I've been thinking for a while about whether I should even write this. I live in a European country with my husband now. We've been together for years, we have a small business and work at local markets. My life these days is pretty normal and, honestly, probably a little boring. We have this little Saturday tradition. We buy a few different cheeses, some salads and spreads for bread, and spend the evening watching a movie or a TV show. We have two cats, and they're usually there with us — one on someone's lap, the other squeezed somewhere between us. Then we go to bed, I hug my husband, and usually I'm asleep a couple of minutes later. I know how incredibly ordinary that sounds. But sometimes it's exactly during moments like that when I think: if you had shown me this life when I was 15, I wouldn't have believed you. I grew up in Russia. When I was a teenager and starting to realize I was attracted to men, the idea that one day I could actually live with another man, hold his hand walking down the street, or just sit with him on a café terrace in the summer drinking a glass of wine while nobody around us gave a shit — that felt like something from a movie. I knew people somewhere lived like that. I just never thought I would be one of them. And things at home were pretty fucked up too, long before I even realized I was gay. I didn't have a father around, and my older brother somehow decided it was his job to raise me. I think he genuinely believed he was helping me and preparing me for life. But one of my earliest memories is from when I was maybe five or six. I told my mother that my brother was hitting me. She confronted him about it, and I remember standing behind her while he was trying to get past her to hit me for telling her. I remember his fist coming close to my face and biting it. I remember him screaming. And I remember that he still managed to hit me several times while my mother was trying to stop him. Then there's kind of a blank spot in my memory. The next thing I remember is crying next to my mother and my brother being gone. It didn't stop when I got older. He used to make me study. English, schoolwork, things like that. If I couldn't remember a word or didn't do something he had told me to do, he could grab me by the hair and slam my head into the desk. Later, closer to the end of school, there was a time when he beat me with an electrical cord because I hadn't done the assignments he'd left for me while he was away. I remember curling up and crying while he held me by the hair so I couldn't get away. At some point I just didn't want any of it anymore.
I found medication belonging to a relative and took a lot of it. I don't really want to go into the details. I remember coming in and out of consciousness. At one point my brother was slapping me in the face trying to keep me awake, and apparently I told him: "Just let me fucking die. Leave me alone." Then nothing. My next clear memory is the hospital. A tube in my throat, being incredibly thirsty, and not being able to swallow properly. They saved me. And then I just kept living. My brother already had a plan for our future by then. He was studying economics and decided I should become a lawyer. Then we'd be this successful family — one brother an economist, the other a lawyer, helping each other out. It almost sounds nice if you remove everything else. So I went to law school. The problem was that we had a computer at home, but my brother was the one who mainly used it. My access to it was very limited and often only when he was there. I didn't really have a proper place to study either. I couldn't keep up, and after my first year I was kicked out. Then I applied to another university by myself and got into law school again. By this point I had started dating guys and volunteering with LGBT organizations. For probably the first time in my life, I had some kind of environment where I didn't constantly have to explain why I was the way I was. But that didn't make home any safer. I knew that if university didn't work out and I ended up completely dependent on my family again, I'd be right back where I started. Then I saw an ad on social media for work in another city. I applied and left. It turned out to be a gay escort agency. I worked there for about a year and a half. I don't really know what to say about that part. It was a job, and at the time it was also a way not to go home. Eventually more new guys came in, I started getting fewer clients, and at some point the agency basically kicked me out. Around the same time, I got tested. I found out I was HIV positive. So that became another thing I had to learn how to live with. I started treatment. The regimen I was put on in Russia was pretty outdated even at the time, and the drugs could have psychiatric side effects, including depression. I wasn't exactly doing great mentally to begin with, and the medication made the depressive thoughts worse. I've been living with HIV for a long time now. It's not what my life revolves around. It's just one part of my life. But back then it felt very different. After the escort agency I came back with basically no money. I still didn't want to go home, so for a while I lived in an old country house with almost no amenities. There was no running water, so I had to get water from a communal pump. The toilet was outside. There was electricity and gas, though. So, you know. Luxury. I took whatever random jobs I could find online. Handing out flyers, stuff like that. And one of those completely random jobs ended up changing my life. I got hired to work on an election campaign. That's where I got incredibly lucky with my boss. After the campaign ended, he helped me get another job, then helped me get involved in other projects, introduced me to people. Eventually I stayed in that world and worked for what you could broadly call an opposition political party. That guy eventually stopped being my boss. But he didn't stop being my friend. We're still friends today. I don't want to say he "saved me" or "changed my life," because that sounds way too dramatic. He was just a real friend. Someone who would help me not because he wanted something from me, but simply because we were friends. That was a very big deal to me at the time. He was also one of those people who was always doing something. Making plans, starting projects, moving forward. Not everything worked, obviously, but being around someone like that made it feel like there was always something ahead. Eventually I became more involved in political work myself. At the same time I continued doing LGBT-related work and speaking publicly about LGBT issues. There were occasionally articles about me and the things I was involved in. I wasn't famous. Not even remotely. Most people walking past me on the street would have had absolutely no idea who I was. But I wasn't completely anonymous anymore either. If someone searched my name online, they could find things. And around that time, things started feeling more dangerous. There wasn't one single event that made me say, "That's it, I'm leaving tomorrow." It built up over years. When I was younger, I remember leaving a metro station with a female friend and some random man started yelling "faggot" at me from behind. There were politicians constantly saying shit about gay people on TV.
And growing up, I almost never saw examples of people like me just being normal people. Not sick, not crazy, not perverts, not a punchline. Just people who wanted to love someone and live their lives. And then there were things worse than words. One time I was outside a gay club and someone punched me from behind. I fell and hit the back of my head on the steps. There's another incident I remember really clearly even though physically almost nothing happened. I was coming home from work. My downstairs neighbor was waiting for the elevator with her boyfriend and their dog. The elevator came. They got in. I tried to get in after them. Her boyfriend pushed me back out and said: "You, faggot, take the next one." So I waited for the next elevator. Another time I was attacked outside my own building while people shouted the same kind of shit about me being gay. And by then I also had some online visibility because of the political work and LGBT initiatives. Again, not enough that strangers normally recognized me, but enough that someone could find me if they wanted to. At some point I started thinking: okay, today someone pushes me out of an elevator. Another day I get beaten up. What happens next time? Do I just get beaten to death? Eventually I left. But leaving didn't magically make everything okay. At one point I ended up alone in Istanbul. I wasn't allowed onto a flight I was trying to take. I spent hours trying to sort it out, failed, and eventually just started walking around the city. I didn't know a single person there. I didn't want to go back, and I had absolutely no idea what I was supposed to do next. And I very clearly remember thinking that maybe I should find somewhere nice to eat first, and then I could jump into the Bosphorus. Why food came first in that thought, I have no idea. But that's genuinely what I was thinking. Instead, I wrote a post on Facebook. People responded. Old friends and acquaintances from political work. People I barely talked to anymore. Some people I hardly knew at all. They started messaging me, calling me, trying to figure out options, trying to help. Basically, those people are the reason I made it through that night. Eventually I made it to a European country and applied for asylum. I spent the first couple of weeks in a closed reception center. Later I was interviewed, told that I would be granted asylum, and transferred to an open center. I was completely exhausted by then. I got lucky and ended up in housing with other LGBT refugees. I mostly just wanted to stay in bed. I shared a room with another refugee who kept trying to get me out of it. "Let's go to the store." "Let's go for a walk." "Let's go to the park." "Come sit with everyone. I made food." There was no profound psychological wisdom involved. The guy made food and told me to come sit with everyone. But apparently that was exactly what I needed. We eventually lost touch. The last I heard, several years ago, he was doing well. I hope he still is. About a year after I moved, I met the man who is now my husband. After that, life became surprisingly ordinary. Relationship stuff. Immigration paperwork. Learning the language. Work. Money problems. Plans. Everyday bullshit. We worked a lot. And most of the things I hoped for when I first moved actually did happen. So I guess this is where the happy ending is supposed to go. And in a way, there is one. I am happy. I really am. I love my husband more than I can explain. But there's something I only really understood after building this life. Socially, I'm almost completely alone. I have my husband, but your husband can't be every single person in your life. We work together. We eat together. We sleep together. We spend most of our free time together. And sometimes I just want a friend. Someone I can call. Someone to have a drink with. Someone I can complain to about some stupid shit, or talk to about something serious. I live in a small town. A lot of people here have known each other since school. Their parents are here. Their old classmates are here. Their friends and relatives are here. I arrived as an adult immigrant who could barely speak the language. My language skills are much better now. I know plenty of people through work. I know people through my husband. It's not like I'm sitting at home alone and never seeing another human being. But I have almost no close friends. Sometimes it's a really weird kind of loneliness in a crowd. And there's another part of it. It's very hard to explain my old life to people here. Not because they're stupid or don't care. Their lives have just been completely different. They have their own real problems. Someone's car breaks down. Someone gets divorced. Someone has a fight with their family. Someone has problems at work. Those things genuinely hurt them, and I'm not saying they don't have the right to be upset. But sometimes I catch myself thinking, Jesus Christ, I wish something like that could be one of my biggest problems. And then immediately I know that's unfair to the person. But I can't switch off my own life experience either. The funny thing is, people from my old life don't completely understand me anymore either. They know that version of me. They didn't live this part. So the people back there can understand where I came from, but they don't really know the person I am now. And the people here know the person I am now, but they can't really imagine the person I used to be. I think that's probably why I'm writing this. I don't think I want pity. I'm not even sure what kind of response I'm looking for. Maybe I just wanted, for once, to tell the whole story from beginning to end. Because normally people only know one piece. Some people know me as a refugee. Some know I'm gay. Some know about HIV. Some know about the political stuff. Some know about the escort work. Most of the people in my life now know almost none of it. And I'm still the same person who spends Saturday night at home with his husband, two cats, a bunch of cheese and some random TV show. That's probably the weirdest part. If 15-year-old me could see everything that happened in between, I don't even know what he'd make of it. But I think he'd understand the Saturday night. He'd look at us and think: "Holy shit. I actually got the life I wanted."