented a room and moved most of my things there: at least it was in the city. But in the end, I still lived at Nastya’s. And when her parents visited, I went to my rented room. That was really nerve-wracking.
NASTYA
Toward the end of our first year living like that—Lena was finishing her first year and I my third year at the university—I went home to Kirov. And I forgot my cell phone at my parents’ house and took the train back to Moscow.