‘Lesbians Did Not Exist’: Growing Up Gay in Russia

What could I have known then about myself? My desire was very strong, but it also scared me. I didn’t know anything about lesbians.

In little Ust-Ilimsk lesbians did not exist. When in Year Nine my girlfriends kissed in the entryway of a building and said they were lesbians, nobody believed them, it was a joke. But for some reason I didn’t think it was funny. I liked the band Night Snipers, I had their live acoustic CD Trigonometry, which I listened to several times a day. The voice I heard in my headphones made sense to me on a physiological level, I felt drawn to it. The meaning of some of the songs was unclear, but I could feel everything that the songs were about; I identified with their lyric heroine. They were teaching me how to feel. I found out that Night Snipers were and remain lesbian icons much later, when I started working at the clothes shop where I met Zhanna.

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My year of working at Depo, as the shop was called, was a real immersion in lesbian culture at the end of the 2000s. We went to clubs, watched The L Word, listened to Zemfira and Night Snipers, and the manager gave me a disk of films about lesbians, so I could download the files to my computer. I kept watching and rewatching both parts of If These Walls Could Talk and Imagine Me & You. I didn’t like The L Word because all the women were too glamorous and their world was alien to me. I did think that one of the characters, Shane, was very cool, but watching her was intolerable because Zhanna tried to look like her, and everything that had to do with Zhanna caused me pain and heartache. Zhanna was a seductive, silent type like Shane; she wore low-rise trousers and had dark hair that fell into her eyes. I wanted Zhanna very badly. But she, sensing the power she had over me, quickly cooled towards me.

Paula Harrowing (bottom) with a friend in Hampstead, before a night out in Soho

At clubs we got drunk, danced, and discussed other lesbians. From these conversations I found out that lesbians could be separated into types: women who looked like Zhanna were called dykes and were the most popular, since their androgyny and attention to their appearance were highly valued in lesbian society. Feminine women were called femmes, and were treated dismissively because they exemplified all the attributes of femininity. But held in the deepest disdain were the butches – masculine women. It was thought that they imitated men, had sex without taking off their clothes, and got into drunken fights at parties. You fell in love with butches only if you were a femme or insane.

I seemed to be both. Because I really liked masculine, short-haired women. I thought they were perfect. At the club, Zhanna noticed how carefully I was watching a woman in a blue denim shirt; she poked me in the side and started laughing. She was laughing at me because I liked this large woman, I liked how she moved, how she spoke, reached for her glass of beer, held that glass. But most importantly I liked her gaze. It was a gaze that gathered things up into itself, a gaze in which I wanted to go limp and open, as though I were something hard that wanted to be something soft and agape. Her gaze was a key.

But Zhanna was laughing at me. I saw her eyes grow damp from laughing, smearing the greasy black mascara on her lashes. She was laughing at me, at my sexuality. When she’d had enough, she leant towards the ear of her wife, Yulya, and told her about me. Yulya’s mouth dropped open in shock and she stared at me as though I’d come out to party in a tutu. That night I danced with the woman in the blue shirt, and in the morning at work everyone made jokes about it. I put up with their teasing and had no defence for my desire, because it was directed at “a guy with a ****”.

Shame about being a lesbian who liked masculine women lived within me. It devoured me from the inside, and I forbade myself from looking in their direction. When I found myself among feminists, I encountered an even greater condemnation of butches. Though I was already familiar with it from the second part of If These Walls Could Talk, in which the young red-haired feminist Linda meets the silent biker Amy at a lesbian bar. Amy is a rebel in a leather jacket, Linda is a redheaded university student. Amy infuriates Linda’s friends; she’s far from the essential femininity that second-wave feminists are fighting for, she imitates men, thus she is an agent of the patriarchy.

Moscow feminists of the mid-2010s thought similarly, and it seems that many people think this way even now, though it’s precisely this essentialist view that chains women to femininity and doesn’t give them the right to behave as they choose. Masculinity and femininity are not properties of either men or women, and masculine women are direct evidence of this. In lesbian and feminist circles, a “golden mean” was considered acceptable, but anything that had to do with a radical move towards one end of the gender spectrum was frightening and frowned upon.