Masha Gessen: Gay Propaganda

I failed to convince any older LGBT people, those who lived through the experience of being gay in the USSR—and, often, unconventional family arrangements that defy Western-style characterization—to talk to us. At one point I feared all the lesbians in the book would be lawyers and psychologists, and indeed a disproportionate number are indeed lawyers and psychologists living in Moscow. Still, the book has interviews with a young lesbian couple who fought off an attempt to have one of their children taken away by the courts; two gay male couples raising children with straight women; an unemployed gay activist struggling to stay afloat; interviews with people living not only in Moscow and St. Petersburg but also Sochi and Yekaterinburg and smaller towns that they chose not to name—and, of course, New York, Washington, DC, and Seattle.

Working with pieces in two languages meant I had to read every one of them several times, editing in the original language, then editing the translation, then making sure the two versions were consistent. Every day in November—as the largest gay club in Moscow faced an attack by masked gunmen, and then another by men who sprayed it with poisonous gas, as the LGBT film festival in St. Petersburg racked up a record five bomb threats, as I signed the papers selling our home, as our apartment turned into an ongoing yard sale and strangers carried away our belongings—every day, after the kids went to bed and the place quieted down, I read LGBT love stories. It was my own private samizdat, and it kept me sane.

JOSEPH

Early on, Masha and I decided to stick with a format that best captures the flavor of these stories: first person testimonial, letting people speak for themselves.

I’ve always been a huge fan of Studs Terkel and his stripped-down style of oral history, the kind of lightly edited interviews that play up people’s voices, their tics, their unique turns of phrase; that make you feel like you’re sitting across from these people in a coffee shop or in their living room. Masha organized interviews in Russia and I chased after Russians living abroad, a fast-growing category thanks to the deteriorating situation back home.

Almost all of the stories herein are carefully edited interviews with couples or individuals. A handful are original submissions that have been edited by Masha and me. A few others are updated versions of interviews originally published in Afisha , a Russian entertainment magazine, in February 2013.

In these pages you’ll meet the owners of the only gay bar in the Olympic city of Sochi, two women reunited and raising children together after a decade apart, a journalist who lost his job after coming out and then married his partner weeks later, and dozens of other vignettes, many of them fabulously wry and unsentimental in a distinctly Russian way. We pulled this together in two months, with the help of a talented group of journalists, translators, an early assist from dear friend and LGBT rights champion Andrew Tobias, and the team at OR Books, not to mention the help of my boyfriend Artyom, who was raised in the U.S. but born in Moscow. Still fluent in the language, he translated a number of in-person or Skype interviews with Russians still getting their bearings in English.

Given our brief window to pull it together, sometimes this book feels as much about the stories that got away: stories from the many men and women we approached who didn’t want to risk exposure, for fear of backlash from family, colleagues, or the Russian government. Russian émigrés and LGBT exiles in major cities like London, Berlin, Barcelona, LA, and Tel Aviv with whom I was never able to connect. The Russian woman in Pittsburgh who canceled an interview at the last minute because a quarrel with her girlfriend didn’t put her in much of a mood to wax poetic about their relationship. Love can be a bitch.

We made a mad dash to publish in time for the start of the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, which, given all the polemics, will now likely be remembered, ironically enough, as the gayest Olympics ever. But the Games will come and go and one thing will stay the same: millions of Russian men and women, like people everywhere, will keep on looking and fighting for love, ban or no ban. This lovingly prepared work of gay propaganda is dedicated to them.

When they come home from their office jobs to a small two-room apartment in a tiny town outside of Moscow, Marina and Elena change into almost-matching pajamas with cat-and-paw-print patterns. They are both 28, and they have been living together for less than a year .

Their story began in preschool, when Marina was in love with a boy named Kolya. They were so taken with each other that their parents ended up becoming good friends, staying in touch even after Marina and Kolya’s romance faded .

Marina and Kolya grew up and both married different people when they were 20—no younger than most Russians. Marina had a son. Nine months later, Kolya’s wife, Elena, was due to give birth to a daughter. Kolya suggested they go see Marina, whom he hadn’t seen in years. His parents had told him that she had a new baby with her husband Vitya. They could go see what a real one looked like .

They went to visit, and the next day Elena had her baby .

MARINA

At first we didn’t spend all that much time together. Then, as the kids got bigger, we’d take them to places in town. My husband, Vitya, didn’t like to go anywhere. So, often, it would be just the three of us, Elena, Kolya, me, and the kids. Then we started talking to each other online.

ELENA

We were chatting on Skype, and just talking a lot. Marina has a complicated relationship with her parents and she was having a hard time with it. And things with Vitya weren’t so good. So often she’d come over and cry and just need to talk about it. Do you remember why we started kissing?

MARINA

I think I was hysterical.

ELENA

That’s right, she was hysterical. She’d had a fight with her mother and her mother had said a bunch of mean things to her, so Marina was saying, “I’m worthless, no one wants me.” And I was like, “Don’t worry, you are not worthless, somebody wants you.” And I was also like, “Why don’t you have an affair with some other guy?” And then we just started kissing.

I’d had relationships with girls before. It was never an issue for me. But I was Marina’s first woman. So the next day I decided we should have a talk. You know, because she had kissed a girl for the first time and it must be traumatic for her.

MARINA

So she came over all serious, to have this talk.

ELENA

And we talked, and Marina was like, “Let’s give it a shot.” And I was like, “Alright, but we are not going to sleep together right away. We’ll take it slow.” Marina had only ever been with Vitya before me. We slept together half an hour later.

MARINA

I had no issue with the fact that she was a woman. I’d been thinking of having an affair. And I was actually thinking it should be with a woman. Because…I don’t know.

ELENA

You can’t get pregnant.

MARINA

That’s one consideration. I have a lot of friends who are lesbians—I met most of them through an online Anne Rice community, so it’s never seemed like a big deal to me.

ELENA

And then—the thing is, we had no plans to live together, or to build some sort of relationship.