Gay Propaganda: Russian Love Stories

GLEB LATNIK “I dream one day I’ll have a little apartment, someone I love, and people who come over and see us.”

Gleb Latnik, 30, moved to Moscow last summer. He was invited by fellow LGBT activist Alexei Davydov because life was no longer safe for him in his hometown. Soon after Gleb moved, Alexei died suddenly. Several days before this conversation, Gleb had returned from a three-day trip to the United States for Russian LGBT activists organized by the State Department. Despite his friends’ encouragement, he didn’t even consider staying in America. The first thing I noted when we met was a small scar on his childlike face. It was a mark left by the hooligans who had beaten him up. A small rainbow flag was pinned to the worn strap of his bag. He smells like alcohol and unwashed clothes. This is the odor of a hard life, full of one-man pickets, being chased, hospitals, and during temporary breaks, finding the resources to survive.

I’m from Pervouralsk. It’s a small town, with a population of 125,000, near Ekaterinburg. That’s where I became an LGBT activist. On June 11, when the Duma passed the law on gay propaganda, I went out in the main square with a sign that said “I’m against the second law of the scoundrels” [The first “law of the scoundrels” is the prohibition on American citizens adopting Russian orphans]. It had a rainbow sun on it. They refused to print my sign at the print shop. They told me it was extremist, so I ended up making it myself. I came out into the square and stood there for an hour. I got the most attention from journalists who even got in the way of my talking to people. About five passersby stopped and asked me questions. The rest stayed away from me.

I was the only one out in Pervouralsk, but no one even went out into the street in Ekaterinburg. I ended up rousing the local LGBT activists, asking them what the point was in sitting around together talking about our problems. We did a series of one-man pickets, although the press paid no attention to us. I saw that we needed a more controversial space to protest. We found it: it was the Inoprom Expo, an international industrial show. We prepared a shocking, bloody performance to do in front of the entrance. I wrote about it on my personal web outlets and social networking sites. Then a man showed up to my house. My mother let him in. I wasn’t home. He said he was police, but he didn’t show any documents and started asking where I was and when I am usually around. For several days, there was a car parked outside our house, and I stopped coming home or discussing any specific meeting points with anyone on the phone because I knew they could be listening.

Then I ended up messing up and naming a meeting spot after all. I showed up and was detained by people from the Center for Extremism Prevention [a notoriously brutal branch of the Russian Ministry of Internal Affairs] and taken down to the station. We spoke for a long time and they demonstrated that they knew the kinds of things about me that I myself no longer remembered. They politely explained that if this was the government policy, resisting it would cause problems for me: my relatives would turn away from me; I’d find it hard to find a job.

Then they let me go. Several days later, on July 13, we demonstrated in front of the entrance to the expo. These were several one-man pickets with people holding signs that read, “Homophobic Policies Untie the Hands of Murderers,” with a picture of a person with a rainbow tear on their face. As soon as we rolled out our posters, the police attempted to arrest us, but the lawyers who were there with us intervened just in time.

The people who spoke to me at the station turned out to be right. My mother ended up telling me that she wanted a calm life and asked me to move out. My brother stopped talking to me. He knew I was gay before and it was never a problem. Our relationship was ruined by my activism.

Several days after the expo protest, I got a terrible headache and my arm started going numb, as did the whole left side of my body. I called an ambulance and it was a good thing I did because the doctor told me I’d had a mini-stroke. I think it was from psychological strain. I spent several days in the hospital. I would go from the hospital to my friend’s house. I was keeping my things there and staying there.

One evening, I was going back there when I ran into two men. They recognized me, they’d probably seen me on TV. They were clearly drunk and started harassing me. They threw me down on the ground, kicked me in the face, and broke my glasses. I ran away from them and then spent two more weeks in the hospital. A journalist friend of mine told me that the nationalists were after me. That’s a lot more serious than some random hooligans. That’s when Alexei Davydov, the LGBT activist from Moscow, called me. We’d been close friends online. He invited me to come stay with him. When I got out of the hospital, I left town right away. On August 27, I arrived in Moscow.

Me, Alexei, and his friend Roman, who had also been kicked out of his house, were all renting a one-bedroom apartment in Novogireevo. Alexei had kidney problems and was getting dialysis. I got a job selling SIM cards, Roma was transcribing protocols from the Bolotnaya Square trials, and Alexei was on disability, so we had enough to live on.

We staged a couple more protests this fall. When they were discussing the passage of the laws that will take away the parental rights of same-sex couples, we stood by the Duma dressed up as doctors with signs that said we were offering psychiatric help to Duma representatives. On September 25, we protested by the Olympic committee headquarters, demanding that there be a pride house in the Olympic Village in Sochi, as there is in other countries. I was late to this protest and by the time I showed up, the police transport vans were already there and everyone had been arrested. It’s always the same thing after we get arrested. They take us to the station, process us for administrative violations, hold us for a few hours, and then release us.

Exactly a month later, on September 27, Alexei’s condition began deteriorating rapidly. He came home from dialysis and lost consciousness. We took him to the hospital, and three days later, he died in the ICU. Looking at his chart, I think that he was killed by the doctors, who didn’t actually perform hemodialysis like they said. After Alexei’s death, we weren’t able to stay in the apartment in Novogireevo and had to move. Now, a friend and I are renting a small one-bedroom house in the village of Drozdovo, which is only twenty minutes outside of Moscow on the train.

Alexei, Roma, and I were all just friends. I’m single. Three years ago, I was in a relationship with a man, Sergei, who had lived with another man for twelve years before that. From the very beginning, I knew that if they’d been together that long, they were probably only broken up temporarily and would get back together sooner or later. This happened six months later; Sergei went back to his boyfriend. I haven’t been in a serious relationship since. It’s very easy to find sex in Moscow, but I don’t understand the point of having sex with strangers, like how some people go to the back rooms of clubs to do. That’s not for me. I have a lot of friends online, but only two friends in real life. They’re both from the Urals, like me.

Most of all, I want a partner. I would like to walk with him down the street holding hands, unafraid of anything. In America, I realized the problem isn’t homophobia but the gay community itself. We need to work on the LGBT community and not society at large. People need to start coming out of the closet so that there are as many openly gay people as possible or else nothing is going to change.

It’s very hard to find work. I studied to be a chef. I’ve worked in food service for many years. I know the kitchen inside and out. I can do anything from washing the dishes to running the place. I can’t find a job in my field. It seems like potential employers Google me, see that I’m an activist, and decide not to hire me. At one place, they told me outright, “What if you’re arrested and can’t come to work?” I used to work for a company that sold printing supplies and accessories; then I sold SIM cards. I never get hired anywhere and I’m starting to think that maybe I should have listened to my friends who told me to get out of here. But for now, I don’t think it’s critically dangerous for me or that I need to flee. It could get worse after the Olympics. They’re starting to talk about criminal penalties [as opposed to just fines] for gay propaganda. My money is running out and I don’t really know what I’m supposed to do next.

If it gets really bad and nationalists start showing up to my door I can move to Poland. My father is Polish so I could apply for repatriation. It would be better than being a refugee in America, especially since the Polish language and culture are closer to me. Ideally, I’d like to open a café. I’d like to have a little apartment on top of it. I don’t need much. I would like to have a partner, someone I love. I want people to come over and sit with us drinking wine. I’ve thought about children, too, but I haven’t pictured myself as a father yet. Maybe because I’ve gotten used to the thought that I will never have kids.