NASTYA
My parents summoned me to my old apartment for my birthday and offered to buy me the car of my choice if I would only leave Lena. I said no, so I didn’t get a car, but at least that time they let me take a few of my things. My father had broken or thrown out most of them.
LENA
Then they arranged for the four of us to meet. They said they wanted to send Nastya to Sicily for a year on the condition that we don’t talk or correspond. And if our love survives the year…
NASTYA
My mother didn’t say “love.” What they have is love. We have something else.
LENA
Anyway, we were willing to go along with it. But then I said to Nastya, “Nothing is going to change even if we do this. They’ll start all over again once the year ends and they’ll never leave us in peace.”
NASTYA
They changed their minds anyway. Then they harassed me for two years, then my father attacked me again at my cousin’s wedding. I guess because it reminded him that I’m not having a wedding. Then we spent two years not talking to one another, and now we’re on speaking terms again—only because they think Lena and I broke up.
LENA
Because we did, for a month. That was six months ago. Then we got back together but we forgot to tell them. Because Nastya really doesn’t have any communication with her parents.
NASTYA
Every time I see them, it ends in a confrontation.
LENA
Ksyusha and I keep telling her to give it up, to stop trying. But she says, “But they are my parents.”
NASTYA
I want them to see that I’m an honest, open person, always willing to have contact.
LENA
But they see something completely different. You’re honest with them and they think you’re lying; they don’t believe you could have known you were gay when you were 13. The thing is, we’d planned to tell our parents, but only once we had jobs. We were pretty sure they wouldn’t let us live in that apartment anymore once they found out. But we didn’t expect to end up on our own with Nastya having only a bag of summer clothes. Those were really hard times. We had dry pasta and we stole mayonnaise and ketchup from the other people in the apartment.
NASTYA
Lena would make me a sandwich to take to work: two slices of bread and a single slice of cheese that had already started drying up. I expend a lot of energy and need a lot of calories, so I’d eat that sandwich as soon as I left the house and then at work I’d pinch sweets from everyone. Every so often we’d let ourselves get a shawarma sandwich or a grilled chicken from a street vendor, and that was like going out to a luxury restaurant. This went on for a about a year. I had a job in a call center and Lena was waiting tables. But she has low blood pressure and the job exhausted her so much she got sick.
LENA
Then I got work as an editor. I could work from home, so this didn’t get in the way of my studies. That lasted a year. And then I restored my relationship with my father and he said, “Quit your job.” That was the toughest year at the university, when you take your boards—half the people drop out at that point—and my father said he’d help me out during that year. After that, I got a job in my field.
NASTYA
And I got a good job right out of university in 2011 and we were finally able to get on our feet.
LENA
If we didn’t both specialize in Russian law, we’d probably have left the country by now.
NASTYA
It would be easier if we were engineers or something else that’s universal. As it is, we both need to get a new education in order to live abroad. That’s a hard decision to make; the memory of our last period of “going without” is still very recent. We’ve only just barely begun to accumulate a little bit of fat. And to be honest, I’ve never encountered any homophobia, except from my parents. And the case in which I represented a woman whose parents were trying to take her son away [see MARINA & ELENA: “And then they kidnapped my son for the first time,” p. 19]. But that was not a case of homophobia directed against me personally. At my last job, everyone knew and there was no problem. At my current job, I don’t really socialize with anyone.
LENA
I’ve only made one friend at my job, and I’ve told her. And her husband knows too.
NASTYA
As for the laws, in this country everyone’s rights are systematically violated. And I don’t feel hurt and limited by the anti-gay laws specifically, because all the laws they’re passing infringe on the rights of all citizens of the Russian Federation. And that does make us want to leave this sad country. Rather, this sad state.
But the state politics have given my parents a second wind. My mother called and said, “They’re going to start sending your kind to jail soon. You’re going to end up in jail.” I said, “Oh, goody, no one but women around.” She screamed and hung up. That’s how I communicate with my parents now. My father said, “Go try doing it with a man. What if you like it?” I said, “How about you go first? If you like it, I’ll try it too.”
VITALY MATVEEV
“In general, the way someone reacts to your coming out is a good filter.”
Scientist and photographer Vitaly Matveev, 35, returned to Moscow after many years of studying and working in Japan, Britain, and America. He’s not a gay activist or a revolutionary. But, as it turns out, living openly, as he grew accustomed to doing during his years abroad, is itself a form of activism—a battle with prejudice.
I’ll never forget it. I was 6. My mother and I went to the movies to see The Amphibian Man. In the middle of the movie, my mother bends down to me and whispers: “Look at how beautiful Guttiere [the female protagonist] is!” I nodded weakly, while not taking my eyes off Ichtiandr [the male protagonist]. I fell in love with him and asked to be taken to this movie a number of times. This goes to the question of why the very idea of “gay propaganda” is absurd. As a biologist, I know that sexual orientation is formed in the womb and is impossible to influence in any direction. It’s not a matter of choice. When I was a child, I didn’t know any of this, of course, and didn’t understand why I was attracted to the beautiful Ichtiandr.
In high school and college I dated girls. I didn’t lose my virginity to a man until I was 24, when I decided that I couldn’t lie to myself any longer and there was no point in resisting. This was in Thailand, where I was vacationing before going on a scientific expedition to Cambodia. It was with a man I met at the beach. I travel a lot. I’ve been to more than thirty countries and lived in three for an extended period. I haven’t paid particular attention to the significance of being openly gay in any of them.
In England, I worked so much I barely had time for a personal life. I lived in Japan for three years and had a boyfriend there. Japanese culture is infinitely tolerant; it’s not controversial being gay there. Our friends didn’t know about us for another reason: discussing your private life is very taboo in Japan. We had a group of friends, we all worked together, traveled, and hung out. I didn’t find out that some of the people in this group were dating until after I left, when they sent me their wedding photos. Before their weddings, they didn’t even show affection at parties. It wasn’t the custom.