Gay Propaganda: Russian Love Stories

LENA & NASTYA “My parents said, ‘We’re just going to make her disappear.’”

The fact that Nastya and Lena, 24 and 22 respectively, are accomplished corporate lawyers is perhaps the least surprising part of their story. They met eight years ago in Kirov, a city an overnight train ride from Moscow, and since that night they’ve gone through every sort of hell to stay together.

LENA

It’s all rather prosaic: we met on the Internet. My best friend had transferred to the school where Nastya went, and I started hanging out on their online forum.

NASTYA

You wrote that you needed some songs by Psichea.

LENA

You’re embarrassing me.

NASTYA

It’s this awful band, you know, “aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah-boom-boom-boom-boom,” but I just happened to have an entire disk of theirs that a classmate had given me. I wrote: “Come to our school and I’ll give it you.” That’s how we met. Lena was 14 and I was 16. I was in eleventh grade and she was in the ninth.

I realized I was gay when I was about 13. It was an uneventful discovery. I said, “Well, all right,” and proceeded to live with this knowledge. I didn’t tell anyone, of course. Lena was the first person I told. But at first, we just hung out and talked on the phone a lot.

LENA

And then Nastya hinted that she had another girlfriend.

NASTYA

It was just this girl I was also hanging out with. It’s not like we had a relationship. But I found out she was in love with me back then. But Lena was intrigued and we started talking even more. It was tricky: I had my own phone line that my parents had put in for me, so I was free to spend as much time on the phone as I wanted, but Lena’s father didn’t allow her to talk for hours. So we had to correspond. But her father kept deleting ICQ [an instant messenger program] as well, so we would meet up in these awful online chat rooms to talk, even though we lived in the same city. So we were on one of those chats when I asked Lena if she thought she might be able to have a relationship with me. It took me a long time to get an answer out of her, but when I finally got to “yes,” I was terrified. I’d never had a relationship with a girl before, even though I knew that was what I wanted. Plus, I worried that I was older and may have pressured her. So I retreated. But we kept talking.

In May, about five months after we first met, we went for a walk in the botanical gardens. There’s this little river there with a bridge over it. And there we are standing on this little bridge and Lena says, “Kiss me.” I said, “I can’t, you have to understand blah blah blah.” And she’s like: “That’s it. In that case, I’m leaving and not coming back.”

LENA

I just said “That’s it” and walked away. I was walking and thinking: this is it. If she doesn’t come after me now, I’m not even going to talk to her.

NASTYA

I was terrified, both of having to kiss her and of the possibility that she’d walk away and never come back. So I ran after her and we went back to the bridge, which was sort of secluded, and I kissed her.

LENA

And then these two women sitting on the hill above us—

NASTYA

They start hollering: “What’s going on, would you look at that!” So we had to beat a retreat. And that’s how our relationship started.

LENA

Then Nastya went to university in Moscow and I stayed back to finish high school. Nastya had this five-term system at university with a week in between terms, so she would come home. And I kept going to preparatory courses and such in Moscow, so we saw each other about once a month. Two years later I got into the same university, also in the legal department.

NASTYA

I was living in an apartment my parents had bought for me in Moscow, though it wasn’t legally in my name, and when Lena came, we started living there together.

LENA

I started out living in the dorms but kept shuttling back and forth between the dorm and the apartment, and this was hard, especially because the dorm was in a suburb. So I told my father I didn’t want to live in the dorm anymore and rented a room and moved most of my things there: at least it was in the city. But in the end, I still lived at Nastya’s. And when her parents visited, I went to my rented room. That was really nerve-wracking.

NASTYA

Toward the end of our first year living like that—Lena was finishing her first year and I my third year at the university—I went home to Kirov. And I forgot my cell phone at my parents’ house and took the train back to Moscow.

LENA

I kept calling and texting her. The thing is, we had had a fight-nothing serious, not a big deal, but at first I thought Nastya wasn’t answering because she was upset with me. So I kept texting, angrily at first—“Fine, go ahead and pout”—and then conciliatory: “I’m sorry. Let’s make up already.” Then I started panicking: “Where are you?”

NASTYA

At this point my parents were busy exploring the contents of my phone.

LENA

Three years’ worth of text messages and photos.

NASTYA

So I got to Moscow and at the end of the day got on the train back to Kirov: my parents had summoned me back for a talk. Our friends came over to see me off. We had these two friends who brought vodka and drank it, I think, for the first time in their lives that day, because everyone was so upset.

My parents told me to end it. I said, I can’t, I don’t want to, I love her, we’ve been together for a long time. They said, in that case we’re going to have to do something about her. My parents are very wealthy people. And they said, “We’re just going to make her disappear.” I got really scared. I texted Lena, “Let’s break up.” Instead of responding by saying “OK,” Lena got on a train and came to Kirov.

LENA

I stood under her windows until she came out and we talked. I was in tears, slobbering.

NASTYA

I promised Lena we wouldn’t break up, and I promised my parents we’d break up and everyone was happy and I was miserable.

LENA

When we got back to Moscow, we tried living separately because we were afraid Nastya’s parents might surprise us with an inspection. But soon we were living together again. That was really the most difficult time. Because, say, Nastya would have an earlier class than I and she would leave the house and then I’d go to the window and see a black SUV outside—I think all large cars look like Nastya’s father’s car—and I’d see it parking and then I’d quickly grab my things and go up a floor and change out of my pajamas and into my school clothes standing up on the landing. And then I’d call Nastya in hysterics and she’d say, “It’s probably not my father” and I’d say, “But I hear someone coming up the stairs.” And then I’d be too scared to go back into the apartment.

NASTYA

In the summer, my best friend was getting married. I went to Kirov for the wedding. Lena was in Abkhazia on vacation with her mother. And I forgot to log out of Vk.com [a Russian social network] on the computer. That’s when my parents cornered me again. I admitted that Lena and I were still in touch. For some reason my parents decided I should have labor therapy and sent me to work in my father’s factory. I guess they thought if I spent two weeks wearing coveralls and sorting timber, I’d become less dykey and more feminine and start liking men. They also took my phone away.

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.

LENA

Then I got work as an editor. I could work from home, so this didn’t get in the way of my studies. That lasted a year. And then I restored my relationship with my father and he said, “Quit your job.” That was the toughest year at the university, when you take your boards—half the people drop out at that point—and my father said he’d help me out during that year. After that, I got a job in my field.

NASTYA

And I got a good job right out of university in 2011 and we were finally able to get on our feet.

LENA

If we didn’t both specialize in Russian law, we’d probably have left the country by now.

NASTYA

It would be easier if we were engineers or something else that’s universal. As it is, we both need to get a new education in order to live abroad. That’s a hard decision to make; the memory of our last period of “going without” is still very recent. We’ve only just barely begun to accumulate a little bit of fat. And to be honest, I’ve never encountered any homophobia, except from my parents. And the case in which I represented a woman whose parents were trying to take her son away [see MARINA & ELENA: “And then they kidnapped my son for the first time,” p. 19]. But that was not a case of homophobia directed against me personally. At my last job, everyone knew and there was no problem. At my current job, I don’t really socialize with anyone.

LENA

I’ve only made one friend at my job, and I’ve told her. And her husband knows too.

NASTYA

As for the laws, in this country everyone’s rights are systematically violated. And I don’t feel hurt and limited by the anti-gay laws specifically, because all the laws they’re passing infringe on the rights of all citizens of the Russian Federation. And that does make us want to leave this sad country. Rather, this sad state.

But the state politics have given my parents a second wind. My mother called and said, “They’re going to start sending your kind to jail soon. You’re going to end up in jail.” I said, “Oh, goody, no one but women around.” She screamed and hung up. That’s how I communicate with my parents now. My father said, “Go try doing it with a man. What if you like it?” I said, “How about you go first? If you like it, I’ll try it too.”