For five years Oleg and Dmitriy led a low-key semi-closeted life. They weren’t bar flies, but friends would come over for dinner, and Dmitriy’s family would visit them at the apartment. Oleg’s mother refused—she hasn’t talked to Dmitriy to this day. Dmitriy built up his private practice as a therapist, and Oleg was moving up the ladder at the news desk of his influential TV network, Kultura. In August 2013 things changed.
OLEG
For five years I was volunteering at a big children’s hospital in Moscow. It’s for kids with some of the worst diseases, the hardest to treat, very tough cases, and kids come from all over the country since all of the best services are in Moscow.
One day last summer a friend of mine, a journalist, pointed out to me that the website of the hospital said that they wouldn’t accept blood donations from drug addicts, prostitutes, or homosexuals. That was the day when something inside of me broke. I really felt betrayed: this was my home, I’d volunteered here for five years. I knew how the blood was stored—for six months, meticulously tested. This was a big, sophisticated hospital in Moscow, and they had this rule that had nothing to do with science or medicine.
After that I got in touch with Anton Krasovsky [another Russian journalist, fired in the summer of 2013 for coming out on-air] just to talk. We weren’t great friends at the time, but we knew each other. Anton put a photo of the two of us together on Instagram, and in thirty seconds, literally, I got a phone call from somebody at the network, a gay guy actually. He was basically delivering the message from on high, and he told me I was being seen with the wrong person. It was literally seconds.
I had a conversation with that same guy a little later in a café, and it felt like an old-timey KGB meeting. He told me that being seen with Anton, I was starting to be seen as an “undesirable.” That’s exactly how he put it. He wasn’t shy—he said I could be fired. I was a TV producer; people know me. For the people in charge I was becoming a risk.
That conversation really pissed me off. And that’s what made me finally go on Facebook and post about it. The news spread quickly, and it got picked up by some other news sites. At work people stopped talking to me. But also people from the provinces started to write me, telling me I’m a hero, making it easier for others out there in smaller cities. It was very surreal. It still is. I don’t feel I’ve done anything special. I just feel like I’ve been hit over the head by anybody who could get a swing in.
I don’t regret any of it. I’d already started to lose it a little bit by that point anyway. I remember in May the Cannes Film Festival had just finished. One of our producers said, “No way, we can’t talk about Cannes, that lesbian film won the competition,” and I was just thinking how I was trapped in this theater of the absurd. I told her she’d lost her mind! This is the Cannes Film Festival, it doesn’t matter which film won, this is news. But this is how this law works: people learn to censor themselves. My contract was discontinued soon after.
DMITRIY
I’m not a public figure so I haven’t been in the eye of the storm as much, but I was worried. Beyond psychological risks, we could be threatened. A lot of our risks all of a sudden increased. But whatever happens, I have my private practice: we can support ourselves and get by on that. A lot of my colleagues are also gay. I guess I have a slightly different view on it too. I kind of came out in stages, piecemeal. I think it’s important not to live two personalities, to live just one life. I just did it in a different way.
OLEG
After I lost my job, we decided to leave for a bit, get a change of scenery. We already had visas to the U.S. since we’d been planning on visiting a friend who lives in Kansas City, and she had a kid last year. So we thought, while tickets are cheap, let’s go to New York. We’ll get married, then visit other people in the States. I had already proposed to Dima four years ago, and at least then he said yes “in principle.”
DMITRIY
Oleg has always wanted to get married, and I was always pretty skeptical. Why get married? We have a great relationship. I started changing my way of thinking about it recently, though. I was in the hospital this summer for a bit, and I thought, what if they don’t let him visit me?
OLEG
He was so annoying about it! We love each other, we understand each other. Why not?
DMITRIY
I’m still processing it all. Our relationship is evolving. We’ve been together for six years. When we were there getting married, I felt like we were reaching a point that should have already happened. It was like something fulfilling itself.
OLEG
Right now I have to say I’m not proud of myself for coming out, or getting married. I’m more proud of taking my first long flight. I’m terrified of flying, I’ve never flown more than a few hours. What I’m proud of is flying nine hours over the Atlantic to New York City.
ANDREI TANICHEV & ROMAN KOCHAGOV
“Our parents and even the Sochi city government know who we are and how we live.”
Andrei Tanichev, 35, and Roman Kochagov, 42, have been together for the past thirteen years. For the last eight, they’ve run the only gay club in the Olympic city of Sochi. They are reticent about their private lives, but eager to talk about business. But their private and business lives are intertwined and appear to be proceeding equally well. It’s hard to believe their story is set in a country whose increasingly high-profile homophobia makes regular headlines all over the world. Despite their idyllic situation, Andrei and Roman are considering emigration and have already made one failed attempt to move to Spain.
ANDREI
We’re both from Moscow. I was a manager at Central Station [the largest gay club in Moscow] and Roma came there as a patron. We met in the way that club managers usually meet with guests: we struck up a conversation. It was, incidentally, my last day of working at CS. We moved in together literally the day after we met.
ROMAN
It was spring, I was working at Sheremetyevo Airport as the head of passenger operations at the time, and even though I had my own place, we immediately rented an apartment for two. In autumn, we went on vacation to Sochi and we liked it here so much—the climate, the nature, the people—that we decided to stay here and open a gay hotel. It was the first of its kind in Sochi. For six months, we’d come once a week scoping out locations, doing construction, and by next spring, we opened our hotel, Okhota [“the hunt”] near the gay beach. It had six rooms. We had almost no overhead, no staff, just the two of us.
ANDREI
Yes, the name was a double entendre. It’s actually in the woods not far from town, and there really are a lot of hunters there. Of course, it also has to do with meeting people. The business was so successful, a competitor soon opened up next door, Oblaka [“the clouds”]. It was bigger and more luxurious. The owner invested one million euros, I think. Even in Europe, we’d never seen such an extravagant gay hotel. It’s 2.5 thousand square meters and only has fifteen rooms.
ROMAN
We’d built our hotel up from nothing, and we never had any problems with the police or the administration. Only the journalists raised a stink. They wrote that the local residents were protesting. Meanwhile, our closest neighbors were two kilometers away, and no one has ever protested us. Later, in 2005, we opened a gay club. It was impossible to run both businesses at the same time, so we closed down the hotel and turned it into a large house. It’s where we live and where our friends and relatives come to stay with us on vacation.