Gay Propaganda: Russian Love Stories

ANDREI TANICHEV & ROMAN KOCHAGOV “Our parents and even the Sochi city government know who we are and how we live.”

Andrei Tanichev, 35, and Roman Kochagov, 42, have been together for the past thirteen years. For the last eight, they’ve run the only gay club in the Olympic city of Sochi. They are reticent about their private lives, but eager to talk about business. But their private and business lives are intertwined and appear to be proceeding equally well. It’s hard to believe their story is set in a country whose increasingly high-profile homophobia makes regular headlines all over the world. Despite their idyllic situation, Andrei and Roman are considering emigration and have already made one failed attempt to move to Spain.

ANDREI

We’re both from Moscow. I was a manager at Central Station [the largest gay club in Moscow] and Roma came there as a patron. We met in the way that club managers usually meet with guests: we struck up a conversation. It was, incidentally, my last day of working at CS. We moved in together literally the day after we met.

ROMAN

It was spring, I was working at Sheremetyevo Airport as the head of passenger operations at the time, and even though I had my own place, we immediately rented an apartment for two. In autumn, we went on vacation to Sochi and we liked it here so much—the climate, the nature, the people—that we decided to stay here and open a gay hotel. It was the first of its kind in Sochi. For six months, we’d come once a week scoping out locations, doing construction, and by next spring, we opened our hotel, Okhota [“the hunt”] near the gay beach. It had six rooms. We had almost no overhead, no staff, just the two of us.

ANDREI

Yes, the name was a double entendre. It’s actually in the woods not far from town, and there really are a lot of hunters there. Of course, it also has to do with meeting people. The business was so successful, a competitor soon opened up next door, Oblaka [“the clouds”]. It was bigger and more luxurious. The owner invested one million euros, I think. Even in Europe, we’d never seen such an extravagant gay hotel. It’s 2.5 thousand square meters and only has fifteen rooms.

ROMAN

We’d built our hotel up from nothing, and we never had any problems with the police or the administration. Only the journalists raised a stink. They wrote that the local residents were protesting. Meanwhile, our closest neighbors were two kilometers away, and no one has ever protested us. Later, in 2005, we opened a gay club. It was impossible to run both businesses at the same time, so we closed down the hotel and turned it into a large house. It’s where we live and where our friends and relatives come to stay with us on vacation.

ANDREI

Launching the business was easy because there was a huge demand for this kind of hotel. There was only one gay business in the whole town when we opened. Imagine a summery café or ice cream parlor, without windows or doors, where during the day, grandmas drink lemonade with their grandchildren, and at night, the gay community comes out for drag shows. We saw that it was nothing like Moscow here. There was no danger, homophobia, or aggression. The transvestites are the most popular performers in town, and you’ll see them at various parties and weddings.

ROMAN

The people here are exponentially more tolerant.

ANDREI

It’s a tourist town. Everyone here is used to being polite and welcoming. Even in Soviet times, there were a lot of private businesses dependent on tourists. Plus, the city is very international, there were never any fascists or nationalists here because there are too many different ethnic groups.

ROMAN

Right now, we don’t have a sign. It’s not because we’re afraid, though, it’s just to keep certain people out.

ANDREI

When we had a sign, all sorts of people showed up, like tourists from the countryside with their children and grandchildren, and they didn’t understand that this is a gay establishment. They don’t even know what gay people are. Before these laws were passed, many people didn’t even know the word “gay.”

ROMAN

For the first four years, we had a glass door. No problems. When we were remodeling, we decided to put in something more substantial. Not for safety reasons, but because there’s a hotel next door and we need a more soundproof door.

ANDREI

We often have to deal with the authorities, but we’ve never had any problems with them. Especially now, right before the Olympics, they’ve even paid special attention to us. They call and ask whether we’ve had the menu translated into English, whether we’ve been training our staff to speak foreign languages.

ROMAN

Right now there are a lot of foreigners here, especially journalists. We’ve given thirty interviews just in the past month. One American journalist told us that she was convinced that our club was a myth, that there was just a residence at this address, and that the story that we existed had been invented by the ruling party, to make the Olympics run more smoothly. She was shocked when she saw how many people showed up for the drag show.

ANDREI

Another time, some journalists came here from the Associated Press who really wanted to write a story about the Muslim guests that come to the gay club. We used to have these theme nights, but right now we’re Ukrainian-themed, so we had no Muslim flavor to offer. Anyway, the night they were there, during the drag show the emcee asked whether it was anybody’s birthday. A young Chechen guy comes out and says, “I don’t want any particular congratulations, but can I dance the lezginka [a traditional dance]?” And he started dancing and then his friends came out and his boyfriend, who had given him a hundred roses, and some girls. All of them were dancing.

We have between one and three hundred customers a night, although there are only fifty seats. We tried having a dance floor with electronic music, but no one liked it. There’s only one road that goes into Sochi, a winding mountain road, and it’s easy to control.

ROMAN

That’s why there are no drugs here. At all. And so people don’t go for club music.

ANDREI

That’s even better for us, because it means we sell more alcohol. A lot of people want to open clubs that play house music in Sochi, but all of them fail. Last year, they opened “Pacha” and only ten people would come there a night so they had to close it.

ROMAN

People around here like good food and drinks. That’s why we have a cabaret and put everything into our floor show. We often host acts like Lolita, Eva Polna, the red-headed Ivanushka, Chili, Mirage, A-Studio. You couldn’t name them all.

ANDREI

The business is very profitable. We have some of the highest sales figures for alcohol in town. We’re also the only club open seven days a week. It’s unlikely we could have a business like this in Spain. There are so many clubs there already and the culture is different. People go into a bar, have a cocktail, and move on.

ROMAN

It’s completely different here. People want the table set, to have a big menu, salads, meat, they want to stay a while and have a good time. We have three chefs in our kitchen on weekdays. People don’t order one drink at a time, they want bottles, and they want them to be as big as possible. Even high-end cognacs like Cordon Blue and X.O. People order by the bottle. And then they dilute it with cola.

ANDREI

We don’t only have gay customers. There are a lot of women and maybe one fifth of our customers are heterosexual men who just come to hang out. There is a zone in the club for men only. It used to be very large, with a lounge and a separate bar and a back room. It turned out that this was unnecessary: the young people here aren’t accustomed to these kinds of amusements. We left the small dark room, but replaced the lounge with karaoke for everyone, with hookah. It’s incredibly popular.

We’re completely open about our lifestyle. Not only our parents, but also the municipal administration is fully aware of who we are. My mother lives with us and helps us out a lot. I told her I was gay when I was eighteen. My brother knows as well. He works at our club.

ROMAN

I told mine when I was thirty. When I was eighteen, there was still a statute against “sodomy.” My mother died a long time ago, but when Andrei and I moved in together I told my father. His response was: “Whatever grew, grew. You’re my son.” My father and his wife and children come see us often on vacation.

ANDREI

All of our neighbors know and understand. We’ve always been very lucky with our surroundings. Nonetheless, we applied for residency in Spain last year. This is the usual problem for the Russian businessman: you can make good money here, but it’s hard to plan for the future. We’re renting this building but investing in it is dangerous: what if the owner changes his mind tomorrow? We want to buy something, build something of our own, something more substantial, but we have no security, there’s no assurance that everything isn’t going to change tomorrow. On top of that, there’s a lot of red tape. Right now, a lot of restaurants and stores are just closing for the Olympics.

ROMAN

The President signed a decree that transport vehicles can only enter the city with special passes, with permission from the FSB, the Ministry of the Interior, and the administration. Which is to say that getting food and alcohol here is turning into a big fiasco. Sochi doesn’t produce anything locally. Filing all the documents for the permits is such a pain in the neck that a lot of businesses have decided to simply shut down for that period.

ANDREI

We want to get married in Spain. And we want to have kids, but apparently, not here, if Mizulina passes that law right now [the law that would deprive same-sex couples of parental rights]. We’ve already applied for residency permits in Spain, but recently they changed the rules there. It used to only be necessary to own property worth over two hundred thousand euros, but now they raised it to four hundred thousand, which isn’t something we have yet. So it didn’t work out and now we’re not sure that it will. We want to get residency in Europe, but for now, we like living here.

ROMAN

Many American journalists say that we could easily apply for political asylum in America. But we don’t want to do that at this point.

ANDREI

We look to European clubs for inspiration, not local ones. I go abroad very often, and I’d like to go more often. On average, I spend five months out of the year in Europe.

ROMAN

I go less often than Andrei. I also like Asia. We never vacation together because it’s impossible for us to go at the same time and leave our business. If we didn’t work together, it’s possible that we wouldn’t still be together. This way, we always have something to talk about, a lot of common concerns. We’re never bored around each other.

ANDREI

We hardly ever fight. We used to. When we first started, building the business, we would get into arguments. Now, if we fight, it’s only in jest.