Masha Gessen - Gay Propaganda

LENA

That’s when I realized I was in real trouble, that Nastya’s parents would talk to my parents. My father is a military man and a real homophobe. He thought Nastya and I were just friends. We could be watching television one day and there would be a mention of gays and he’d say, “They all belong in the gas chamber.” And we’d just sit there quietly.

I decided to preemptively come out to my mother. I had this mythical boyfriend named Lyosha, who never existed; I would just tell my mother everything that was going on with Nastya except I’d call her Lyosha. My mother was perfectly satisfied with Lyosha, but not once he turned into Nastya. But she didn’t throw a fit or anything. But the day before our vacation was supposed to end, my mother got a call from my father, who said he now knew everything and told her to send me home. So I was on the train for three days stressing out.

He picked me up at the station. His eyes were red and his hands were shaking. He said, “Either we forget this ever happened and then I continue to support you, or you are no longer my daughter.” I said, “I have to think about it.” He was shocked. He was sure I’d accede immediately. He and I had a very good relationship, and I lived with him, not with my mother, after the divorce.

NASTYA

Two days later it’s the bachelorette party. I went and got a manicure and pedicure and am sitting at home, wearing pink pajamas, my toenails are bright red, and I have on high-heeled shoes because they were too tight, so I’d sprayed them with some compound and put them on to stretch them out before the party. And I’m sipping coffee from a demitasse cup.

And then my parents barge in. Both have bloodshot eyes and both are screaming. “We were at Lena’s father’s house and he said you are the man. You’re the man in the relationship!” I say, “Look at me! Do I look like a man?” And they just keep screaming. Then my mother started telling me Lena was a whore and saying all sorts of things about her. I said, “You know, this is the person I love. After you talk about her like this, I don’t even want you to be my mother.” That’s when my father started hitting me. He didn’t stop until after he’d split my lip. There was blood everywhere.

I went to wash up and saw myself in the mirror: half my face is blue and my lip is badly torn. I came back downstairs and said, “Dear parents, we have to get my things together now and take me to the hospital. I need stitches.” My father looked at me and said, “Nah, it will heal on its own.” In the end I needed six stitches. So I said, “OK, then I’m going on my own.” I started packing—they wouldn’t let me take a lot of my things. I left with a small suitcase of summer clothes; they wouldn’t even let me take my laptop.

My best friend’s fiancée came to pick me up and took me to the hospital. Lena came, and they stitched me up.

LENA

Her entire face was blue. I had never seen anything like it. She went to her best friend’s brother’s apartment, which happened to be empty. The next morning, as soon as my father went to work, I got my bag and slipped out of the house. I’d made my choice. Our parents started looking for us. We shut our phones off.

NASTYA

My father got the idea that Ksyusha, my best friend, must be hiding me. He went to see her father.

LENA

Ksyusha’s father is the same sort of bigwig as Nastya’s.

NASTYA

Ksyusha told her father that if he’d seen my face, he’d be on my side too. And that if he surrendered me to my father then she’d cancel her wedding. He agreed. So we stayed there a few more days and then we went to Moscow.

LENA

Not so simple. We had tickets to go to Moscow. But two hours before the train leaves, Ksyusha’s father calls: “You have to exchange your tickets because Nastya’s father has put a tracker on your names and now he’s bought tickets to go on the same train,” which Ksyusha’s father knows because he’s put a tracker on him. So we got tickets on a later train. While we were at the station exchanging tickets, my father was there looking for us, but we saw him and hid. Once we were on the train, I got paranoid. I said, “Your father is in Moscow and he’s probably tracked these tickets too by now, so he’ll be waiting for us at the station.” So we got off in Vladimir [about one hundred miles outside Moscow] and took a commuter train the rest of the way—and then only as far as a suburb of Moscow.

Our old apartment was inaccessible: Nastya’s father had changed the locks. We went to the apartment where I was renting a room for my things. The place was a dump. And my “room” was actually a bed in a tiny room where another girl lived. We stayed there for a couple of months, until we were able to rent an apartment.

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.