The Best American Magazine Writing 2015

by The American Society of Magazine Editors

  And in October, the Duma started to take up a law to remove children from LGBT parents in Russia. It’s been put on hold, but it’s expected to return once the Olympics and international scrutiny have passed.

  “The problem is bigger than laws,” a gay activist named Igor Iasine told me, tracing a line through his beard where neo-Nazis had broken his jaw. “The law is icing on the cake.”

  For Dmitry Kiselyov, the director of Russia’s massive new state media corporation—created in December to swallow up state media entities that show any hint of autonomy—laws are not enough. He’s concerned about organ donors, the possibility of a queer heart beating in a straight body.

  When homosexuals die, he says, “their hearts should be burned.”

  “I haven’t heard of these laws, but I think it’s fine,” a kid named Kirill tells me at a hidden gay club called Secrets. “We don’t need gay pride here. Why do we need to show our orientation?” He shrugs. He has heard of the torture videos popular online, the gangs that kidnap gays, the police that arrest gays, the babushkas with their eggs and their stones. But he hasn’t seen them. He prefers not to. “Everybody wants to emigrate, but not me.” He shrugs again; it’s like a tic. “I love Russia. This is their experience, not mine.” He says he does not know what the word closet means.

  “Something Is Coming”

  In an upper-middle-class neighborhood close to Moscow’s city center, two apartments face each other. Two families, two daughters. They leave the doors open to allow easy access from one to the other.

  Pavel met Irina not long after he moved to Moscow twelve years ago, and almost immediately he knew that someday he’d start a family with her.1 Irina felt it, too. They agreed on it one night over vodka, after a night of clubbing. The party had moved back to an apartment, where they kept drinking, Irina teasing Pavel, Pavel marveling at Irina’s bold friends. She was a Muscovite; Pavel had come from one of those distant eastern cities, 4,000 miles from Moscow. Irina was six years younger, but she was his teacher, teaching him how to be silly and modern and free. They drank and danced, Pavel discovering his hips, until they both collapsed around a kitchen table and, over more vodka, Pavel tried to be funny and Irina thought he was, so she said, “Someday I would like to have a child with you.” Pavel said, “I feel the same.”

  Suddenly they were sober, giddy but clear: They knew it was true. But they had to wait. To have children is a great responsibility, Pavel thought. You have to have a place to live. You have to earn. You have to have a partner you can rely on. In 2010, they were ready. Their best friends, Nik and Zoya, were having a baby, too, and they lived right next door. Their children would grow up together. Two little girls: Nik and Zoya’s Kristina, and then Pavel and Irina’s Emma.

  Now they are one big happy family, inseparable. Pavel has always been great with kids. He likes to read the girls Russian fairy tales, and he buys DVDs of old Russian cartoons, the ones he was raised on. They watch them together. The girls toddle between the apartments through the open doors. Pavel thinks little blonde Kristina looks like an angel. Emma’s darker, serious like her father. Both girls call him Papa. The children share a nanny, too, who helps the parents with light cleaning, dishes, and dusting, making sure all the family pictures are in place.

  “Nobody would suspect us,” Pavel says. Not even the nanny.

  Pavel’s secret isn’t that he’s gay. It’s that they all are, the adults: Pavel and Nik and Irina and Zoya. Both girls have two mothers, two fathers; they have beds in both apartments. Their life together was, until recently, the fulfillment of all that Pavel had wanted, an ambition that had come to him at almost the same moment he’d realized he was gay: to be “normal.” If he were normal, he thought, then he could be a father. “That,” he tells me, “has been my precious dream.”

  Pavel agrees to talk to me because soon, he fears, the laws that have passed and the laws to come may make it impossible to hide. I’m told to meet him at a metro station. When I arrive—with my translator, Zhenya, a gay activist—no one is there. A phone call from a mutual friend directs us through the empty station, around a corner, and down some stairs to a basement restaurant, Georgian cuisine, a man in a corner with a bottle of white wine. Is this—? Yes. He smiles. We sit down.

  “Something is coming,” says Pavel. What it will be, he’s not sure. He’s worried about “special departments” in local police stations, dedicated to removing children from gay homes. He’s worried about a coworker discovering him. He is worried about blackmail. He is worried, and he does not know what else to do. He wishes he could fight, but he doesn’t know how. Sign a petition? March in a parade? Pavel would never do that now. “My children,” he murmurs.

  “This law,” he says, referring to the ban on “propaganda.” “If something happens, it touches only me. And I can protect myself.” But the next law: “This is about my child. My baby.” If the next law passes, they will leave. The two women are doctors and Nik works in higher education, careers that will require new certification. Which means that only Pavel, a manager for the state oil company, will be able to work right away. They will be poor, but they will leave. They might have to separate, Pavel and Irina and Emma to Israel, where Irina can become a citizen, Nik and Zoya and Kristina to any country that will take them. They might have to become the couples they pretend to be. For now, they are staying. “We’re going to teach them,” he says of his two little girls, Emma and Kristina. “How to protect themselves. How to keep silence.”

  This is how the law really works: It’s the little things that break first. Like a child who wants to call her father Papa. “Father can be only one,” Pavel tells Kristina. She can never call him Papa again. If someone overheard her … No, not even at home. She must forget that was ever his name. “I can be anybody but Father,” he tells the girl he used to call daughter.

  A Dangerous Pride

  In 2006, an activist named Nikolai Alekseyev organized Russia’s first pride parade. Moscow’s mayor forbade it; he called for “concrete measures” to stop it. On May 27, Alekseyev and a few comrades approached Russia’s Tomb of the Unknown Soldier with flowers. The tomb is a memorial to the millions of Soviet troops killed in what Russians call the “war against fascism.”

  The little group found the gate closed. Before it stood a line of police and squads of the OMON, elite riot cops in boots and blue camo and black berets. And a crowd, chanting, “Russia without faggots!” One man, in a fit of apparent generosity, screamed, “You have your nightclubs!” Another began shouting about his grandfather, who had fought in the war. Alekseyev shouted back that his own grandfather died fighting. Then the police arrested Alekseyev, and the crowd took the others, and the Tomb was preserved, safe from gay roses.

  In 2007, about three dozen pride marchers tried to deliver a letter signed by more than forty members of the European Parliament to the mayor of Moscow, asking for permission to hold the parade. The mayor called it a “work of Satan.” Among those beaten was an Italian parliamentarian.

  In 2008, activists applied to hold marches across the city, all denied, and then assembled as a flash mob for moments in front of a statue of Tchaikovsky.

  They tried the same trick in 2009, but the police were ready.

  2010: Success! Thirty marchers marched for ten minutes before they were captured.

  2011: Three minutes, maybe four.

  2012: Moscow officially banned gay-pride parades for one hundred years.

  Last year: The police were waiting. They brought trucks fitted with metal cages.

  At Bunker one night, a fat man named Yuri, pink-cheeked and furry-chested, leans in close, over my notebook. Not threatening; frightened. “No more parades!” he says. “No more marches!” Yes, he would like to have rights. “But this is Russia!” He’s shaking an open palm on either side of my face, making sure I write this down: “I will be beaten!” He points to a teenager. “He will be beaten. All of us will be beaten! And we will go to the police, and they will just smil
e.”

  Elena Kostyuchenko knew she would be beaten. It was how hard she went down that surprised her. Not immediately. When the fist connected with her skull, she fell, yes, but then she stood again and raised her rainbow flag. The crowd was silent. Their mouths were open as if screaming, but there was no sound. Her hearing was gone. Then the police grabbed her, and Elena’s first gay-pride parade was over.

  Elena is twenty-seven. “I’m not very tall; I weigh fifty kilos. I can’t overthrow this world,” she says. But she is trying. It took months, hospitalizations, five medications “to widen the veins in my brain,” but most of her hearing is back now, and there’s an app on her computer that allows her to jack movies up to 150 percent of what you might consider tolerable volume. She wears her hair in a short black shag with high spiky bangs, and she has big pale blue eyes that lighten in to the pupils. Her voice is droll, her manner deadpan, her presence at first unassuming; I talked to her for a couple of hours before I learned how much violence she’s endured since that first pride event in 2011, and she never did get around to telling me that when she was nine she was given up for dead, warehoused in a cancer ward for kids her provincial hospital deemed “unlikely” to survive.

  She and Zhenya and I meet at a dull little café near her metro station. Grayish pink walls, two TV screens playing Western pop videos from the eighties and nineties—there’s a lot of Wham!—and a fluorescent-lit smog of cigarette smoke. Elena’s a reporter, hard-nosed. “Prostitutes, addicts, these are my people,” she says. She has fainting spells, but she wills herself to keep standing: “A journalist shouldn’t faint.” In the nine years she’s been working for her paper, Novaya Gazeta—the last major opposition publication—three of its reporters have been murdered, including Anna Politkovskaya, shot four times in her apartment elevator in 2006, the killer still unknown. “I’m lucky,” Elena says. She means alive.

  She knows some English, but she speaks mostly in Russian. Explaining her view of Russia’s rising homophobia, she dictates to Zhenya: “Putin needs external enemies and internal enemies. The external enemies are the U.S. and Europe. Internal enemies, they had to think about. The ethnic topic is dangerous. Two wars in the Caucasus, a third one, nobody knows how it would end. Jews? After Hitler, it’s not kosher. We—” she waves a hand at herself and Zhenya—“are the ideal. We are everywhere. We don’t look different, but we are.” She inhales. She’s one of those smokers who hold your eyes when they’re smoking. Cigarettes disappear into her lungs. She says, in English: “It’s our turn. Just our turn.” She exhales. She has a pleasant smile.

  She met her girlfriend four and a half years ago, at a lesbian movie night in a club. The movie was Lost and Delirious, translated into Russian as They’re Not Gonna Get You. Mischa Barton, prep-school lesbians. They both thought it was a little childish. Elena liked Anya’s seriousness and her broad grin; she liked her earnestness and her calm. Their love was quick and deep and strong. Soon Elena was thinking about a home together. “Then I was thinking, ‘I have health issues. I’m hospitalized once in a while. I can be unconscious—who will come and make medical decisions for me?’ Then, at one moment, I realize Anya is the one I want to have my children with.” That’s when she got scared. “Before that, I didn’t feel like I was discriminated against. Then Anya appeared.”

  She’d reported on pride events in 2009. She found it pitiful: a handful of queers. “Why does nobody want to defend my rights?” she’d ask. “Why does nobody want to fight for my happy future?”

  The morning of the pride demonstrations in 2011, Elena wrote a post on her blog that would, in the days that followed, go viral. It was very simple: “Why I Am Going to Gay Pride.” She was going for Anya. They would wear silly T-shirts—i love her, with arrows. Elena made a sign that said hate is boring. She put on a black raincoat, Anya an olive green one, to hide their shirts until they got there. “I was scared that at the moment I wouldn’t be able to unzip my raincoat, that people would somehow feel we were lesbians, that we would be beaten before raising the flag.”

  There is video of the man attacking Elena. His name is Roman Lisunov. Not an activist—a family man. “Just a simple Russian guy,” as homophobes here like to say. Elena’s flag flickers, and then hurtling from behind comes Lisunov’s fist, taking Elena’s skull flat across his knuckles, just above her left ear. In his defense, he will tell the police that he is baptized. That’s it. Good enough! The detective assigned to the case will ask her lawyer, “Why would she go to the street? What protection does she want now?”

  They caught Anya on the metro. “They know our faces really well,” says Elena. They know all the activists. “They know Anya is my girlfriend.” Three surrounded her on the escalator going down. One put Anya in a headlock to hold her still, then smashed his fist up into her face once, twice, three times, four, five. Anya counted.

  This was after a kiss-in protest at the Duma last winter. It wasn’t like they hadn’t been warned. Some neo-Nazis had posted instructions online: “The guys, we beat them until they can’t stand up anymore. The women, we break their faces.” But the men in the metro weren’t Nazis. Their leader seemed to be a man named Dmitry Enteo, a one-man would-be Pussy Riot of the right who leads an “action art” group called God’s Will, linked to the Russian Orthodox Church. Like performance art, Enteo will tell me later, only, you know, more real. He’s kind of a hipster.

  The kiss-ins were Elena’s idea. She’d been complaining to a friend. “I am tired of standing there with a poster,” she said. Well, said her friend, what would you rather be doing? Easy question! “Kissing Anya.”

  Announcing the event on her blog, she wrote: “A kiss only concerns two people.… It does not need permission from deputies of the Duma.” And: “How long should you kiss? However long you like.”

  Anyone was invited to join them. “I don’t like being an activist,” she says. But what choice does she have? “It’s a long time until there will be some kind of magical Russian Harvey Milk who will defend my rights. I have been waiting, but he is not coming.”

  The LGBT movement splits along two philosophical lines, she says. “One of them says we need to work through education and enlightenment. The other says we should stop trying to get everyone to like us. I respect the educational approach. It takes a lot of time. I don’t have so much time. We want to have children. I need my rights now.” Her demands are modest: marriage, kids, a mortgage. Also, if possible, she would like not to be murdered. She doesn’t want to be Harvey Milk: “Harvey Milk was killed!”

  “Take a plane,” her mother begs her. Emigrate. “Two hours, you will be in another world, where you will be loved and needed.” But Elena can’t leave. So now her mother calls her after every action. “Are you in a police van?” she asks. “If I say yes, she says, ‘Thank God.’” Better a jailed daughter than a dead one.

  The day of the fourth and last kiss-in, the day the law passed, June 2013, the haters tried a new weapon. It gives even Elena pause. She stubs out a cigarette, starts a fresh one, and begins to speak. Zhenya listens. “The homophobes …,” he says, starting his translation. Then he stops. “Zhenya?” I ask. Elena continues. Zhenya is nodding, but he says nothing. His face is flushing.

  He’s twenty-six, grew up in Vladivostok, was beaten, saw his straight friends beaten for trying to protect him. He became an exile at the first chance, living abroad for five years. He worked for a human-rights organization, writing reports on the escalating violence in Russia. It wasn’t enough. After the law passed, he came home. “To fight,” he says.

  “Zhenya?” I say again. He’s staring at the wall. Elena says, “He is crying.”

  He composes himself and continues the translation of the story that overwhelmed him. On the day of the last kiss-in, the mob tried something new. They brought their children. Action art. A mockery. A lesson. Not rocks; the children were their weapon. Who would hit a child? Adolescent boys, twelve, thirteen, moved in packs from activist to activist, one by one, throwing fi
sts, kicking. It was a day of beatings.

  It takes me a moment. “Their kids?”

  Elena smiles. “Yeah.”

  “We couldn’t fight them,” says Zhenya, finishing his translation. He moans and starts to shake. And that’s it; now he’s broken. Because everybody knows twelve-year-old boys can be real shits, these are the same fights they have with one another in the schoolyard, but the hope is that they’ll grow up, that their parents will teach them. The hope is always that it will get better.

  At a club called Ice, I befriend a long-necked hustler with bright green eyes, wearing a white NYPD cap. His name is Nikolai. He says he kissed his first boy at fourteen but that it took him until he was seventeen to realize he was gay. He was small in school and he fought often, but he was perhaps a little slow to grasp his social condition; he didn’t understand why other boys beat him. By the time he got it, he’d learned how to beat them. Such was his coming-out story.

  He was happy being gay, though. He liked knowing what he wanted. The problem was his mother. Gay she could handle, but she wanted grandkids. She made him a deal: an apartment in exchange for grandchildren. Plural. Minimum two.

  So Nikolai did what he had to do: “I married a woman. I am a father!” He beams. He has delivered the goods: a girl, one and a half years old; a boy, four months. His mother rewarded him with the apartment, and he came out to his wife.

  “I don’t think there is homophobia in Russia,” he says, “because I always carry a gun.”