The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia

by Masha Gessen

In the three years since his gay life began, Lyosha had had sex with one man, loved two, and had explored the entire range of options available to him: the closet and the gutter. Or at least those were the options available to his gay body and his gay heart. His gay mind could still soar. He decided that he would be gay in the academy. The following year Lyosha defended his senior thesis, titled “Sexual Minorities as a Political Issue.” Getting the topic approved by the department was difficult, but he managed, and then went to Moscow for research. At the Russian State Library, which everyone still called by its old name, the Lenin Library, the repository of every periodical ever legally published in the country, Lyosha saw gay and lesbian magazines from the early 1990s. It turned out that there had once been people who wrote in Russian about gay rights, the movement, legislation, a political agenda. They sounded freer and better-informed than anyone Lyosha knew now. They seemed to inhabit a public space that Lyosha could barely imagine, to be connected to efforts that trusted their own importance—this was particularly true of a woman named Evgenia Debryanskaya, a lesbian activist so outspoken the whole country seemed to have heard of her back when Lyosha was in first grade. She was now an entrepreneur, like several other activists of old; others had left the country, and a couple had died.

Sitting in any intractable, impossible situation it is always best to hit those books.