The tightrope queers walked in Russia highlighted how deep and treacherous the repression must have been. While the Moscow production of Genet’s The Maids was not considered gay, it was.
I could not take what people said to me in interviews at face value. There was so much history and culture involved and a strong legacy of repression to consider. I learned to listen with that in mind. Several transgender couples told me they wanted to become a traditional heterosexual couple so they could live better. One of my Russian friends explained, “Sonja, you must know why they want to do that. A woman can’t do anything in society here. Everything she tries to do, a man can do better.”
Gender identity was definitely in the mix of sexual minorities. In St Petersburg, I spoke to a beautiful young couple, butch-femme in my eyes. Dark, long-haired Natasha came smiling to our meeting in a pink crinoline dress with large polka dots and an open back. Her partner, Rem, looked more serious in a red T-shirt and jeans with blonde hair pulled back in a ponytail. When I mentioned femme-butch roles in the U.S., Rem said it was not like that with her. Whether it was because of homophobia or the social denigration of women that Rem hated her body, the concept of gender and gender variance was there, even in intimate relations. “I wear my underwear when I have sex with Natasha so I won’t be conscious that I am a woman,” she told me, and then Natasha lovingly said she didn’t want her lover to “mutilate her body” to change her gender.
The intensity of the interview process was often overwhelming for some interviewees. After Natasha and Rem talked about their early feelings for each other, we took a little break because Natasha had started hyperventilating. Rem too was breathing hard, trying to smile as she said that it was so difficult to be recounting these details about their relationship openly to someone else. It was intense for me too, that people were choosing to reveal themselves to me.
In Moscow I met a transgender (female-to-male) train conductor in an army uniform and who used the male gender in Russian verbs. He thought of himself as male. I am not sure if he had had any operations or treatments yet, but he looked male and was short.
“I’d like to get my papers and work on trains going to Warsaw. I am a Muslim Tatar, and my mother left the family for a boyfriend. Sometimes I just don’t want to live. I just want to be with my wife. I don’t really want to hear about any of this [homosexuality, lesbians, the queer lifestyle]. People are not ready.”
I felt his discouragement and frustration. He also expressed misgivings about the interview and didn’t want any of what he said to be publicized. I was coming across a lot of that—people being open and then telling me not to publish what they said, or changing their minds about being interviewed. It was not an easy time. People were not sure about what perestroika and the new liberal media meant. Changes were happening very quickly.
Under the alias Max, the director of The Creation of Adam, not the first Russian film with homoerotic content but the first billed as a gay film, came to San Francisco from St. Petersburg to participate in the eighteenth San Francisco International Lesbian and Gay Film Festival in June 1994. When I was enlisted as Max’s interpreter, the festival organizer wanted to know if Max was gay. People would ask him about this, so he should be prepared.
Tall, medium build, about forty, his thick salt and pepper hair cut short, Max looked sophisticated in black pants and a black silk shirt buttoned up to his neck. With his full beard, he could have been an artist from New York or Paris. He was a warm person, it didn’t take him long to feel comfortable with me.
“Do I look all right?” he chattered on in his Petersburg accent. “I’m very nervous about all this. My film is showing at this festival! And I’m here in the United States! I never thought I’d ever come here! I wonder how it will be received. My son has seen my film and likes it. My wife is traveling in the United States too right now. She’s a critic, invited by some university conference in Texas.” Max was married, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t gay or bisexual, from what I knew of gay culture everywhere.
In San Francisco that night we were expected to attend the festival gala at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. As we walked from the Marriott, we talked excitedly like old friends, about the great Russian filmmakers Tarkovsky and Paradjanov, about St. Petersburg and where Max lived on the grand Nevsky Prospect, and other Russian subjects. Then I asked him pointblank, “Max, are you gay?”
He looked at me wide-eyed.
“Sorry,” I said, “but you know people will be wondering. You’re at a gay film festival, so it’ll probably come up. Just preparing you.”
“Sonyechka”—Max was already using an endearment for me—“I don’t know what to tell you. I’m married, you know, and we don’t talk about this in Russia. It’s all new to me.”
I said I understood—I’d been to Russia, “Maybe you’d like to say you’re bisexual?” I was feeling silly. What did it matter, and why should I challenge his discreetness just because we were in America?
He flung up his hands, “I’ll leave it up to you. I don’t know what to do.” Then, after a pause, “Oh, go ahead and say I’m gay.”
Max told me he had a boyfriend he saw regularly, who was also married and had two children. I tried to picture Max’s wife. When I asked what she thought of his gay relationship, he said, “We don’t really talk about it. She goes about her life and I mine. She guesses, but we never talked about it.”
Adam, the main character in his film, is married and discovers an interest in men. Max raised his thick eyebrows and flung his hands up again. “I wanted to show the general public that homosexuals are regular people, that’s all—that they are not perverts.”
After many intriguing stories, experiences, and interviews in St. Petersburg, Yekaterinburg, Novosibirsk, Tomsk, the Crimea and other places, I was back in Moscow standing in line with my friend Ksiusha (who’d taken me to the dacha) at Primyera, a popular discotheque. A round babushka with gray hair pulled back in a bun collected the 20,000 rubles cover charge, about $6.50 but quite a bit for a Russian at the time. I paid Ksiusha’s way. Many more men than women were expected. Only a few people were there when we arrived at eleven p.m. The real fun would begin at midnight.
Metal tables with white tablecloths surrounded a large wooden dance floor and a raised platform to one side. Multicolored lights spun and flickered around the room. People sat in groups quietly drinking, not saying much to each other, serious, not smiling or flirting, waiting, perhaps, for the crowd to swell.
Prince, Madonna, and other good disco blared through the speakers. Three women sitting at a nearby table got up and playfully coaxed us to the dance floor. Shimmying up to me, a tall long-haired woman in a striped miniskirt and black tights danced around me like a go-go girl. Ksiusha nodded at me in approval and danced with the other two women, one revealing the top half of her voluptuous bosom. The dance ended, the women waved to us and moved back to their table. Where was the eye contact? I wanted to learn the signals, but I felt my obvious American look prevented me from fitting in.
A few minutes later, I leaned over to Ksiusha and asked if she thought there were a lot of heteros at the disco. She said, “Oh sure, there are all kinds of people here, but it’s fine. They’re not hurting anyone.” I watched two male-female couples in leather, switching partners in all kinds of combinations. Apparently there was a freedom, a looseness, a letting-go they enjoyed among us.