Gay Propaganda: Russian Love Stories

NATALIA USHAKOVA “If I start worrying about the government, I’ll end up having a third heart attack.”

Natalia Ushakova raised six children with her partner, Olga. Today, the kids range from 14 to 24, and only the youngest live at home with their mothers. Natalia and Olga will be grandmothers soon, and Natalia is planning to create a crisis center where LGBT teens can receive help and shelter if they’ve been kicked out of their homes, or have otherwise found themselves in dangerous situations. Right now Natalia and Olga are giving shelter to two LGBT teens they helped get off the streets of Moscow.

For those who believe in reincarnation: my wife Olga and I were together in our previous life. Otherwise, we’ve been together for long enough to be two parts of one whole, a whole called a family.

We both grew up in Soviet times. Back then there wasn’t only no lesbianism, there wasn’t any sex at all. So we’d both gotten married, even though I’d always felt attracted to my female friends. The first time I had sex with a woman was in college. At first it seemed insane, but it was also insanely pleasant.

By the time we met, we had each had children, and some of them were already teens. All it took was a couple of hours together to see that we wanted to be together. That was seven years ago. We’re in our eighth year living together.

It may sound strange, but both my and Olga’s children were fine with our moving in together. We immediately found a common language.

Same-sex parents are no different than heterosexual parents if the father doesn’t drink and push the mother around. I can hammer in a nail, chop wood, and lay wire myself. Like any family, we have our disagreements, but not because we’re both women. The rest, the everyday, is the same: cleaning, doing the dishes, skipping class, and keeping grades up. The children do the dishes and clean. I cook. Olga goes to work. I also do the laundry and ironing. Everyone fixes things around the house. When I get sick, Olga cooks and the little ones do the washing and ironing. We’re all equal.

There are practically no other families like ours in our city and Olga sometimes gets bored. That’s when we go to Moscow to hang out at a club or go to a concert.

The “morality warriors” claim that the “propaganda” of growing up in a same-sex family will make children homosexuals. Idiots! Our three eldest are all married. Two of our other children are dating. My son and his girlfriend also seem to be moving toward marriage. Only the youngest hasn’t figured out his love life yet, but he’s only fourteen. He is courting a girl very gracefully.

My mother used to make mean-spirited jokes about us, but after a while, she calmed down. My middle daughter Nastya has helped a lot in this regard—she’s going to give us the gift of a grandson soon. She said that she’s not going to disown me, even if I decided to live with the devil himself. If grandma doesn’t like it, she won’t come see her. That was her ultimatum.

Friends come over pretty often. They don’t have any issues with us, or any kind of negativity toward us. I’m like one of the guys with them, and they aren’t shy about telling me all of their secrets and problems. They even call me at night sometimes. I have a lot of straight friends and they are all worried about us.

I try not to pay attention to the news. If I start worrying about some nonsense with our government, I’m going to end up having a third heart attack. But I’m afraid of the hatred of the people who hate without knowing why. It’s like it was during the Inquisition. There’s mass hysteria, a witch hunt.

Some people leave the country so that they can have families and lead normal lives. To each his own. Everyone should do whatever they find necessary. But what should people do if they can’t leave the country?

I am not about to run and hide. But if they come for my children, I will respond with the same violence they throw at me. In this case, violence must be answered with violence.

It used to be easier. Before this whole brouhaha, no one paid any attention and didn’t even know the words to talk about it. But they could have put us in jail. There was an article in the criminal code, but they didn’t use it on very many women. There were some, though. If two girls are dating and one is under eighteen, she gets three years, just like that, unnatural relations, for being a sex offender.

We are writing our own story. The people are the ones who made the revolution. I strongly believe that everything will change soon. It’s important to come out of the underground, but we have a lot to lose.

The idea for a crisis center for LGBT teens came up spontaneously. Someone wrote me from another country to tell me that there were two LGBT teens living on the street in Moscow. It wasn’t summer. So I went to go pick them up. And I’ll help others out, too, if the need arises.

You can talk and offer a lot of things, but there are very few people who actually do anything. The teens need physical and material support. More than anything they need people to take care of them. It’s too early to talk about the objective of the project since we don’t have the laws to make this possible. But the shelter needs to come together and fast. It’s almost winter and many of our children are on the streets. These children are more vulnerable to rape and torture and they need help. They are the victims of circumstance and of our laws.

I’m working on this alone for now, but I do what I can. But why talk about it when you need to act? For today, I declare that it’s my house and I can invite anyone I want to live there.

I’m not an organizer and not even an activist. I’m just the kind of person who can’t look the other way. I also have a job. I’ve just taken a sabbatical for health reasons. Our family can’t survive on one salary, and the kids we take in will need to eat, too. Some of them will need clothes, too. As a rule, they end up on the streets without a change of underwear or an extra pair of socks.

In general, you can’t be indifferent to children, but these in particular are in need of our support. The adults they trusted since they were little have rejected them. This is more hurtful than anything their peers can do. If you have problems at school and on the street, but your mother is waiting for you at home, and she understands, all of the rest of it seems small.

This conversation took place during one of the “Evening Salons” hosted by “Children-404,” an online community for gay Russian teens that formed in 2012. The conversation has been abridged, and is published here with permission from the community administrator.