Gay Propaganda: Russian Love Stories

MASHA & RUSLAN “And suddenly, bam: I want a beard.”

Ruslan, 29, is a journalist, and Masha, also 29, is a flight attendant. The two met over ten years ago, when Ruslan was 17 and Masha, 18.

RUSLAN

When I was fifteen, I firmly told my mother that I was going to get a sex change. For her, this was a disaster. However, it hadn’t come as a surprise. She had always been afraid I’d do that. She always said there were people like this and that I was like them, and that she didn’t want it to happen to me because it was scary and dangerous. On TV, they say that because of the hormones, you’ll only live for ten years and you’ll die young and sick. This is, of course, very far from the truth. As soon as I got permission, I got the surgery. I was 24. It’s been five years. My life has changed dramatically. I can’t imagine myself as anybody else anymore. I can’t imagine what would have happened to me if I hadn’t done this. How I would live, how unhappy I would actually be, which is unhappy as hell.

MASHA

Yes, and you wouldn’t have married me. What would you be doing?

RUSLAN

Suffering. Crying.

MASHA

You’d probably be an activist fighting for same-sex marriage.

RUSLAN

Of course. I never felt like a lesbian. Since I was a child, I felt like a boy. Although I couldn’t go right out and say that I was a boy because I knew I wasn’t. I would look in my underwear and see that I was not a boy at all down there. This was my secret. I didn’t know that there were people who changed this, but when I found out, I immediately felt like I was one of them. I met a group of them in Ufa. Before that, I lived in a very small town. This was before the Internet. I didn’t have anyone to talk to about it. I probably thought I was a lesbian at some point, you could say that. But I didn’t like to think of myself as a lesbian. I knew that they were not like me. They didn’t want to get a sex change or have a beard. I had always dreamed of it.

MASHA

I remember how I found out the first time; it was a shock. I was going on vacation back home to the country and Ruslan gave me a letter to take with me, and said I should read it when I got home. I opened the letter and it had a picture of him with a beard—he’d drawn the beard on. He wrote, “This is how I’m going to look.” Just like he looks now. I looked and I had tears in my eyes. I thought, “Dear Lord, what is this? What’s happening?” I couldn’t understand what it was about. At that point, we had been together for more than a year. It was so stressful, I still remember it. I cried, I was depressed, I didn’t know what to do. I thought it would ruin my life. Of course, it was because of a deficit of information. Especially since we were kids, we were both nineteen. I had never thought of myself as a lesbian. Subconsciously I felt that the person I’d fallen in love with was not a woman. I didn’t fall in love with women.

RUSLAN

With us, it wasn’t like, “Let’s define who you are.” We were just in a relationship.

MASHA

We were in love. I cried because I was afraid of the process. What would happen, what will people think, what will Mama think, what will it be like for him? I had been so happy ever since we’d started dating. Everything was going smoothly, we were living our lives, and suddenly, bam: “I want a beard.”

RUSLAN

It’s very important to have a good, beautiful, successful role model. I know that if they put some guy from the country next to me, I could serve as that good example. He’d look at me and say, “I want to be like that guy. He’s successful, he has a job, an apartment, a car, and a wife. He has everything!” I didn’t have a role model. I was surrounded by strange people who would go on and off their hormones, who were totally dysfunctional. They popped hormones because they felt like they were male, but then they would change their minds, and end up with a whole lot of health problems. Once I got the Internet, “The FTM Transition,” the most popular Russian forum on the subject, became a part of my life. There were such beautiful men on it. They were very different from their before photos.

MASHA

I am actually very grateful to Ruslan. He had to become part of this world and I fell in love with him so I also became part of this world. I met a lot of people and it made me very tolerant. I grew up in the country. My grandfather is a Stalinist, my grandmother is Russian Orthodox: it’s this explosive mix. I thought that I was the only one, that I was the only person this had ever happened to. He still used the female pronoun back then. I got used to the change very late, after everyone was already referring to him as a male. I was still writing him things in the feminine gender, and he’d be like, “I’ve asked you, blah blah blah,” and I’d be like, “Oh, oh, sorry.” Now it’s hard for me even to remember how it all happened; it is as though it’s always been this way.

I couldn’t get used to his name for a long time. I thought that it was a dumb name. There are so many names he could have chosen. Why this one? I called him by his nickname for a long time. Then I got used to it. Now it’s completely natural.

RUSLAN

Trans people are often the least politically active; their activity ends with changing their documents and socializing in their new gender. There’s this category of people, that when there’s a conversation about transexuals and they don’t know that you’re transexual, they start saying these harsh things: “Those trans people are crazy, psychos, they’ve changed their gender.” I hear this a lot. I am not too upset by it because I know that these people have never encountered it. If I told them I was trans, that I’ve changed genders, they wouldn’t be able to assimilate the image of me and the image they have in their heads. But there’s another reaction too: when someone finds out you’re trans, they start treating you worse.

MASHA

Some people think trans people are zombies, monsters.

RUSLAN

That they’re freaks with a bunch of things sewn onto them, that they’re sick, crazy. When they see that you’re that transgendered person, I don’t ask them what they feel, but I feel like they can’t reconcile me to the image they have. It causes cognitive dissonance. They see some guy on TV in a wig and that has nothing to do with the attractive young man they know.

My grandmother and grandfather’s reaction was amazing. It was a weight off their shoulders. They had always thought I was crazy because I flew around like Tarzan, swung on the vines in the village and rode around on a motorcycle with my brother. They had always thought I was insane, and this calmed them. They even started being nicer to me.

MASHA

If that were my grandmother and grandfather, my grandfather would have resurrected Stalin and killed you and everyone around you. My mother knew since I was a college student. When we started dating she knew about it and she was fine with it. She got used to it.

RUSLAN

She’s just really great. She loves me. Now she’s my mother-in-law. They don’t know at work. That chapter is closed. It’s easier that way. Telling children is actually a complicated question. We’ve discussed whether we’d tell our children, whether it’s worth it or not. We’re leaning toward telling them. That is, to educate our children to be tolerant and LGBT friendly from the outset. That seems like the right thing to do.

MASHA

Yes, unequivocally so. I would raise them that way no matter what.

RUSLAN

There are a lot of transgender people raising children and the children don’t know anything.

MASHA

I think that it’s important to tell children not in early childhood, but when the child is rational, when there’s a foundation. Then the child is ready to learn the truth about their father. We’re going to have children and they’re going to be happy.

Masha and Ruslan have known each other for ten years, but they haven’t been together that whole time. When Ruslan was twenty and Masha was twenty-one, they broke up for six years, but they remained friends. Several years ago, Ruslan and his mother moved to Moscow. Two-and-a-half years ago, Masha moved in with them.

MASHA

When we first broke up, we didn’t see each other for a long time. Maybe for three years. Then we’d see each other once a year, twice a year, but steadily. We always had things to talk about. It’s possible that if we had stayed together back then, we wouldn’t still be together now. It’s possible that we would have outlived our relationship by now. We needed to have more experience, to accept things about ourselves, and each other.

RUSLAN

Back then we were always fighting. It was very volatile.

MASHA

For a long time, we couldn’t bear to break up. We’d do it, but then we’d get back together and this went on for a long time, almost a year. I am still upset about all of it, about all of those break-ups. It was very hard for me; I was horribly depressed. For three years. I didn’t think we’d ever get back together. I got used to it. But everything happened of its own volition. I hope that we die when we’re old, on the same day.

RUSLAN

We didn’t have a real wedding. We had dinner with our relatives, drank champagne at a restaurant.

MASHA

I had this punk dress. It had a yellow tutu and a corset. I just really wanted a yellow tutu. It all began with that tutu. We hadn’t wanted a wedding but then I said, “I want that tutu.” Then, once you have a tutu, you have to invite people over. Everyone got drunk. Ruslan doesn’t drink and I was sick. I get a fever in the middle of the wedding and can’t eat anything. Everyone got drunk and had fun, while Ruslan and I were sober. But we were happy, of course, and satisfied. It was really fun. And my dress was cool. Oh man, I really wanted that yellow tutu. I’ve always hated marriages. I had been trying to prove to everyone that I didn’t need to get married, that I was happy anyway, that all of it was bureaucratic nonsense. When Ruslan wrote me a message saying, “Masha, do you want to be my wife?” I naturally said hell no, why would I do that, but really, I couldn’t refuse. I didn’t have a choice.