Gay Propaganda: Russian Love Stories

ELVINA YUVAKAEVA & ELENA NIKITINA “This is my family, and you can’t change families.”

Elvina, 33, is a marketing manager at an engineering firm. She is also the co-president of Russia’s LGBT Sports Federation. Elena, 38, studied to be an architect, but is now an interior designer. She is also a Candidate Master of Sport, a Russian ranking for non-professional athletes, in judo. In 1998, she put together a team of women who practiced judo and who could play basketball, and took them to Amsterdam to compete in the Gay Games. Elvina and Elena met a little before New Year’s in 2008.

ELENA

Elvina was renting an apartment to a friend of mine and I had helped her move in. When I went into the apartment, I saw a photo of Elvina and fell in love.

ELVINA

I knew Lena from afar. Livejournal was very popular back then and there were a lot of people on it. I wasn’t one of her friends on the site, but I would look at her page every now and then. The strange part is that we’re both from St. Petersburg, but we’d never crossed paths. We had a good number of mutual friends in Moscow, too, but had never been introduced until we met that first time.

ELENA

Before New Year’s, the three of us ended up having dinner together: Elvina, my friend, and I. You could say she set us up. It happened very fast, all at once and beyond all doubt. We never had a phase of buying candy and flowers; we immediately began working out how we were going to live together.

ELVINA

The first time we saw each other was two weeks before New Year’s. And right after New Year’s, we were practically living together. For me, this was love at second sight. I decided that I was Lena’s once and for all, which is something very serious for me. This is my family, and you can’t change families.

ELENA

I am more or less openly gay, with my family and at work. If no one asks, I won’t say anything, but my boss knows and a few of my colleagues do, too. I didn’t haven’t any problems with my parents. Elvina is a part of the family. When she goes to St. Petersburg without me, she can stay with my parents.

ELVINA

Lena’s mother even says, “Come on, it’s time for the two of you to have kids.” We’re taking our dog to breed in Sweden next time she’s in estrus, and her mother jokes that since we’ve already found a foreign husband for our dog, why can’t we do it for ourselves?

ELENA

Since I’m the older one, I’d like to be the first to give birth. We don’t have any set criteria for choosing the father, but we need to know the donor. I’d like to see his parents, determine whether there are any pathological problems, know what his family is like psychologically, and so on. I would not be against the father participating in raising the child. We would like to do it in Russia.

ELVINA

But ever since they started discussing the next phase of the anti-gay law, the possibility of children being taken away from same-sex parents, we’ve lost sight of what to do. We’ll see what happens after the Sochi Olympics and decide. Of course, it’s scary. We’re not going to hide behind sham marriages. If we have kids and that law goes into action, we’ll just have to be extra careful.

ELENA

I don’t want to leave. I like living and working in Russia. I’m not 25; I can’t start my career over from scratch.

ELVINA

I was in the U.S. recently. For the first two weeks I was there for a State Department program on sports marketing. There were six of us, and the other five people were representatives from the organizing committee of the 2014 Sochi Olympics. They all knew each other because they all worked in the same department. On the first night we got to Washington, they had a lot of questions for me: Who was I? What did I do? And so on. I told them, and they were more or less decent. Toward the end, when we were parting ways, they told me, “Elvina, you’ve opened our eyes. You’ve broadened how we see and understand the world. We had never thought about the social difficulties same-sex couples faced. Now we understand what you are fighting for.” These five people were a small personal victory.

ELENA

It’s not that our society is psychologically unprepared to accept gay pride parades, but we have a number of underdeveloped realms of civic society. Once our culture is more tolerant, we can change people’s minds. I have experienced people changing their minds about things and telling me, “You and I get along and you seem normal to me.” Right now I have Muslim clients, Chechens. On the one hand, I am comfortable enough working with them because they are very intellectual, modern people. On the other hand, I can’t imagine telling them about myself.

ELVINA

In 2011, we organized a winter sports festival—but apparently, we weren’t careful enough. In the VKontakte group [a Russian social network], we listed the name of the recreation center in Solnechnogorsk where the event was going to take place. On the eve of the festival, people started sending anonymous letters to the municipal web site saying: “We won’t allow a gay parade on our soil. We’re rounding up troops and will come break it up.”

The recreation center manager called me and told me the administration had told him that we were no longer allowed on their grounds because they “didn’t want any problems.” We got in touch with the director of the company that ran the place, and he said: “You have to understand that I don’t care, but I got a phone call from the administration of the Moscow Region.” We had two options: either cancel the event or find another location. We did the latter.

ELENA

I’ve been an LGBT activist since 1997. We had a non-profit in St. Petersburg called Labris. At that time, it was the only organization of its kind in St. Petersburg. Among other things we provided legal services. There was no Internet back then, so we would write letters, answer phone calls, organize public events. We translated and republished everything we could get our hands on. We also organized LGBT film screenings. But back then there wasn’t as much persecution. The situation is much worse now.