Gay couples cannot adopt, nor can anyone from a country where same-sex marriage is legal adopt a Russian child. Russia is nearly as difficult a place to be gay today as it was under the Soviet regime. After all, how could a country with haute couture and organic food stores remain stubbornly anti-gay? How could a country with vibrant academic and activist communities not become more like the West in its attitudes toward sexuality? Later, as Russia opened up to the more or less free exchange of ideas, goods and services, it was easy to imagine that life would get better for its lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender residents.
When we escaped that night, we did not report the incident to the police because there was no legal protection for Russia’s gays and lesbians. Just a few short years before the fall of the Soviet Union, homosexuality could land you in the gulag or a psychiatric hospital. The restaurateurs-cum-criminals wanted us to pay them a few hundred dollars or else they would inform our families and employers that we were “pederasts” and “dykes.”
The meal abruptly ended when we were escorted, at gunpoint, into a back room. Twenty-five years ago, when I lived in Russia, I was in a restaurant with some friends. Laurie Essig, a professor of sociology and women’s and gender studies at Middlebury College, is the author of “Queer in Russia: A Story of Sex, Self, and the Other.”
