out
I grew up in Russia, a country that is as universally controversial as it is ridden with misconceptions. Surprisingly, there really aren’t as many bears as national marketing would like you to believe. And, yeah, it gets pretty cold in the winter, which is a good thing if you’re me, moving to Chicago at twelve years old. Here’s one more thing: being gay in public, whatever that might mean, constitutes a criminal offense.*
Let me start again. Sometimes I joke that “Russia made me homophobic,” which is true, but not true enough. Russia made me homophobic without even knowing what homophobia was. Russia made me homophobic, and even once I left, ignorant America perpetuated that homophobia. Russia made me homophobic even as I fell in love with women, again and again. But I’m over that now.
My parents weren’t homophobes, at least not actively, which made them better than the vast majority of Russian adults. I’m sure they didn’t care much one way or the other, and definitely not enough to let me know how they felt. To them, the notion that this was something I might benefit from talking about was entirely alien.** Maybe there just wasn’t time in their lives. They were busy running one of the first private art galleries in the country that was well-known for its political progressivism. For years, they exhibited all sorts of anti-government work, some of which found its way onto the walls of our apartment.
One of these pieces was part of a photo series called “Era of Mercy” by the Blue Nose Group, which featured several gay couples kissing in what looked like stereotypical Russia. At age eight, I didn’t really understand what the point was. I honestly didn’t know what being gay meant. Nobody ever told me. Still, every time a classmate of mine was coming over to the apartment, I took time to, carefully, on my tiptoes, take it off the wall and turn it around. To hide it from sight. I was only caught once, by my mother. At the time, she was the loneliest woman in the universe, her face long and mournful long before I knew there was anything to mourn.
“What are you doing,” she asked me, and I didn’t know what to say.
“Put this in your room,” I told her finally, “I don’t want it here. It’s weird. I don’t want anyone to see it. Just put it away.”
She stared at me, startled by this aggression from a child, not even tall enough to reach her chest, and definitely not old enough to be spouting conservative rhetoric. She took the canvas from me and walked away, as she always did, in her ghostly floating, long skirt fluttering against the wooden floor.
There were other incidents, too, like that time my friends began singing a derogatory song I didn’t know the words for at a gay couple that passed us on a Moscow street. Or the message I got on VK (the Russian version of Facebook) asking me if I was “bi,” which I thought stood for lesbian. I spent the next twenty-four hours combing through my profile, looking for what might have tipped the stranger off. If something caught my eye as potentially incriminating, it was gone.
Once, when I was still in Russia, a female classmate of mine slipped a four-page letter into my backpack during recess. She wrote that somehow, it was clear to her that she and I were the only two people at the school that were worth anything, and that she desperately wanted to be my friend. Though I had spent the better part of my own elementary school career begging for the attention of different girls in my class, this letter seemed to cross a line I didn’t know existed. Reading it, I felt gross. I decided I wasn’t going to tell anyone, but that made me feel even worse—as if I was the one with something to hide. So, I told my friends. In the next days, the letter was mocked and passed around between us, then thrown out. I never sent anything back. In fact, I never even spoke with the girl that sent it until, long after I left, she asked me how I knew I was gay. In the girls’ locker room, I faced the wall in shame, locking my eyes on the peeling wallpaper.
I would like to say that once I moved to the U.S. in seventh grade, my world was rid of homophobia and prejudice, but that would be a lie. On my very first day of school, I learned that to call a boy “pretty” meant that he was gay, and later in the year, I watched my classmates bully a guy from my grade for having a hairbrush in his backpack—a sure sign of homosexuality. Even once I realized gay people were okay, it still wasn’t a concept I could ever apply to myself. It took a hyper-liberal high school, countless gay friends, and a lot of courage to realize that what I had thought were “friend crushes” hid something far more sinister.
My best friend at the time was the first person I told. I left the city for a month to go to a camp, and there wasn’t a day that I didn’t miss her. Each letter she sent me was read and re-read, and each chance that I had to use my phone was spent trying to call her through the terrible cell service of rural New Hampshire.
We were walking through the August heat when I told her I thought I was bisexual.
“Why are you telling me this,” she asked me, and I didn’t know what to say, so I just shrugged.
Her coldness left me deflated, feeling gross at the thought that she could possibly think there was some ulterior motive in my confession. Maybe I wasn’t even gay, I was tempted to say, anything to get rid of that sinking feeling in my stomach, a voice in my head telling me that I was a predator, a creep, an attention seeker.
I held on to my attraction to men for years after, though every time I came close to being with one, there was something that kept me from pursuing it any further. Every guy I met had some fatal flaw that acted as a deal-breaker, and the ones that didn’t were either fictional or entirely unattainable, which meant I didn’t have to worry myself with the possibility of anything actually happening. It wasn’t until earlier this Spring when I realized that there is a term for everything I just described: compulsory heterosexuality.
It was February, and I had spent the past months convincing myself that I had been straight all along. It took a YouTube video by the legendary ContraPoints, an “Am I a Lesbian?” Masterdoc sent to me by my roommate and falling in love with my now girlfriend for me to finally understand what I had been doing to myself all this time. Though I won’t go into detail on the psychology of comphet, another YouTuber I follow closely made a video about the colonization of the mind—the way that an oppressive society’s messaging can infiltrate a person’s internal monologue and perpetuate that oppression even as the outside world seemingly grows more accepting. Unbeknownst to myself, the Russia I was so eager to leave has been festering inside me all this time, swelling like a parasite until it was simply too much to bear. Suffice to say, I soon found myself crying in my bedroom, mourning the normative family structure that I now knew to be entirely inaccessible to me. Over time, though, the mourning grew into joy, and the fear of being trapped inside an unhappy patriarchal marriage became replaced with the excitement to one day raise my children in a truly happy household—one that mine rarely was, despite its heterosexuality.
At seventeen, I just spent my first June out as a lesbian. Next month, I’m going off to college, marking the first chapter of my life that I will spend fully and unapologetically myself. Things are good, really good, although the Russian government just cemented same-sex marriage as unconstitutional rather than simply illegal. But I’m out—out of there, and out of the closet, though it took me years to come to terms with it, even here, even now. To be completely honest, sometimes, I still feel the urge to hide that part of myself, turn it around as if it were a framed photograph on the wall of my old apartment.
* I wrote that before fact-checking, and found out that (to my surprise) that law only stretched to any sort of media rather than actual living people. Still, I decided to keep the sentence, because the mere fact that I was convinced it was true says a lot about how it feels to be gay in Russia.
** I actually asked my mom why she never talked to me about LGBTQ+ issues growing up, and she told me that she assumed I would learn about them in school—a laughable thought, since there was literally no sex education in our curriculum. Yeah.
Eva is a high school senior, an INFP, a Slytherin, and, among other things, a poet. Growing up in Russia in a family of political dissidents, she struggled with her parents' and peers' expectations. Now, a refugee in Chicago, she has learned to let go (a little bit) and notice the beauty in the world. And write about it. She is passionate about the Beatnik movement, the 1920s, electoral politics, contemporary art, and people-watching. She also occasionally exists on Instagram at @evagelmann.
This article was edited by Kailah Figueroa