Gay Propaganda: Russian Love Stories

ALEXANDER SMIRNOV “I regret nothing.”

This interview with Alexander Smirnov was originally published in the Russian weekly Afisha in the spring of 2013. As soon as the issue came out, Alexander brought it to his boss, the press secretary for Marat Khusnullin, deputy mayor of Moscow. A few days later, Alexander’s boss called him in for a conversation. She said that the deputy mayor, a Muslim, wouldn’t understand, and that if Alexander didn’t resign, their whole team would be fired, including her, a single mother.

Alexander was offered four months’ pay for his silence about being fired. He took the money (cash, in an envelope) and wrote a resignation letter effective the following day. Two months later, he found himself in the back of a police transport van for the first time. He had participated in a sanctioned LGBT protest and was beaten up and detained. Four months after that, when Vladimir Putin announced there is no discrimination against homosexuals in Russia, Alexander gave another interview where he told the story of how he was fired. “I’m still not convinced that I did the right thing,” he says, “I should have probably returned the money after doing the second interview.” But since his resignation, he hasn’t been able to find work with a comparable salary, possibly because he has reluctantly become a gay rights activist.

This year he turns 40, but he is still afraid to come out in church, during confession. He has little hope of finding a new job, and not very much faith in becoming a successful activist, especially since the police refused to open an investigation into his assault at the protest. “I regret nothing,” said Alexander, insisting we quote him on that.

I work in Moscow city government and I’m fully aware that after this interview is published, I may be fired. They don’t need a scandal on the eve of the mayoral election, so they will probably ask me to quietly submit a resignation letter, try to portray me as unprofessional, or worse, cut all ties with me. I haven’t told anyone that I’m gay. If someone at work makes some joke about fags, I just grin like an idiot. In my regular life, I have to control my gaze so that it doesn’t linger over some beautiful man for a suspiciously long time. I’ve trained myself in self-control since childhood, but this causes constant internal pressure. I lead a double life, and it has me climbing the walls.

I grew up in a small town in the Far East and realized that something was awry when I was around 13 or 14, when everyone became interested in girls and I didn’t. I wanted to get close to boys. There was nothing outwardly sexual about my desires. I didn’t understand what was happening to me. The hardest was between the ages of 14 and 16, when your hormones are raging and you’re losing your mind from such strong desire that you couldn’t even express it. This internal conflict, the conflict between you and society, tears you apart. There was no one around I could talk to. That was when I first started considering suicide. When, twenty years later, I started volunteering for an LGBT hotline, I found out that gay teens are four times more likely to commit suicide than their heterosexual peers.

I was almost 20 when I first saw Ya + Ya [“I + I,” a mimeographed gay magazine published in Moscow in the early 1990s] magazine at a kiosk. There was an advertisement for a gay hotel on the cover. I could tell that it was for people like me. I just froze in front of the kiosk, deeply conflicted: I was afraid that the lady would immediately figure out why I was buying that magazine. I ended up having to buy a pack of pens to cover it up.

I found some ads that appealed to me in the magazine and I wrote to this guy who lived in Minsk. This was a different time, it was a paper letter. It’s not like now where you message someone online and half an hour later you’re in bed with them. The letter took two weeks to get there and then the response took two more weeks to get to me. It could get stuck somewhere along the way. I desperately awaited the response and spent a lot of time worrying. We corresponded for a year and finally Volodya came to see me. I was 20 and nine months. He was a year older.

This was the first time I’d ever been in love. He was pretty experienced. On the fourth day of his visit, he decided to count how many partners he’d been with, which he couldn’t do without the assistance of a spelling dictionary with a list of men’s names. It turned out that I was number seventy-seven in the course of his twenty-two years of life. This didn’t stop me because I really loved him.

Our relationship was doomed from the start. We were very different in terms of our experience, opinions, and goals. He was, after all, a citizen of the capital, the capital of Belarus. He tried to expand our social circle and figure out where the other gay people hung out. We combed the town but never found it. I bought him a return ticket to Minsk. “Go home,” I told him. “I can’t watch you suffer here.” Six months later I went to see him, and then I left, and then I went back again. This went on for another three or four years. It took another three or four years to get over him. I never cheated on him. Now, in hindsight, I think that perhaps I should have. I’m not positive that it’s great to be faithful in this kind of a situation. I don’t know. In any case, at the time I felt like it was the right thing to do.

I come from a regular Soviet family. My father was a heavy drinker. He’d beat me and my mother. I want to say this, so that no reader will make the leap that abusive fathers necessarily lead to gay sons. He beat my brother, too, and he’s straight. So that’s not the reason. But there’s no question that my life at home was no picnic. When he came to be with me, my boyfriend and I rented a separate apartment. I applied to college in Vladivostok just to get out.

In the dorms, I met Lena, who I later ended up “playing house” with. Lena was older and worked for the best regional paper. She really wanted to get me to switch over from my work in television. Instead, I was drafted. I tried hard to get some form of alternative military service. I told them that I was a pacifist and that my rights were protected by the constitution. At the enlistment office, they said that the constitution was one thing, but there wasn’t a corresponding federal law, so I would have to choose between the army and prison. I chose prison. I would have been there for a long time if it hadn’t been for Lena. When she found out I was in prison, she got me out with the right phone calls. She really was an awesome journalist.

After that, Lena confessed that she was in love with me. I was forced to tell her the truth. She was, I think, the first person I ever came out to. I’m a strong person, but she is even stronger, so this didn’t stop her. She suggested we do an experiment.

Lena is four-and-a-half years older than me. She’s not beautiful, but she is incredibly charming, and very professional. I really value that in a person. She’s a real talent. But she also likes to take risks, and I mean this in a negative way, because the risks she takes often lead to disaster. At least in my experience, that’s what happened.

Lena divorced her husband with whom she had a one-and-a-half-year-old child. We took Lena’s sister, who was in ninth grade, and moved to Volgodonsk to start over. For a year, as I’ve already mentioned, we “played house.” This was a very hard time. I was in a bind: she was a person I owed a lot to. On the other hand, I felt guilty because I couldn’t return Lena’s feelings. On top of it all, she drank, which had started before we even met. She got pregnant. With twins. They were mine. And we—I can’t even say that it was “we,” she was the one who made the decision—she decided she needed to get an abortion. The tests showed that she had kidney problems. This was during the 1998 financial crisis. We were these fucking awesome professionals and now we found ourselves penniless with her kid and younger sister. We worked, but they didn’t pay us. By that time, we’d tortured each other so much. We just couldn’t be together anymore.

I consider all of this my sin. When I was baptized a year later (even though I’m gay, I believe in God), I repented having allowed Lena to make a very hard decision on her own and get an abortion. Sometimes I think about how old my children would have been. Since then, a few women have asked me to father their children, and I want to, but it has never worked out. It’s a sad story.

I don’t remember how soon after the abortion Lena and I stopped sleeping together. It probably doesn’t matter. What matters is that for me, having sex with her was always like rape. I’m in good health: I could probably be aroused by a lamppost if I wanted to be. That’s just a matter of using your imagination. Nonetheless, having sex with a woman felt unnatural. Just because a man is aroused doesn’t mean he wants intimacy. Physiology and emotions are separate things. At a certain point, we decided that we would keep living together but stop pretending to be a couple. We got a new job and told people we were brother and sister. We stopped being friends because, as it turns out, certain deeds can kill a friendship.

After that I got into a relationship with a man, and we even exchanged rings, but then he went to China and never came back.

In 2003, we moved to Moscow. It’s a lot easier to be who I am in the capital. A year after I got to Moscow, I wrote to my mother. I really wanted to fix our relationship because when I was a kid, I had really faulted her for not divorcing my dad. I addressed all the gay stereotypes I could think of. I wrote that I’d felt the urge since I was a teen, that no one had “turned” me, that I hadn’t fallen in love with a girl who’d broken my heart, that you can’t cure it, that there haven’t been trustworthy studies determining the causes. With flawless logic, I gave her an exhaustive account. I sent the letter through the mail. Four weeks went by, but there was no reply. I called my grandmother and it turned out she didn’t know about the letter. My mother called me back five minutes later. She said that she hadn’t known what to say, but that she loved me. We both cried. Since then, we’ve been close. It’s a great joy to be accepted for who you are.

Two years ago, I lost a friend. He was found in his apartment stabbed to death. He was gay. Do you know how things like this happen? Gay men often meet each other online. There are gangs of people who come to gay men’s houses disguised as gay men, rob them, and then kill them. And the relatives don’t tell anyone because no one wants these stories circulating about them. That friend and I had a female friend in common, Sasha. She told me to be careful and stop meeting men online. I ignored her advice.

He was very good looking, and his profile on the website was pretty interesting. He came over to my house, we hung out, and then slept together. On his way out, he asked me to borrow some movies, promising to return them in a few days. He came back a week later. I let him in and went to the kitchen, where I was cooking something. Meanwhile, he let another guy in. They came up from behind me and hit me over the head with a bottle, but I didn’t fall over or pass out. I turned around and instantly understood that I might be facing death. One of them was holding a knife and the broken bottle, which he immediately shoved up against my throat, and the other one was also holding a knife. The first one was screaming that his brother was a faggot and that people like me were responsible for this, which is why I should be killed.

It’s unclear why it was my fault that someone else was gay. I tried to explain that, but it quickly became clear that there was no talking them out of it. So I just asked them not to kill me. I was bleeding hard and I thought that I was going to pass out. I begged them not to kill me. You can’t imagine how ashamed I am of myself, although they are the ones who broke into my house and almost killed me. They took everything, even my phone. They committed the crime and I’m the one who’s ashamed.

I was shivering, but I couldn’t call an ambulance. I would have had to explain what happened. I couldn’t tell anyone at work. I convinced my friends to call my coworkers and tell them that I had been attacked at a bus stop. I couldn’t go to the police, either. It would have been easy enough to find my attackers, but I didn’t have the strength to explain myself to the men in uniform. Now, I blame myself for my weakness. Those two really could kill someone if no one stops them.

When I was 13, my life was hard because I was alone. Now I’m 39, and society is still trying to put me in my place. I really hate being told how to live my life. I hate being accused of things I haven’t done. I hate being torn away from those dear to me. I can’t tolerate being persecuted.

I can stand up and say that this ends here.

A version of this interview was originally published in Afisha magazine Issue 339 (February 25, 2013). It was updated by the author and reproduced here by permission of Afisha