Out of the Iron Closet: Inside New York’s Gay Russian Immigrant Community (2014)

Jonathan Epstein
Aug 24, 2017 · 10 min read
Dima (left) and Oleg (right) at home in Brighton Beach.

I meet Dima and Oleg in Brighton Beach — or more accurately, I meet Dima and Oleg on Brighton Beach. Having spent the last hour or so with my face pressed against a Q-train safety railing or a Chinese father’s inhospitable bosom, the sea-tinged air of Brooklyn’s southernmost point is like smelling salts to my sinuses, and I am rescued from the depths of MTA apathy: never mind that my four weeks of rooskee yizik barely qualify me to introduce myself — let alone conduct an interview — in this Slavic tongue; never mind that, after a near-infinite volley of e- mails in which I diligently conjugated my vowels with the formal “вы”, my “informants” still insist on meeting in a public space. Here I am, descending the steps of the Ocean Parkway station, throwing myself head-first into the Cyrillic neon signs of “Little Odessa” below — a sight that few of my NYU classmates will make the effort to see before graduation, but that’s their loss. I know the truth: eef I can make eet dere, I vill make eet anyvere.

I’ve done as much research as possible before we meet, an easy task considering the couple was recently profiled in such publications as The New Yorker and Buzzfeed. Oleg, formerly a prominent journalist for Moscow’s state-controlled Россия К arts & culture network, came out on Facebook in late August, 2013, in a post that declared, “Today, for me, is a time to be brave. Openly and honestly I want to tell you that I am gay…[and that] I am exactly the same person that you knew before, a journalist and a pianist, a faithful Christian convinced that God created and loves me for who I am. That [Russia] is not homophobic — this is false. That homosexuals have the same rights as everyone else — this is a lie. Let’s stop lying to each other, and, above all, stop lying to ourselves.” Two weeks later, Oleg’s employers chose not to renew his contract, though the language of the release document was forceful, less “letting-you-go” and more “get out”. Oleg tells me that his termination was “heartbreaking, but not unexpected. After [coming out], my whole life seemed to change overnight. Friends…people I had known for ten years or more…not even a ‘hello’ the next morning.” Seeking a reprieve from the stress in Moscow, Oleg and Dima, who had been clandestinely dating for six years, flew to New York and were married a few days later. They decided to immigrate to the states, and now assist other gay Russian expats in the relocation process.

While contemporary democratic societies continue to struggle with varying degrees of homophobia, Oleg’s ordeal would most certainly net him a hefty settlement fee in a Western court, but the Russia of 2014 is a far cry from Obama’s America or Cameron’s England. On June 30th, 2013, the State Duma ratified an amendment to the “Protection of Children from Information Harmful to Their Health and Development Law” which criminalizes any “propaganda” that seeks to normalize “non-traditional sexual relationships” to minors. Here, the terminology is left intentionally ambiguous: a “non-traditional sexual relationship” is anything from bestiality to homosexuality, while “propaganda” can be active protest to public hand- holding. This law has effectively silenced the voices of Russia’s gay community and its allies in an Orwellian attempt to erase homosexuality, both in notion and in practice, from society. It seems hard to fathom, but later in the evening, Dima is quick to demonstrate how deep this ideology goes. He presents me with a novel by Artur Solomonov. “This caused quite a stir in Russia,” he explains. “No one wanted to publish it. It’s about two men playing the leads in Romeo & Juliet. Look.” I follow his finger down the book’s cover, and there it is: kneega ni soderzheet viskazivanee, propagandeerooyooshneech gomoseksooaleezm, “this book does not contain statements that promote homosexuality”.

In some respects, this idea of “doublethinking the gay away”, or at least ignoring it to the point of non-existence, seems to be engrained in the Slavic identity. I had almost exhausted my connections to the Russian-speaking world — having solicited contacts from Moscovian friends (“Forgive me, but in this respect I have no connections whatsoever.”), strangers (“You’re really asking me about this on OKCupid?”), and professors (“…Let me ask around the department.”) — before discovering RUSA LGBT, an online MeetUps community that counts Oleg and Dima among its members. Perhaps Ilya, a Russian-American drook of mine, put it most provocatively: “Gay Russians? There is no such thing as a Gay Russian.”

Russia, in comparison to other countries of the 21st-century, is a sort of enigma on the spectrum of international isolation. Proud of its decidedly un-Westernized culture (as President Putin is quick to point out) yet simultaneously enmeshed in global trade with those same conspicuous “Others”, the Russia of 2014, though certainly not as isolated as the Russia of the Soviet Era, could vaguely appease Margaret Mead’s outdated parameters of a national character: a semi-hermetic culture in which “…every thought and movement [is] a product…[of] the society within which an individual [is] reared” (Mead III). Stepping down from the Ocean Parkway platform, I am shocked at just how stereotypically Russian the neighborhood is: there are tough guys in track suits; there are drugstores, aptekas, every ten steps; there are countless babushkas who can beat the shit out of me faster than you can say “borsch”. To make matters worse, Oleg and Dima have now instructed me to meet them on the beach, and it’s getting dark.

What does this mean? What have I gotten myself into? The same energy that had previously filled me with excitement is now suffocating me, and I consider hopping back on a Q-train bound for Manhattan. I have never felt so foreign and alone in New York! I do not speak this language! Oy, I must look so Jewish!

But it all makes sense once we get to the couple’s apartment. I present my hosts with a bottle of wine and take my shoes off at the door, trying my best to not be the ignorant American who shows up empty-handed and treks shmutz all over the floor. Dima invites me to make myself at home on the sofa while Oleg decides what to do about dinner, and I can’t help but notice the three books on the coffee table before me. Each is a photographic collection of naked men standing in iconic spaces in New York; some of the models are wrapped in rainbow flags, others are wrapped in Russian flags. “Please, do not be shy if these…interest you,” Oleg jokes from across the room.

I am being tested! Of course! They are not interested in my professional aspirations. They only want to know what my motives are, why I am interested in this topic. Am I truly a naive college-student, or am I an exploitive journalist who is feigning sympathy in order to get a story? Am I gay myself? They want to know if they can trust me, and from there they will decide whether or not to let me into their world. If, in a Meadian sense, the national character of the cultural Russian male is a well-defined heterosexual trope, one that has been sculpted by the hands of history and circumstance for centuries, then Oleg and Dima are outsiders themselves, forever viewed as “Others” in a Russian society. I, then, am a double-alien, an outsider to the outsiders, and I need to be let in. This does not need to be said. This is imponderable. “Oh yeah,” I reply. “These are very interesting.”

The art books themselves are fascinating, and not only because the models are hot. As someone who has never understood the adolescent rite-of-passage that is watching porn with friends, I am an overthinking moth to the sexually-charged object flame. There is a strange audacity created when the naked human body is presented to a public audience, an obscure atmosphere that is inextricably intertwined with questions of class and taste, and while I wonder what sort of persona Oleg and Dima are trying to project by displaying these books in their living room, I am hit by a new idea: the books are no longer solely objects of sexuality, but also small moments of rebellion. They are testaments, speaking to the trials, triumphs, and disappointments that Oleg and Dima have experienced as member’s of a very specific minority. In fact, everything in this apartment, from the novels that line the bookcase to the rainbow flag that hangs patriotically above the television, is an act of rebellion, a marriage of “form and function”, as Bronislaw Malinowski contends in his essay “The Functional Theory”, that leads “[a human being] to the satisfaction of some need…[that is] technically, legally, or ritually determined” (155). In this apartment, Malinowski’s tenants of Functionalism encompass not only biological and social purposes, but also purposes in the realm of the metaphysical, purposes that, while exotic at first, speak to the basic needs of a human being in a free-thinking society. If the feng shui of this space is a functionalist discussion, the topic being discussed is not “freedom from” but “freedom to”: Look at all of this freedom I have, scream the artful nude photographs. Look what I can do in my own home. Do not forget it.

As the evening progresses, Oleg and Dima, aided by a few glasses of wine and Turkish take-out which they graciously buy for me, continue to warm up to my presence. Though I still feel out of my league in certain regards — Oleg’s journalistic expertise is intimidating to my novice sensibilities — I, too, am opening up to my hosts, and this “interview” has quickly turned into a conversation.

With this new level of trust in mind, Dima shows me a front-page article from the most popular newspaper in his hometown of Saransk. The article, titled “Sodom i Eemora,” a play on the biblical story and the Russian word for “ridicule”, is a hateful, invasive piece of journalism covering Oleg and Dima’s marriage, drawing on the testimonies of neighbors and former teachers to express the “outrage” felt because of Dima’s homosexuality in contrast to his “public reputation” as a “cute, educated guy”. Dima, like Oleg, left his job as a psychologist in Moscow shortly after word of his marriage spread, and though he satirizes the Saransk piece now, the pain caused by this crisis remains a reality.

But it is Oleg’s lifelong relationship with Christianity that strikes me as the most paradoxical. Having grown up the only son of single, atheistic mother in Kazan, Oleg tells me that he found a sense of community and belonging in religion during his adolescence that, despite the Russian Orthodox Church’s vehemently anti-gay politics, created a place of respite from the alienation caused by his sexuality. “There were two rules,” he explains. “1. Do not masturbate, and 2. Do not have sex with a man. But when you are a teenager, and you begin to have sexual desires…what do you do? I would masturbate and then cry myself to sleep. It was terrible, but the church was…warm.”

Victor Turner outlines the standard progression of a social drama in “Social Dramas and Ritual Metaphors” as a movement from a liminal “breach” of understanding or sentiment, observed by the in-crisis individual, to a final “recognition” that brings the individual back into the realm of “structure”, where he or she may rely on social cues or the examples of his or her forerunners. For Oleg and Dima, Turner’s layout is useless. Their social drama begins normally, with a breach of liminal understanding that leads into the unknown of the unstructured world — that is, the self-recognition of homosexual leanings and perhaps the process of coming out — but from there, the tension of the drama never seems to deescalate to a point below the limen of anti-structure. Though Oleg and Dima have found recognition from within themselves, the same redress has not been achieved back in Moscow, where Oleg’s mother refuses to speak about Dima, or even in Brighton Beach, “Little Odessa”, where, Dima explains, “some people here are just like back home. They want nothing to do with us.”

But their status as Turnerian anomalies does not bother the couple any longer. “We had just gotten married [in the U.S.],” Dima tells me, “and, in the elevator, these people were so happy for us. Strangers! Congratulating the happy couple! It was unlike anything I had ever experienced, something that could never happen in Russia.” They have battled with their families and been ostracized by journalists, they have led tumultuous lives filled with ubiquitous social drama, but despite it all, Oleg and Dima have found order in each other. The “Sodom i Eemora” article mocks the couple for being “a head and a neck,” but in conversation, they are more like two halves of the same brain, bouncing witticisms off of each other, their chemistry so strong that I feel as though I can almost see it moving through the air.

Before I head back to Manhattan, I ask Oleg and Dima if I can take their picture. I’ve been eyeing a mirror in the north side of the apartment that, from a certain angle, eerily reflects the rainbow flag hanging from the adjacent wall, and it some ways, this image perfectly captures the duality of the couple’s lives: the constant battle between tradition, the reality of their home, and the future — seemingly unreachable but oh-so-close. I hug them goodbye and make my way back to the Ocean Parkway station, staring at this photo the whole way there, careful to not let any of Brighton Beach’s locals see the propaganda that I now carry on my phone.

— — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — —

Bibliography

Malinowski, Bronislaw. “General Axioms of Functionalism.” A Scientific Theory of Culture and

Other Essays. New York: Oxford U, 1960. Print.

Mead, Margaret. Coming of Age in Samoa. New York: Morrow, 1961. Print.

Turner, Victor. “Social Dramas and Ritual Metaphors,” in Richard Schechner, ed., Ritual, Play,and Performance. New York: Seabury, 1976. 97–120.

Unknown. “Sodom I Eemora.” Stolitsa S [Saransk] 29 Oct. 2013: Print.

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Jonathan Epstein
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