“It’s my fault that we broke up. If I could have been firm, strong, this wouldn’t have happened. She, she’s a soft, tender person. She needed a strong person, strong-willed, someone to lean on. And I myself am just a woman. I can’t give her what a man could give her. She wanted children. I don’t know, I can’t even explain what. I myself wasn’t missing anything with her.”
I asked how the man Elena was currently with came into the picture.
“I was in Novosibirsk looking for a job for a month, and while I was gone he showed up. He knew that Lena was by herself, he knew her from before, and he came to be with her. He thought I was a guy and when I left he came to be with her. They made up and started seeing each other.
“When I got back, I walked into the apartment and immediately knew a man was living there. When she came home, we didn’t fight, there were no explanations, we even smiled at each other. We left each other quietly. We separated as friends. It was of course very hard for me, but why put up a fight? We haven’t had any contact since then. She lives with him and I am here alone. I don’t think she will get rid of him. I consider myself a lesbian but she does not, she is just a straight woman, a heterosexual. She didn’t even have sex with a man before, I was her first sexual experience. It is natural that she would fall in love with me.”
Suddenly Sveta said she had to leave, and we parted. I wondered if the interview was just too emotional for her.
A month later I met with Sveta once again. We sat under a tree in the park at the center of Novosibirsk. She wore a different cap, this time with the bill forward. Natasha had come with her, but she sat with our friends on a park bench farther off.
Sveta still seemed shy. She handed me four photos and said they were the only ones she had of her ex-girlfriend. One photo especially struck me. It was their wedding day (it was basically illegal—they were faking a marriage), and they were sitting at a table. Sveta was smiling as her girlfriend planted a kiss on her cheek. If I hadn’t known otherwise, they were a typical young heterosexual couple.
In the photo, Sveta is sporting a tuxedo, a white shirt and a bow tie, smiling in delight. Her hair is shorter but has the same waves, the look unmistakably hers, a devilishness in pulling off the wedding. Her young wife—both of them in their early twenties—looks at her in admiration, her profile sharp but pretty. The black and white photo doesn’t reveal the color of her dress.
Sveta was more relaxed with me this time. I had decided to be bold in my interviews, but sometimes the questions were a little too much for the interviewees. When I asked her if she could tell me something about her and Elena’s sex life, she was taken aback and said it was too intimate a question, so I asked more about their life together and passing as a man.
“For me all this, my relationship with Elena and being interested in girls, was natural. Those feelings were not repressed or oppressive to me. I think about her a lot. We were very much in love. But we never talked about being lesbians. Everything was accepted the way it was. We lived like man and wife.
“The most difficult part about trying to make people think I was a man was being with the men. I had to be careful about using masculine endings in the first person all the time when I spoke about myself. And you know, you have to drink and smoke and act like them. I helped some guy fix a motorcycle once. They aren’t shy about themselves or with each other. They said all kinds of things to me, personal things. Of course, they didn’t know I was a girl. I remember it was hot once and all the men were taking off their shirts, but I couldn’t.
“And my mother, although she had guessed something like this was going on, when she learned about what I did, she thought it was awful. She saw my pictures. She thought I was playing a joke. And Elena—it was all her idea to live as man and woman so we could be together. We were together for three years, never apart.
“Anyway we had a wedding for her parents’ benefit too—there were a hundred people at her place in the village. We couldn’t be together if we were living as two women—we wouldn’t be considered a family, a couple. Her relatives gave us a double bed for our apartment. We loved each other a lot, everyone would have noticed if we lived as two girlfriends.
“Then, when I left to go see my mother after not seeing her for a long time and I went back to her again, I sensed that she was with a man. When she came home we just cried. She told me not to write, call, or come anymore. She probably misses me, but she’s with a man now. They can have children and a regular family. No one will say anything, she doesn’t have to hide. She still loves me, I think, she must be bisexual.
“I never wanted to be a man. I think transsexuals must be very unhappy people. But I think it’s actually easier to be a man than a woman in life.
“After my break with Elena it was so hard at first, but now I’ve gotten used to it. I don’t have a girlfriend now. I am alone and I have nothing to fear. I don’t even want to look for a girlfriend.
“The thing that has helped me all this time is my photography. It’s the only thing I love, it’s my lesbian life now. When I have a hard time I stay in my room, I develop some pictures or think of a new idea. I’m not always able to develop and print things because of costs, and I don’t have everything I need.
“I would love to photograph a beautiful woman. And do more photos on our tema [theme]. I thought of some still-life photos I could do—two glasses and two women reflected in the glasses, or cassettes with triangles on them, or a bed that had been slept in, with two pairs of women’s underwear flung on it.
“I’m frustrated that I can’t make large prints and show them to everyone. I’m always afraid my mother will see my work. I don’t want my mother to know about my lifestyle. I would be ashamed to look her in the face. She thinks I was just being bad when I went off with Lena, that I did it to be mischievous. She says I’ve always been that way. I don’t think it was a very good thing for me to live a lie like that and to fool all those people.”
I thanked her for talking with me again and gave her back the photos. She handed me the one I liked of her and her girlfriend at their wedding and said, “For you, a gift.” I shook my head and told her I couldn’t accept it knowing how she valued these few pictures of Elena, but in true Russian style she insisted, and I gratefully accepted.
We went out for ice cream afterward with our friends, to a cafe in central Novosibirsk popular with young people. Disco music blared in the background. Sveta wore her cap and walked with a butch swagger. Her light blue eyes sparkled as she mumbled, “Those people over there think I’m a guy.” She laughed and ate her ice cream, delighted at her little trick.
During perestroika Russians came out of a lifetime of intense repression. Sex had never been discussed publicly during the Stalin years and after. In the 1990s suddenly even pornography made a debut on a large scale. Deprived of information and a modern way of life, many gay Russians struggled to adopt Western attitudes toward sex wholesale, rather than evolve their own tradition. They loved the books and magazines and films we brought over, because they had not had the opportunity for more than sixty years to develop their own. That was why it seemed that queer culture was being imported. In fact, Russian queers did have a culture of their own, but it was secretive and hidden and coded. Even after perestroika, because of the strong influence of the church and the government, the new openly queer movement had to battle extreme homophobic attitudes.
I found the average person to be very private about his or her sexuality, but actually the privacy was a form of the intense secrecy people developed in the Soviet Union to keep themselves safe from the watchful eye of the ubiquitous state and a possible prison sentence. This was a real fear among gay people.