In the United States, we have a need to define our sexuality as part of a political struggle for our rights. The fight for women’s rights and the black civil rights movement gave birth to a lesbian and gay movement. In my youth, U.S. lesbians, gays, bisexuals, and transgendered people established their identities as a way to embrace their orientations and genders. This need changed as our rights and lives became more secure. Having a sexual identity was a strange concept to the Russians I interviewed in the 1990s. One woman I met, the partner of an open lesbian activist, told me she was offended when someone asked her about her sexuality: ”It’s a very personal question.”
The gender question came up quite often in interviews. Another Russian friend told me she felt that she was a he but did not want to leave the safe lap of the lesbian world. Being considered a man who was responsible for women’s oppression was not something she could imagine for herself. She often got pounding headaches from being a woman in the world, physically ill, yet she did not go through gender reassignment. The thought of being a man—the source of the oppression of women, the idea of becoming a burly macho homophobic jerk did not interest her, as she said. The world was so complicated.
In Russia, the words “homosexual” and “lesbian” were associated with prison life and had a criminal aura. Public attitudes began to change in the 1990s with more access to news from the West and more discussion of sexual minorities in the media. Falling in love was not about gender, a few interviewees said, but on the other hand some wanted to pass as male in order to be in a relationship. Were the secondary status of women and the obvious opportunities for men driving forces for them? Was a change in gender a way to pass in society, that is, a way to have same sex relationships? The transgender issue is very complex in Russia and has its own history. If I learned anything from Russian gays and lesbians, it was how deeply sexuality was situated in the context of a culture. It was not something you could generalize about across cultures.
I am back in Novosibirsk, at its one and only lesbian bar, on the banks of the Ob River. Teresa, the owner, greets me warmly and asks me to say a few words about my book of interviews, Pink Flamingos, which has just been published. I present her with a big rainbow flag I’ve brought for her to hang in her bar, a major meeting place for lesbians in Novosibirsk by now.
“Someone wants to talk to you,” Teresa says, pointing down the counter to a woman drinking a beer. It’s Sveta, whom I haven’t seen since I interviewed her eight years earlier. I’d tried to remain in contact, but she was nowhere to be found.
She looks at me almost angrily as I greet her. The old warmth and playfulness are not there. Sveta brings up the interviews and my publishing the book. I assure her I did not use her name or even that she was from Novosibirsk, as we agreed in the last communication. Like a rejected lover, I am sad that she’s so hostile. I go back to my friends, and we dance and have a good time. I catch Sveta staring at me from the bar from time to time.
The place is packed with women, loud music pounding through our bodies, smoke hanging heavily. Teresa quiets everyone to make an announcement from the stage. She introduces me and holds up my book. “Here is our American friend Sonja Franeta! And here is Pink Flamingos. She has given us this rainbow flag for our Novosibirsk Club,” Teresa says, unfurling the flag. People clap and cheer and go on drinking. I notice Sveta still staring at me from the bar as I say something about the book to the crowd in Russian.
When I pass near her again later, she is in an animated discussion with another butch at the counter. She looks away to avoid contact, aware of all that is going on around her. I want to thank her for being part of the book and just connect. I go up to her in my direct American way, and she turns away from her friends to listen. I ask how she’d been doing and we exchange small talk.
A story she told me during our interview about passing as a man flashes through my mind. She was working in an auto shop and would wear a T-shirt to conceal her bound breasts, small to begin with. The men in the shop where she worked would take off their dirty T-shirts in the heat of summer and bluster about. She worried about the pressure to take hers off but never did. That was eight years ago.
“We lived as man and wife for three years,” Sveta said proudly then. She loved being married to Elena. “Everything was normal” between them—that is—in the privacy of their home, they were two women living together. They did not pass as male and female in their home, they were a lesbian couple.
A couple of years after our encounter in that bar and not far from it, Sveta was killed in a fight over a femme. It was a cold winter night, and there was some sort of gathering at this femme’s house. She had two suitors, Sveta and Fila. Fila wanted Sveta to come outside and fight over the girl. Sveta didn’t want any part of it. Fila was twenty five and almost ten years younger than Sveta. When the party was ending, Sveta left with a couple of other friends; other women accompanied Fila to the street in a kind of gang arrangement. Fila picked a fight. Sveta threw her down and punched her. Then Fila took out a knife and jabbed Sveta in the stomach. Sveta rolled over, and Fila ran off. Apparently she hit an artery, for even though the ambulance arrived soon after, Sveta died on the way to the hospital. My friend Lena told me this story and she got it from a someone who was present. There was a trial, and Fila was sentenced to prison for about ten years. All this, over a girl! Lesbians acting like men? Like in the movies? Lives ruined?
Of course, Sveta’s mother and friends were heartbroken. I was heartbroken upon hearing this terrible story. I think of her smiling face and her fascination with meeting an American lesbian writer for an interview, and then her scowling resistance to being in print. It was a sad end. Sveta’s story is not only a part of our queer collective history but a revelation of how homophobia can twist and extinguish a beautiful desire.
The lesbian bar was closed soon after, because of this and other brawls. Teresa was tired of the problems. She knew Sveta and the others personally and didn’t want more women to be hurt.
Amazon Sisters on the Trans-Siberian Railroad
A lifelong dream of mine was to travel across Russia on the Trans-Siberian Railroad. My sense of romance, my Slavic heritage, my studies in Russian literature, my left leanings—all pointed me in that direction. I yearned to cross one of the most enigmatic countries in the world and experience its expanse firsthand.
In the summer of 1991, I was lucky to have been a delegate at the Gay and Lesbian Symposium and Film Festival in Moscow and St. Petersburg, a first for Russia. Home in San Francisco I returned with phone numbers and invitations to return to Russia for another visit.
I wrote about my Trans-Siberia idea to Asya and Lena, whom I had met at the festival. They had traversed half the country from Novosibirsk in Central Siberia, and were stars at the symposium, which had turned into a coming out event. Being from another city, they felt more comfortable speaking to the press and posing for photographers at the kiss-in. Back home they continued giving interviews to the press, and they set up a post office box for queers wanting to correspond with each other. They were enthusiastic about their fledgling activism.
I called Asya and Lena before I left San Francisco. I had decided to fly to Khabarovsk and start at the eastern end of enormous Russia, make a stop in Novosibirsk, then continue on to Moscow. Lena’s mother answered the phone in Novosibirsk and told me her daughter was not home, adding, “The girls (dyevushki) are planning to meet you in Khabarovsk and travel back here with you.” I was stunned.