Gay Propaganda: Russian Love Stories

KSENIA MESHCHERYAKOVA “She’s our child, deal with it.”

Ksenia Meshcheryakova, 39, has lived in the U.S. for over ten years, but she only recently received her green card, after the Defense of Marriage Act was overturned by the Supreme Court. Her wife, Lisa, a U.S. citizen, was able to sponsor her. Ksenia works part-time as a therapist in New York and watches their one-and-a-half-year-old daughter, Sophie, during the day, while Lisa works as an immigration attorney. Though she was already living in the U.S., Ksenia helped launch the gay and lesbian “Side by Side Film Festival” in St. Petersburg in 2008. In 2013, the St. Petersburg organization behind the festival was able to beat back an attack from the prosecutor’s office, which accused it of violating a new federal law on “foreign agents.” Some cities have refused to continue hosting the festival, but in late November it pulled off its sixth year of screening dozens of LGBT-themed films in the heart of St. Petersburg, despite numerous bomb threats.

I met Lisa in St. Petersburg, in 1999. I was 24, she was two years older. She was there working on her PhD, studying the history of the Caucuses. She’s Armenian, from Iran, but she grew up in the United States. Her family moved there after the ’79 revolution. I met her the first week that she was in town, at one of these artist-friend birthday parties, at a very old-style artist loft.

It was a strange moment when we met because a friend of mine, an American guy, had told me she was a lesbian. Back then I wasn’t ready to have that conversation yet. I wasn’t even really out myself then and didn’t know any lesbians, so I kind of avoided contact. She probably left the party with the impression that I didn’t want anything to do with her. But I left with the impression that something had happened. Normally I’m a really personable person, but that night I was scared to make contact. She was pretty, my age, an intellectual, and I wanted to figure out what was happening to me, why I felt like this. So I called her and we met up, and sat in a coffee shop on Nevsky Prospect until morning. It was funny, she spoke English and I spoke Russian. We could both understand each other, as active listeners, but neither of us was fluent in the other’s language.

She was only there in St. Petersburg for two months, and during that time we were a couple for a month. We had a great time. Then she left for Armenia for her work, and I traveled around Russia during that time as well, that following year. Then she flew back to the U.S., and we went a year and a half without seeing each other, and all of a sudden St. Petersburg seemed less interesting. We kept in touch and talked on the phone, but it was very expensive back then. We didn’t have phone cards and it was pretty clumsy sometimes. Over the phone it was hard for her to understand my Russian and vice versa. Then she came to visit for New Year’s, in 2001. And it seemed strange to think: this is the person.

After that I had this idea, and Lisa inspired me to go with it, to study abroad. So I applied for a scholarship to continue studying psychology, and I was accepted on a full scholarship, to study art therapy at NYU. I moved to New York, and Lisa was in DC, finishing her PhD, but then she came up to New York and we moved in together, into a little apartment in the West Village.

Back then it wasn’t so fancy, there were fewer boutiques. We were right by Marie’s Crisis, the piano bar, and Kim’s Video, which is closed now. Before I came to the U.S., I had seen maybe five lesbian movies, so when we lived there I pretty much watched all the gay movies I could from Kim’s Video. They were $1.50 if returned before midnight. My Kim’s Video experience really played a role in the Side by Side Festival. I built up a whole documentary program. When we launched in 2008, that was the year we brought John Cameron Mitchell. He presented Hedwig and the Angry Inch. The police tried to shut it down, but it went on anyway, underground. I wasn’t there that year, but I went back in 2009. I hadn’t traveled back to Russia in five years. I was really worried I wouldn’t be let back into the U.S. to be with Lisa.

Our families took a lot of time to understand us, a lot of time and a lot of work. But they’ve come a long way. A lot has happened in the last year. Once I found out that Lisa was pregnant, that this was for real, there was no more hiding anymore. Things changed when we had Sophie, in June 2012. It was just a feeling of: we are who we are. She’s our child, deal with it.

Lisa’s mother came to stay with us after the birth, and my mother came around her first birthday. My mother treats Sophie like a grandchild. It doesn’t come naturally to her, but she felt it was important to tell her family, to tell her cousins about my family and I. It’s also important to my mother that Sophie speak Russian, since my mother doesn’t speak English. So we Skype a few mornings a week. This is how we set it up with Sophie: I speak with her in Russian, Lisa speaks with her in Armenian, and then out in the world we speak with her in English.

We got married a month before Sophie was born. I’d been in the U.S. for many, many years already, on all kinds of visas, on student visas, on work visas. But I was on shaky ground. I couldn’t change jobs easily. And at work, at some point, I also started to come out. Because of the DOMA decision, now it’s legitimate. It’s on paper. I got my green card. So it was a decision to come out publicly.

You know how sometimes you like the way something smells, but you don’t know why? Or how there are certain works of art that you can’t live without. That’s how it is with Lisa. She’s very intellectual, very curious, we constantly have this exchange. She’s interested in where I come from, where my family comes from. And she’s the one who brought me here, not just physically, but really brought me here. She’s just deep. And it’s just us here. We don’t have babysitters, we don’t have grandparents in New York to look after Sophie. She’s my buddy, she stuck around even with my whole immigration saga.

And when she took the step and became pregnant, it grew us. We have a little person now, a child, to discover the world from that side. And we feel strong enough to feel that we’re good, gay parents. Because I’m the best mom for my child—just ask her if she would trade me for anyone. But by law I still have to adopt Sophie. It’s such a strange concept. I drove Lisa to the hospital, went with her to the delivery room. I helped deliver Sophie. And I was the second person to hold her.

I’m not a very optimistic Russian. It could be bad for a really long time. And Russia is a dramatic place: it goes through collapses. My generation of Russians knows what hunger is, what homelessness is. We lived through that time after the collapse of the USSR when it was like a jungle. Russia is my homeland, my motherland. In Russia this is a big concept, you don’t betray it, but I wouldn’t take Sophie there now. If we went we’d have to be extremely careful. Why would I put my daughter in danger? I have a dream that I can bring my daughter back to my motherland, but my motherland is acting like an abusive bitch, and is hateful to people like me. I don’t love my mother any less, but I won’t let her have my child.