The Best American Magazine Writing 2015

by The American Society of Magazine Editors

The logic takes me a moment. He means they can’t hurt him, because he will hurt them first. His father, a “criminal,” he says, found Nikolai on a Grindr-like app once. He said he was coming to kill Nikolai. Nikolai wrote back: “I’m waiting for you.” His father never came. Nikolai is waiting. He taps one side of his head and then the other, to show the path of the bullet he’ll put through his father’s skull.

  “Violence Is Acceptable”

  There are three faces of homophobia in Russia: that of the state, that of the Orthodox Church, that of the fringe. And yet they’re one—a kind of Trinity. The state passes laws; the church blesses them; the fringe puts them into action. The state is the mind of hate, the church, now, its heart; the fringe is made up of its many hands. Some use the courts; some use fists. There are street fighters, and there are polished men and women who attend international conferences on “family values.”

  Timur Isaev uses cameras. He likes to watch.

  That’s how his activism began, he tells me one night in St. Petersburg. As young men, he and his friends liked to hunt and beat gays. “For fun,” he says. But then he became a father. Like many parents, he worried about the Internet. Late at night, he studied it. He watched YouTube. “Girls,” he says, “young girls, undressing themselves.” Using a special “tool for developers,” he says, he was able to discern that the other people watching these videos at two a.m. were homosexual men. “The analysis of their accounts,” he says, “showed that they also watched young boys.” That’s when Timur realized he must become an activist. For the children.

  Timur bought a video camera, a very good one. He began documenting LGBT life. At first, demonstrations; then he began idling outside activists’ offices, filming and photographing people coming and going. He showed me one of his galleries: dozens, maybe hundreds of faces. Some he has photographed himself, others he finds online. He is a great policeman of VK, Russia’s version of Facebook. These days he stays up late at night searching for homosexual teachers. It’s kind of his specialty.

  I’ve sought Timur out to confirm a story I’d been told the night before at LaSky, from a former schoolteacher named Olga Bakhaeva. She said she’d lost her job because Timur, posing as a concerned mother, had outed her.

  “Is Olga’s story true?” I ask Timur.

  “Yes!” he says, flattered. In fact, he is working on another teacher now. She’s going to be fired next week, he hopes. “We usually fire good shots—good informational shots,” he says. Olga was his sixth. He takes out his tablet to shows me the others. He loves social media. He poses for a picture, holding up a photograph of Olga he found online. It’s a trophy.

  How does he do it? He has connections. In my notebook he scribbles a list of names and numbers, a who’s who of right-wing St. Petersburg, including Vitaly Milonov, the author of the city’s antigay legislation. Timur makes calls when he senses something suspicious. Just last night he had another success. There was a support group for LGBT families. He’d been stalking it online. He had information that there would be a minor there. He’d arranged a raid.

  It was true. As it happens, I had been at that meeting. The police had been right outside the door, held at bay because they didn’t have the right warrant. Inside, there was a seventeen-year-old boy talking about coming out to his mother. For this, we all could have gone to prison.

  In America, I’d dismiss Timur as a crank. In Russia, he seems everywhere to be at the center of events. He scrolls through his photos to show me something special—LaSky, the site of Dmitry Chizhevsky’s shooting, with multiple views of the area outside. Timur says the gays did it to themselves. To make Russia look bad. See, he says, “thirteen surveillance cameras.” He has documented them. “Here,” he says, pointing to a picture, “there is a very good camera. You couldn’t have gone unnoticed.” He points to another. “Can’t get past this camera …” It is impossible, he says. “No sane person would go there with a gun. You would have to go there without a mask and put it on there.” Which is what happened. He knows how it could have been done: “I have blueprints of the building.”

  He moves on, showing more pictures. He slides the tablet across to me, reaching over and flicking through the images, talking about men “who are not worthy of the nationalist name. People like this …” He looks down at the tablet. It is not a picture of a person; it is a picture of an air gun, a pistol, still in the box, on top of it a jar of little metal balls. “Ah,” he says. He didn’t mean to show that one. I’m just as stunned. “A gift for my son,” he says quickly, searching for photographs of the boy. He wants to prove the innocence of the gun.

  Timur knows what I’m thinking. He says, “If I wanted to shoot someone, I would think of my safety first.” Proof, he claims, that he is not the man who shot Dmitry Chizhevsky in the eye. Too risky.

  Besides, says Timur, he is a peaceful man now. He giggles.

  At St. Petersburg’s biggest gay club, I meet a bartender in tight jean shorts and a skimpy turquoise tank top who whispers to me, “I’m not gay.” He pretends, for the job. In fact, he says, “I’m a homophobe.” He struggles not to hit his customers. But he wishes he could change. “I don’t want to hate anymore,” he says. He glances at a man who’s been giving him the eye. He shudders. “It’s not working.”

  We are walking down a long dark street on the outskirts of St. Petersburg on our way to a meeting Timur has arranged with Anatoly Artyukh—pronounced “R-2.” Artyukh is the big man in Timur’s circles, the founder of the St. Petersburg branch of Narodny Sobor—“People’s Council”—a national umbrella group for hundreds of organizations dedicated to preserving Russia’s “traditional values.” It accepts all kinds: skinheads, Cossacks, veterans, Orthodox crusaders, scary squadrons of angry mothers, and more than a few politicians—Artyukh himself is an “aide” to Vitaly Milonov.

  When we get to the backdoor apartment-block address we’ve been given, we’re taken into the basement, a rec room that is filling up for a meeting. On the agenda: developing “new tools” to defeat the homosexualists. A lot of old guys, sour with broad pickled faces. Some young guys in track pants; a couple of babushkas in leather. There’s a man dressed like a Cossack, like an extra from the big pogrom number in Fiddler on the Roof. One of the last to arrive is Artyukh, a gray-black widow’s-peaked buzz cut squaring off a face like Sean Connery plus fifty pounds. Leather jacket, shoulders padded, black suit beneath, black shirt unbuttoned to air out a few iron curls. He says this is a private club but he’ll receive us upstairs.

  Two floors up, Artyukh settles behind a giant desk. One of Artyukh’s lieutenants, exceedingly friendly despite the boss’s open hostility, directs us to our seats.

  Artyukh leans back, fat fingers knitted across his stomach. Over his right shoulder there’s the double-headed-eagle flag of czarist Russia; on his desk there’s a bouquet of four flags from the old Confederacy. “Gift from American friends,” he says. “We consider them brothers.” In fact, many of the People’s Council’s initiatives—including the “research” in which the antipropaganda law is rooted—are taken from the curdled theories of the American right. “When people read it, they are shocked! They understand the gays are not some harmless people.”

  Artyukh says he is afraid blood will be shed. That’s why he’s for the full criminalization of homosexuality: “to protect the people from being hurt. The homosexual people.” They have a choice: let the law walk them back into the closet, or war. He will accept either. “When there is war, you can see the enemy.”

  Violence is justified?

  “Yes, of course violence is acceptable.”

  “What about actions like Timur’s?” I mention the incident at LaSky. “You know about this?”

  He does a perfect Tony Soprano, that little pressed-lip half smile with a head nod. “Yes,” he says.

  “Was it the right way to fight?”

  Artyukh glances at his lieutenant and arches an eyebrow. “Timur is Muslim,” he says. “Muslim people are heated guys.�
� He thumps his chest. “Fire in their hearts. Cruel men.”

  He nods. He feels he has said it well. “I only pray for him not to cross the line of the law. I would not want to have to get him out of jail. But we support his activities.”

  “This confrontation,” I say, referring to the shooting, “is that crossing the line?”

  “It is,” says Artyukh. But only slightly. “If the government doesn’t act, other methods will be used. There are going to be fists, and then there are going to be shots.”

  The last man we talk to that night is the Cossack. Or rather, we listen. Artyukh’s lieutenant fetches him for us. He’s a big man with sallow eyes and a mighty mustache, his head shaved on the sides and a sweep of black hair falling over his shoulders in a style traditional to Cossacks for hundreds of years before Canadians invented the mullet. His uniform is black with red piping, cinched at the cuffs and above his big black boots.

  “Homosexualism is a war against Cossacks,” he tells us. So by rights homosexuals should be slaughtered. He recounts some of the ways Cossacks murder homosexuals. Historically speaking. “Of course, I cannot say this officially.” He cracks his first smile. “Cossacks,” he says, “are known for their humor.” For instance, gay men “like to put their cocks in the ass, so we put the shit on their cocks for them.” In fact, he says, sometimes they hold a man down and smear shit over his whole body. He chortles, waits for me to laugh. Do I not think this is funny?

  “Tell me about your outfit,” I say brightly. He shows me his whip, weighted with a sharp lead block. He puts its thick wooden grip in my hand. “Feel,” he says. He unsheathes a wide black blade as long as my forearm. He says nothing about the handgun at his side.

  “What kind of gun is that?” I ask.

  “A good one,” he says. He releases the clip to show me it’s loaded. He pushes the clip back in. He points the gun at me. Very casual. Just in my direction. Cossack humor. Do I not think this is funny? I lift my notebook off the table. It’s time to go. He reaches across and thumps it down. “Pishi,” he says. “Write.”

  The Future, Vandalized

  In Russia, things are not falling apart, they’re coming together, isolated attacks developing into a pattern, the id of the street ever more in line with the Kremlin’s growing ego. My last day in Russia began with the news that Cossacks had vandalized two theaters in the night, neither of them gay but guilty of showing plays with homosexual characters. One got graffiti; the other got a bloody pig’s head at its door. Humor. Russia’s first queer film festival was to open that night—Gus Van Sant was coming to show Milk—but it was shut down by a bomb threat. In the afternoon, Artyukh just happened to be having a coffee at a café next to the theater. He got into an argument with a gay activist. Artyukh ripped out the man’s earring.

  By then I was with Timur again, pressing him about the picture of the gun and about Artyukh’s words. Were they true? Was he a “heated man”? Timur was furious. He called Artyukh and put him on speaker phone. Artyukh declared Timur innocent. He declared me a liar. He said he had never heard of the attack at LaSky. Timur grew angrier. What right did I have to dispute him? “Whoever did this”—shooting Dmitry—“it’s not your place to judge!” He said I was a guest in his country; he said I have no rights. A warning. My flight was midmorning, but I left and went back to my hotel and packed and went to the airport. It was four a.m.

  I tried not to think about Timur. Instead, I thought about a boy I’ll call Peter. He’s eight years old, the son of a lesbian activist, Sasha, and her partner, Ksenia. I’d met Sasha at the LGBT organization where she worked. Peter was watching a cartoon, waiting for his mother. He invited me home with them. Peter’s skinny and pale, with rosy lips and big bright eyes, and he does not like to stop moving. As we walked, he bounced back and forth between us, a game he called “white blood cell.”

  He was born HIV-positive. He’s healthy, but when Sasha met him, volunteering at an orphanage, he weighed half as much as a three-and-a-half-year-old boy should, and his hair was falling out. The only word he knew was Russian for “Don’t do that.” The nurses told Sasha not to touch him. Not because of the HIV. It was love they were concerned with. If he received any, he’d want more, and none would be forthcoming. He was aging out of the ward, and now they were going to send him to another one, more hopeless still, where he would be thrown in with lost causes of all ages. And there he would remain, as long as he remained.

  So Sasha took him. She lied to the orphanage, claimed she was single, and took him home to Ksenia, and they hugged him and told him they would love him, even though they didn’t know him. Six months later, he said the second word of his life: his name. He has a name. It breaks my heart that I can’t tell it to you.

  My last day, in between the pig’s head and the bomb threat, I met Sasha and Peter at the park, where Sasha told me about growing up in a city without a name, one of the Soviet Union’s secret closed military cities, left off the map and known only by a number. Sasha is built like an elf, with freckles and red hair pulled back in a ponytail. She was a shy and dutiful girl until she saw Ksenia on the day of her college exams. They marveled over each other. Neither of them knew what to call this feeling. They had never heard of lesbians. Literally—they did not know the word. When they kissed, Sasha wondered if they were inventing something new and wonderful. They knew they could tell no one.

  But Sasha’s mother confronted her one night. “What do you have with this girl?” Sasha, who had never defied her parents, who had never defied anyone, was speechless for a moment. She had no words. Then she found one. “Everything.”

  Peter knows his mothers are lesbians. What he does not know is that people hate them. Soon, says Sasha, they will have to tell him. Maybe sooner than they had planned. One law has passed; another is coming. They are thinking about Finland, so they can stay close to Russia. They are thinking about Russia, and about how they don’t want to leave.

  Peter is thinking about faraway places. Over dinner, he asks me if I’ll send him a card from America. I can do better than that—how about a present? “Yes!” he says. He knows what he wants. He asks if he can borrow my notebook. He’ll draw it for me.

  It’s an airplane. A big one, so there’s room for his whole family. Everyone who loves him, he says happily, drawing the wings.

  1. The names in this section have been changed.

  The Atavist

  WINNER—FEATURE WRITING

  “Love and Ruin” is, according to the Ellie judges, “an astonishing profile of a woman who played a remarkable role in preserving the archaeological legacy of Afghanistan,” written in prose that is “both restrained and beautiful.” This is also the first story published by a digital-only publication to win the National Magazine Award for Feature Writing. Another 2014 piece by James Verini, National Geographic’s “Should the United Nations Wage War to Keep Peace?”—about the conflict in the Democratic Republic of Congo—won the sixty-sixth annual George Polk Award for Magazine Reporting. A media and software company founded in 2009, The Atavist has earned eight Ellie nominations in the last four years.

  James Verini

  Love and Ruin

  Prologue

  It has no official number in the archaeological record, nor an agreed-upon name. Some curators at the National Museum of Afghanistan in Kabul, where it resides, have called it the Limestone Head. Others call it the Carved Pebble. Still others call it simply the Head, and while there is no question that the artifact they’re talking about depicts a head, the answer to the question of just whose head it depicts—which person or deity its unyielding eyes and screwed mouth reflect—is lost, like so much else in Afghanistan is lost, to some insolently mute vault of time.

  The Head is carved into a limestone pebble two and a half inches high by one and a quarter inches wide. It dates from around 10,000 BCE, placing it in the Upper Paleolithic and making it one of the oldest pieces of sculpture ever found on the Asian continent. We know that it turned up in a gorge
near the village of Aq Kupruk, in the northern foothills of the Hindu Kush. Beyond that we know nothing. The best that the most thorough scholarly paper written about the Head—published by the American Philosophical Society in 1972, seven years after it was discovered—can say for its subject is that it is “apparently humanoid.” Was it devotional, decorative, whimsical? “Was the head made for a onetime limited use or was it intended for long-term retention and repeated use? … Since it will not stand, was it intended to be carried about?” The Head won’t say.

  But its dumbness beckons. The Head’s sculptor was far cleverer than an artist living 12,000 years ago had any call to be. The eyes are not crude circles (all you’d really need in the Upper Paleolithic, you’d think), but composed of a series of subtle line strokes, as though they are contemplating us wearily. The nose, the American Philosophical Society paper observes, “begins with a wide angular cleft rather like that of the nose cavity in a skull and seems almost to be intentionally ‘unrealistic,’” while the “deeply engraved line of the mouth itself apparently arcs upward in what seems to be a smile.” The paper concludes that the Head does not come from an “individual or cultural ‘infantilism.’” Yet the overall effect, millennia later, is a kind of infancy. It’s somehow fetal looking, the Head. Some observers see on its face a smile, others a frown, and still others that inscrutable expression, neither frown nor smile, that a wise child makes when he peers into you.

  The archaeologist who unearthed the Head, who might have had the most questions about it, had the fewest. Louis Dupree was certain it depicted a woman—and, furthermore, that it had been carved by one. “What else?” Dupree said to a New York Times reporter, rather tauntingly, in 1968, when he brought the relic to the American Museum of Natural History. “Women ruled the hearth and the world then. The men were away hunting.” Of course it was a woman.