Autoethnography. Entry 8 — Some memories about my lesbian life back in Russia

I have just realised that I had never kissed my partner in public before I moved to New Zealand. Also, we nearly never held hands back in Russia and hugged very rarely outside of our apartment. Because it felt unsafe. Because it was not a space for manifestations of same-sex intimacy. I tried to hug or touch my partner several times on the streets, but she refused that, saying that she did not like other people watching. Interestingly enough, after we moved to New Zealand, this gradually changed, and my partner started enjoying us holding hands and paying other signs of affection to each other. Thus, I can only conclude that she felt very uncomfortable back in Russia being recognised as a lesbian in public places. Which is understandable.

There was another quite an interesting thing about our relationship, sexual orientation and identities back in Russia — they were mostly unspeakable. It is pretty difficult to describe. Although we did come out to some close people, the topic of our homosexuality was very seldom even mentioned. I am not sure for what exact reason it was the case, perhaps a mixture of factors, from a lack of knowledge about how to speak about it (thanks to the Soviet ‘sexless’ past, there was no sex in the USSR, as a famous phrase says, and certainly no visible homosexuals), to a lack of true acceptance (my mum, for example, was talking with/about my partner and me as if we were just best friends), to shame to mention any sexuality issue (again, thanks to the USSR and the current lack of sex education) and to, perhaps, lack of trust from our side — there was no certainty around how people might react to some manifestation of your non-heterosexuality, whether you are going to worsen relationships with people or get abused or assaulted. The fear was always there.

I have been thinking of my visibility and realised that back in Russia, I never told anyone outside of my inner circle (some friends and family members) about my sexual orientation/same-sex relationships. It just felt inappropriate to do so. The discourse that existed around me naturalised the idea of heterosexuality as the only norm, and in Russia, it also did not feel safe to showcase your difference in any regard, let alone in terms of your sexual life which was moved by many (including some homosexual people I knew) into the realm of private. As if private truly exists, lol. The only time I had to reveal my same-sex relationships happened several months before we moved to New Zealand in a medical centre in Moscow, where we needed to have some examinations done for our visas. There was a situation there when I needed to hand over some documents to a staff member of the centre, and I gave her both my partner’s and mine ones together, which was usually done for family applications. She looked at the document, saw two female names and stuck. In a couple of moments, she managed to get herself together and asked, ‘Who are you to each other?’ ‘Partners’ — I responded. She visibly got confused, looked at me with a mixture of surprise, puzzlement, and incomprehension but asked no more questions. And I clearly remember that at that moment, what I said ‘Partners’, I felt as if I was very suddenly stripped and robbed of my safety net.

The first time I realised that this order of things with the necessity to keep silent about myself and not to broadcast was actually not a natural state of affairs was when my partner and I had a short vacation in Barcelona, Spain. It was such a huge difference with Russia! People on the streets were so bright and different, we saw quite a lot of queer couples, some with children and babies, and it was a true revelation for us! That was perhaps the first push for us to consider immigration several years later.