Even if the choice seemed inevitable to me, most of my queer friends have stayed.
Maria Sokolova and Yana Mandrykina are partners with different views of the experience of being queer in Russia.Maria Sokolova and Yana Mandrykina are partners with different views of the experience of being queer in Russia.March, a member of the Russian senate asked the prosecutor general to look into the issue of yoga in pretrial detention. Yoga classes, organized on the recommendation of human-rights activists, had been offered to a limited number of inmates since September.
Most of the people I interviewed for this article have been talking about emigrating for a long time. There was a point, in 2013–14—as Putin’s political crackdown intensified, the Kremlin’s antigay campaign revved up, Russia invaded Ukraine, and the Russian economy crashed—when all of them were looking for ways to at least secure the option of moving abroad: a second passport, a residence permit in another country.
to have it shut down. For fear of having him find out that they are a couple, the women have hired a nanny from the Philippines. “She doesn’t speak Russian,” Katya explained, “so she is not going to hang out and chat with other nannies on the block. For the same reason, we are not going to send our daughter to the state preschool on the block—we are going to a private preschool farther from the house.
That anticipation has pushed the couple back in the closet. This past year, after Katya read that vigilante gangs were tracking down gay people by following them on social media, Katya quit all of her accounts and, she said, “forbade Nina” to be out in publicly available posts. Nina is out at her job as a television executive, but Katya, who is a high-powered tax attorney in the Moscow office of a multinational company, is closeted at work. “The office is full of homophobes,” she said.
“In my field, I’d have to descend three rungs down the career ladder,” Katya added. “And it’s scary to go into uncertainty. There is really only one reason: it’s scary.” “Everyone knows that Peter has children,” Marina said. “But I don’t have children. I don’t have children as far as my colleagues are concerned, and my extended family, and the playground. As soon as other parents hear the child address me by my name, they lose interest in talking to me because they assume that I’m the nanny.”
“We are just too comfortable living here,” Marina added. “Sure, outside reality is very unpleasant. But you don’t think about that every day—you think about it once a week, when you see your psychotherapist.” Marina started seeing a therapist a few months ago, as a last resort; she had had an incessant, sometimes debilitating cough for seven years, and no physician could diagnose her.
“That’s because, in the eyes of the law, you are not my partner and you are not the other parent,” Mandrykina, who was educated as a lawyer, said.Kids’ toys on the floor in Yana Mandrykina and Maria Sokolova’s central Moscow apartment.Things got more heated after that. Mandrykina argued for realism. Sokolova argued for principles, and for emigrating.
“If I don’t feel threatened, then why should I leave?” she said. “On the other hand, what is a threat? Is it when I’m arrested, or is it when I’m warned that I might be arrested? And will there be a warning? Recently, there has been a spate of arrests of entrepreneurs—was that a warning that I personally should heed?”
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