Gay Propaganda: Russian Love Stories

OLEG DUSAEV & DMITRIY STEPANOV “I think we’ve killed our mothers.”

When we meet, Oleg pulls out a novel by journalist Artur Solomonov, which he says caused a fair share of controversy when published earlier this year in Russia. Its protagonist is an actor who falls in love with another actor. None of the major publishing houses would publish it. A small publisher finally picked it up, releasing the book with a disclaimer on the back cover: “This work does not contain homosexual propaganda and is not meant to offend people of faith.” Despite—or perhaps thanks to—the controversy, Oleg says the book is selling well.

Oleg Dusaev, 33, and Dmitriy Stepanov, 30, met on an online dating site six years ago and have been together ever since. In the fall of 2013, they flew to New York to visit friends and to get away from a stressful month in Moscow, in which Oleg, an executive producer at a major TV news network, had lost his job contract after coming out on Facebook. While in New York they also took the opportunity to rent tuxedos and stop by New York City Hall to get married. The news spread quickly after they and their friends posted photos to Facebook, causing some commotion with their respective families back in Russia.

DMITRIY

My mother was crying on the phone. She said it was very strange; she was confused, disoriented, basically she didn’t know how to react. She had a stroke two years ago, so I was really worried. Basically my Mom is still trying to understand our relationship. She’s a very educated woman, but she has very traditional values.

OLEG

My mother was at home when she found out, but then the next day when she was at work they had to call an ambulance for her: apparently, she had a minor stroke. I feel like we’ve killed our mothers. We know it’s their problem, but we’re still worried. I understand that my mother loves me a lot, but she thinks of me as somebody with some kind of sickness, like Down syndrome. Obviously I wish she loved me differently. Dima’s family is very tight knit: he has a sister, a father. But my mother and I, it’s just us, she’s all alone. I was scared she was going to die in her sleep. So they’ve given us a very nice wedding gift.

DMITRIY

My mother loves me the way I am, but she still thinks we should both get married to women, and have children. That people like us—smart, educated—should be raising children. She has this inner conflict, she knows it’s impossible, but she still wants us to have wives. My father doesn’t know yet, I’m scared of how he’s going to react. It’s all a little crazy right now.

OLEG

But my mother has always been difficult. She still won’t talk to Dima. When he and I first got an apartment together, it was really hard for her. Mom and I lived together then, and when I moved out she acted like I was her husband leaving her, and leaving her for a man no less! It was very stressful; I basically became a wreck, I was having all kinds of panic attacks. Dima took care of me, and it worked out in some crazy way. I was having all of these problems, and Dima is a psychologist. Of course he didn’t treat me himself, but he referred me to good therapists. Three of them.

DIMITRIY

I scared Oleg when I first told him that I really liked him. It was just a few weeks after we met, and I was pretty scared of what he would think. I thought he would freak out, that it could end everything. But somehow I knew I loved him already, so then a few weeks after that first conversation, we were at this members-only restaurant, one of these places where journalists and artists hang out, and this time I told him that I loved him. I could tell I scared him, but a little less this time. A few days later he told me he loved me too.

For five years Oleg and Dmitriy led a low-key semi-closeted life. They weren’t bar flies, but friends would come over for dinner, and Dmitriy’s family would visit them at the apartment. Oleg’s mother refused—she hasn’t talked to Dmitriy to this day. Dmitriy built up his private practice as a therapist, and Oleg was moving up the ladder at the news desk of his influential TV network, Kultura. In August 2013 things changed.

OLEG

For five years I was volunteering at a big children’s hospital in Moscow. It’s for kids with some of the worst diseases, the hardest to treat, very tough cases, and kids come from all over the country since all of the best services are in Moscow.

One day last summer a friend of mine, a journalist, pointed out to me that the website of the hospital said that they wouldn’t accept blood donations from drug addicts, prostitutes, or homosexuals. That was the day when something inside of me broke. I really felt betrayed: this was my home, I’d volunteered here for five years. I knew how the blood was stored—for six months, meticulously tested. This was a big, sophisticated hospital in Moscow, and they had this rule that had nothing to do with science or medicine.

After that I got in touch with Anton Krasovsky [another Russian journalist, fired in the summer of 2013 for coming out on-air] just to talk. We weren’t great friends at the time, but we knew each other. Anton put a photo of the two of us together on Instagram, and in thirty seconds, literally, I got a phone call from somebody at the network, a gay guy actually. He was basically delivering the message from on high, and he told me I was being seen with the wrong person. It was literally seconds.

I had a conversation with that same guy a little later in a café, and it felt like an old-timey KGB meeting. He told me that being seen with Anton, I was starting to be seen as an “undesirable.” That’s exactly how he put it. He wasn’t shy—he said I could be fired. I was a TV producer; people know me. For the people in charge I was becoming a risk.

That conversation really pissed me off. And that’s what made me finally go on Facebook and post about it. The news spread quickly, and it got picked up by some other news sites. At work people stopped talking to me. But also people from the provinces started to write me, telling me I’m a hero, making it easier for others out there in smaller cities. It was very surreal. It still is. I don’t feel I’ve done anything special. I just feel like I’ve been hit over the head by anybody who could get a swing in.

I don’t regret any of it. I’d already started to lose it a little bit by that point anyway. I remember in May the Cannes Film Festival had just finished. One of our producers said, “No way, we can’t talk about Cannes, that lesbian film won the competition,” and I was just thinking how I was trapped in this theater of the absurd. I told her she’d lost her mind! This is the Cannes Film Festival, it doesn’t matter which film won, this is news. But this is how this law works: people learn to censor themselves. My contract was discontinued soon after.

DMITRIY

I’m not a public figure so I haven’t been in the eye of the storm as much, but I was worried. Beyond psychological risks, we could be threatened. A lot of our risks all of a sudden increased. But whatever happens, I have my private practice: we can support ourselves and get by on that. A lot of my colleagues are also gay. I guess I have a slightly different view on it too. I kind of came out in stages, piecemeal. I think it’s important not to live two personalities, to live just one life. I just did it in a different way.

OLEG

After I lost my job, we decided to leave for a bit, get a change of scenery. We already had visas to the U.S. since we’d been planning on visiting a friend who lives in Kansas City, and she had a kid last year. So we thought, while tickets are cheap, let’s go to New York. We’ll get married, then visit other people in the States. I had already proposed to Dima four years ago, and at least then he said yes “in principle.”

DMITRIY

Oleg has always wanted to get married, and I was always pretty skeptical. Why get married? We have a great relationship. I started changing my way of thinking about it recently, though. I was in the hospital this summer for a bit, and I thought, what if they don’t let him visit me?

OLEG

He was so annoying about it! We love each other, we understand each other. Why not?

DMITRIY

I’m still processing it all. Our relationship is evolving. We’ve been together for six years. When we were there getting married, I felt like we were reaching a point that should have already happened. It was like something fulfilling itself.

OLEG

Right now I have to say I’m not proud of myself for coming out, or getting married. I’m more proud of taking my first long flight. I’m terrified of flying, I’ve never flown more than a few hours. What I’m proud of is flying nine hours over the Atlantic to New York City.