LGBT people were the country's biggest threat: the quintessential "foreign agent", the ultimate other. The country, it felt, was being besieged by enemies who aimed to destroy its traditions and social institutions. Russia was stumbling on its way to becoming the "family values" capital of the world.
The Kremlin, meanwhile, was telling itself and the world a very different story about Russia. Very few of us realised just how different it was I certainly did not. Issues such as same-sex marriage or protection from discrimination were not on the table, but then again, Russia was rebuilding itself as a dictatorship, so the political table had been hijacked. Russia, at the start of the 21st century, at least in its larger cities, very much resembled the United States of the early 1990s: being gay was no longer criminal or shameful, but it was still not a topic for polite conversation or public discussion. They would not acknowledge it publicly, though. A famous singer and a well-known actress, both women, fell in love and began working and living together their relationship was an open secret, the talk of Moscow's largely approving high society. Our stories didn't make it on to the pages of mainstream magazines or newspapers, but at least they were quietly being told. At one point, a couple of Moscow magazine publishers even got the idea that they should actively headhunt gay and lesbian staff. Other Russians were not in a hurry to come out.īy the mid-noughties, I found that I was no longer the only openly gay person in every setting. For years I was the only publicly out gay person who was not a full-time gay activist: my position as a quasi-foreigner gave me a privileged perch, and my ability to earn money by writing for western publications made me almost impervious to discrimination. In 1993, the sodomy law was quietly repealed, thorazine was, as far as I could tell, retired around the same time, and Russian queers got to the slow work of building identities and communities. I also emigrated, with my parents, as a teenager in 1981, and I did not return to the Soviet Union until 10 years later. That friend left Leningrad and made a new, thorazine-free story for herself in the United States. It suggested treating the female homosexual with thorazine, an early anti-psychotic medication with long-lasting, debilitating side-effects. A friend from Leningrad recalls reading, at the age of 16, a textbook on sexual pathology.
A year or so later, this was confirmed when I heard that a famous theatre director was facing prosecution for having sex with a young man.
Somehow, my 12-year-old brain made the connection and I knew two things: I was not alone, and I was a criminal. I was not a man, but I had been having fantasies about being one and kissing a woman, a friend of my mother's.
As a pre-teen, I read the Penal Code of the USSR, which said that the crime of "man lying with man" was punishable by up to five years in prison. Our stories bear the traces of other stories we heard about ourselves. W e tell our stories to know who we are and to tell each other that we are not alone.