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By Vadim Smyslov
At first, it’s just someone else’s story. In the summer of 2016, when I was 21, I was writing for a Moscow-based online news page when I first heard about human rights activist Dima Zhdanov, who had been in a wheelchair for several years: the result of a failed suicide attempt. When I interviewed him, she told me about the night she came home and realized her boyfriend had been beaten and raped by two unidentified men who then fled. , Zhdanov stepped over the railing of his balcony and dropped down. When he later realized it on the sidewalk, he couldn’t move.
I temporarily published an article about Zhdanov, which my news site rated for readers over 18: the popular age limit imposed on all stories about homosexuals published in Russia since the summer of 2013, when Vladimir Putin signed a law banning the distribution of so-called “gay propaganda” to minors. After publishing the article, I presented my editor with a follow-up story. It was clear that homosexuals in Russia had serious reasons to worry about their lives. In Manhattan, St. Petersburg and other major Russian cities, members of the Dobrota gang (whose name, in a sinister twist, means “kindness”) sought out homosexuals in Grindr and Hornet, then went home to beat and extort them. This kind of existential risk piqued my editor’s curiosity. the roving gangs and the regime itself were trying to purge Russia of homosexuals, did homosexuals ever feel compelled to come out to replace their own sexuality?
My project was to track down the gay men who had done this, and I had two weeks to record the article. But a month later, he still hadn’t made any progress. For one, I’ve sometimes avoided talking to gay people, which almost actually stemmed from my deep-seated homophobia. I don’t forget to say “I hate” to one of my classmates in college. I’ve moved away from the streets where I knew there were sweatclubs for homosexuals, I didn’t need them. of their consumers to confuse me with one of them. When some other attempt was made to organize a homosexual parade in Moscow, I rubbed my hands together and thought, “Three, two, one. . . And here is the police with their batons. ” During my school years, the worst insult imaginable was to be called “petukh” or “rooster,” criminal slang for a passive homosexual who is regularly raped by other men. The worst thing my mom said to me was, “Why leave your hair long?You are not homosexual.
Even the meeting with Zhdanov did not arouse in my compassion. (Now, rereading the story I wrote, I see how I described it, in one word: “a loser. “)This kind of homophobia was not uncommon; Russia was an incredibly homophobic country. Beauty salons refused to admit gay clients. Putin signed a law banning the adoption of young people through same-sex couples. I don’t forget a state TV host who said that the hearts of gay organ donors were not suitable for transplants, suggesting they would instead be burned and buried. And Patriarch Kirill, leader of the Russian Orthodox Church, the church into which I was baptized, claimed that homosexuality was a “loss of morality. “
In this homophobic society, it was much less difficult for me to hate homosexuals than to face what I had avoided since childhood: that I myself was homosexual.
I’m five years old and I’m in kindergarten, mendacity on a bed next to the guy next door. We pull down our underwear and take turns putting each other’s penis in our mouths, and at night I innocently communicate with my parents. It’s the first sexual memory I have. ” You’re a petukh,” my father said, punching me in the face. “If this happens again, I will bury you alive. ” My parents, the other boy’s circle of relatives and all my relatives would be informed of the incident. The village where I grew up was small and soon I didn’t have to leave home.
Front flash: I’m seven years old and I’m at my grandmother’s house. A relative sitting in front of the computer asks me to kneel, then puts his penis in my mouth, throws his head back and sighs. Later, I spit out his sticky pubic hair as we have dinner with the rest of the circle of relatives. It lasts a year: in your room while the rest of the circle of relatives is in the market, in your car, in the bathroom. (Because I’m just a kid, what’s wrong with taking a little bath?) He calls me into the basement and climbs me into his lap. Does not wear underwear; It’s dry, it hurts. He says we’ll continue a little later. I locate attractive men. He knows it, uses it and it’s our little secret. Everything stops when my grandfather enters our space and sees the semen dripping from my mouth to the floor. My mom cries and beats me. I have about six more months at home, and each member of the circle of relatives asks for an unspoken wish to everything, as if nothing had happened.
Now I am 14 years old and live with my parents in an apartment in Moscow. On a social network, I create a fake profile pretending to be a woman. I tell myself it’s just a way to inform myself about how to speak better. with other men. My call is Alina. Je works in a library and I live in a penthouse. I’m fussy but vulgar. Men like Alina. Me write describing how they should do me in my car, and I feel smart, I’m excited. Alina receives messages from a national rowing champion and TV presenter, flight attendants and the private guard of a high-ranking Chechen politician. Years go by and I use my own online profile a bit, while in Alina’s chats I get thousands of photos of dicks and dating requests. Alina never gets old. When I talk about her, I rarely say that she is just me.
I am 18 years old and I am back in my village. Six pallbearers bring my grandfather’s coffin. I’m crying, but not because he’s gone. I am glad he is dead and I will never forget what he witnessed. I feel lighter, and that same night Alina receives a DM from a boy from a village. She confesses for the first time that Alina is me, but the boy is so excited that it doesn’t matter. In less than an hour, we are sitting in your car, parked in an open field. On his penis, there is a giant birthmark and a smelly white film. The liquid fills my mouth, then suddenly asks me to get off and leaves. Standing in front of the bathroom mirror, I stick out my tongue and run a razor over it, looking to go blank with the taste of blood and soap.
It sounded like a kind of schizophrenia: I masturbated in front of the shots of men’s torsos that I sent to Alina, while denying the truth that Alina didn’t even exist. in. Then I started bingeing. My goal was to make myself look hopelessly obese, so that my loneliness would seem more logical. At six feet tall, he temporarily weighed more than 240 pounds. Once I went to the bathroom and found that I couldn’t urinate; A spasm caused the creases around my groin to suck my penis until it disappeared completely.
When he commissioned the article on conversion treatment, my editor knew nothing about my sexual orientation or my history with men. Nor anyone but my family. And I tried to keep it that way. I didn’t need to have to explain my afterlife. Then an idea occurred to me: conversion treatment would not only be an intelligent story, but also my possibility of leaving behind that afterlife, of definitively curing what I would come to consider my illness.
From that moment on, the article ceased to be a mere piece for the site; This is now the basis of my private action plan. Except I couldn’t find any data online about conversion practices in Russia. BBC documentary that follows a journalist at a Christian conversion treatment clinic in Tennessee. The journalist in this film said he could swallow a pill that would cure his homosexuality. I looked for one for myself.
But I soon discovered that conversion treatment has less to do with faith in Russia than in America. There were no devout teams to infiltrate, so I imagined a new way to go undercover for my reporting: Tinder. This time I added minephotos and started temporarily chatting with guys. I wrote the same thing to everyone: “I’m a journalist and I’m writing an article about other people who have been treated for homosexuality. Which was almost true, except for one thing: I was pretending to be straight. As with my creation of Alina, I felt I needed a costume: admitting I was gay would have seemed like a one-way ticket with the price of a new life I wasn’t prepared for.
It turned out that Tinder was fertile soil for my research. In 2012, when he was 16, his parents took him to the Moscow Center for Legal and Psychological Assistance in Extreme Situations to try to suppress his charm for men. Directed by Mikhail Vinogradov, a psychiatrist who appeared on the Russian television screen Battle of the Psychics, the medium employs psychics and parapsychologists. When this “treatment” failed, his parents sent him to the Marshak Clinic, a drug and alcohol rehabilitation center outside Moscow. When Ivan left the clinic, he learned that he was no longer homeless: his grandfather wouldn’t let him into the apartment of the circle of relatives, just telling him, “Ivan doesn’t live here anymore. “
But my main source of data was Andrey Gogin, a guy who hid his face in all his Tinder photos. He told me that his remedy began in 1989, when, with his mother, he went to a sexology clinic in Moscow to see a psychiatrist. Andrey recalled that his remedy alternated between administration of unknown drugs and hypnosis sessions, as it is not an unusual practice in conversion psychiatry, but said it did not work. Then Agarkov sent him to sexologist Sergei Liebig in St. Petersburg, who in turn sent him to Nizhny Novgorod, to see the prominent sex pathologist Jan Goland. By the time Andrey and I began our correspondence, Agarkov and Liebig had passed away, however, judging by recent articles on their clinic’s website, I saw that Jan Goland was still treating patients for “sexual perversions. “
Andrey told me about the effect of his treatment. He said Goland used a three-step conversion process: During the first stage, with the help of hypnosis, the patient plunges into what Goland calls a “sexual-psychological vacuum,” a void between sexual orientations where the homosexual is no longer interested. in men, but he is not yet interested in women. At this point, the patient is shown videos of former Goland patients telling stories of their “recovery. “to treat poisoning), while the psychiatrist records homosexual erotic videos (Goland denies giving patients medication). The step of the moment is to reinforce the charm of the patient to women: they are made to look heterosexual erotic and are told to take note of the characteristic cornea in women when they walk around the city. For the third step, Andrey told me, the patient will have to have sex with a woman and describe the party in detail to Goland.
In Andrey’s case, the upheavals arose at the time stage. “I didn’t start being attracted to women,” he wrote to me. “Instead, my sexuality felt obstructed. “Liing behind young men and smelling the once-warm smell of male sweat triggered attacks of worry and anxiety. “I feel nauseous when I walk along the beach and see children in bathing suits,” she wrote. After his therapy, Andrey became depressed, gained up to 400 pounds and began committing suicide.
I myself had begun to struggle with severe depression. From time to time suicidal thoughts would come to me, but they were controlled, partly by fear, partly by the idea that my mother, drowning in debt, had to pay for my funeral. . And I turned a blind eye to the other effects of conversion treatment described by Andrey. They were nothing compared to the sense of inner purity I would have if I could really transition to heterosexuality.
My correspondence with Andrey led me to the online page of the Nizhny Novgorod clinic, where I read about dozens of “cured” homosexuals. gay. Unlike the guys on Tinder, there’s no point in lying to him. Meanwhile, I focused on locating Tinder for more men who had undergone conversion therapy. journalist in search of sources, and more like a guy looking for lovers.
Then one day, Sasha sent me a message. It was a summer afternoon. He was 20 years old, with curly hair and ice-blue eyes. As he recalls, when his mother found out he was gay, he cried. I had gotten the impression on my Tinder feed because I was in Moscow for summer music. but now he’s back home with his mother in Tuapse, a town on the Black Sea coast. A few days later, he advised me to speak on FaceTime. I agreed, telling myself it was just a phone interview for my research.
We talked for about ten minutes. As Sasha spoke, I was first overcome with jealousy: he was blatantly homosexual but obviously happy. I had sought to live like this, but I was not convinced of it. However, it was difficult to remain angry. I had never noticed anyone more handsome than this man. I enjoyed watching her tanned face, her brown hair pulled back into a ponytail, and the hole between her front teeth. And he enjoyed me too,” he smiled,” she told me. I learned that I could stare at my phone screen for a long time, and that thought scared me.
I knew right away who could help me. That same evening, I called the clinic in Nizhny Novgorod to schedule an appointment. At the end of the call, Jan Goland informed me that he had already “cured” 76 men of homosexuality. “If necessary,” he said, “You can be next. “
Jan Goland began his practice in 1957, nearly a quarter of a century after the Soviet Union criminalized sodomy at the behest of Joseph Stalin. After the enactment of this ban, open homosexuals had only two paths ahead: to become criminal for 3 to five years or to psychiatric clinics. Unlike Western countries, the atheistic Soviet government did not resort to church power, but was convinced that a purely clinical technique could be applied.
According to Goland, the celebrated cosmonaut Alexei Leonov once took a gay friend on a date. The “treatment” provided through Goland turned out to be a success, and soon the first man to perform a spacewalk made the decision that he was a true genius. “On his initiative, a Center for Psychotherapy of Homosexuality and Sexual Perversions was going to be opened in our city,” Goland told me on my layover at his clinic in 2016, “but the cosmonaut’s request was rejected through the Ministry of Health. of the USSR”.
That is why the Goland Corypheus Psychiatric Center is in the basement of a psychiatric hospital in Nizhny Novgorod. The walls are covered with abstract, almost hallucinogenic photographs of what he calls his “cured patients. “At the end of a hallway is Goland’s office. , complete with the trash of his 60 years of practice: the patient treatment diaries and the audio and video tapes on which Goland recorded his problems.
As we sat in his office, his hands trembled as he flipped through his patients’ newspapers, and he spoke so slowly that I hardly noticed it. He apologized and explained that he had not put on his dentures that day. 80 years old and proudly informed me that he had cured a gay man almost every single year of his life. “Some years,” he told me, “I even had 3 or 4 patients with sexual perversions who came here from all over the country. “. ” In 1993, the ban on sodomy was removed from the Penal Code of a new and elegant Russia, and began to see fewer patients. But in 2013, the government got back into their game by enacting the new ban. on “gay propaganda among minors” (the State Duma is recently considering a bill that would extend this ban to all ages, not just children).
In his clinic, Goland told me about a patient who, once “cured” of homosexuality, “developed schizophrenia, but remained heterosexual. “He spoke of an economist from Riga who “became obsessed with sex with women. “He continued, “In each of them, I was able to build a detached and icy attitude towards members of their sex, and all thanks to autogenic education and hypnosis. By overwhelming them in those states, I taught them to break their minds like a nut.
The consultation with Goland charges $300, which my editors paid for. But the doctor told me I would want two or 3 sessions a week at $300 each, fees the online page couldn’t cover. I wasn’t sure how to pay for the sessions, however, to begin with, I planned to sell my computer and cell phone. I also deserve to make other concessions: Goland said that I deserve to move from Moscow to Nizhny Novgorod for at least a year. He asked me to locate the e-book A Parent’s Guide to the Prevention of Homosexuality and read it carefully. And he warned me that the remedy required a general detachment from potentially sexual conditions with men: no more gyms or banyas. To exercise general control, he even had one of his patients live in the same clinic. , running as a security guard.
Finally, he invited me to be in front of the camera. On the walls hung diplomas from foreign symposia, about which I may not find any data when I searched for them online. “This video will only be noticeable through me,” he said before filming began.
For the first time in my life, I want to communicate about my story.
I told him what had happened to the other child in kindergarten. About my father’s threats and my mother’s tears. About my relative locking me in the basement. About Alina’s appointment with a stranger in a parked car. I described everything Alina had written to these men: how her bodies aroused her, how she sought their caresses and intimacy.
Sitting across from Goland, it happened to me, as every memory returned, that I had already made the remedy I was exploring. I treated myself for years before that moment: hypnotizing me, making me vomit. of my life, to “heal” myself. But it wasn’t until then that I knew I had been healthy all my life. He was already cured.
When Goland finished recording me, he clapped his hands, “Ha!” he exclaimed happily. Come back with your stuff in a week and we’ll get to work. The camera stayed on me while Goland wrote a recommendation. But the guy I saw reflected in the lens was already someone else. .
A week later, I found myself sitting on a wild beach near Tuapse, watching the waves of the Black Sea crash into a cliff, swallowing salt water. Throwing away all my clothes, I entered the water and felt a sudden pain. I looked down and saw thin lines of blood coming out of my knee, cut from the coral. It was August 16, 2016. That day, and that scar, I will have for the rest of my life, because Sasha was by my side. It was his city, his home, his sea. Scolding me, he leaned to my leg and put his lips on the wound. It was a month before my 22nd birthday and I had only allowed myself to love a boy for the first time.
Soon I would introduce him to my mom and tell her he was my friend. Later, she will realize the true nature of our dates when she walks into my room untouched. And he said, “I didn’t expect that from you. It would take him another five years to continue enjoying me and that no matter what, I was still his only child. “
As for the history of conversion therapy, I never wrote it; I am too satisfied to live my new life. A month after returning from Nizhny Novgorod, I reached out to my friends, but they only shrugged: “We knew you were gay when we first saw you,” one of them told me. In the newsrooms of the Russian magazines where I worked, everyone already knew that I lived with a boyfriend.
My physical appearance has also changed. I competed as a runner and lost 80 pounds. My stretch marks disappeared and the veins in my arms began to swell. I soon dropped one last component of my past: Alina. With a click, the woman she had pretended to be for more than seven years ceased to exist.
Last June, I revisited Goland. Now I’m writing an ebook about conversion treatment and went to collect details. My appearance changed so much that he didn’t recognize me, he just saw me as another desperate patient. I paid him an additional $300 for our session. At the end of our visit, Goland invited me to begin treatment and said he saw prospects in me. “I feel like our treatment can pay off,” he told me. “You have prospective, your brain is still functioning. “
Only later, when I was writing this story, did I call him to tell him that I was a journalist. I told him that in countries of maximum evolution, conversion treatment was considered a form of torture. He sighed with rage, homosexual lobbyists,” he told me. Most psychiatrists who encounter homosexuals see homosexuality as a disease. The happiest homosexual is the homosexual in the grave.
It took me five years to regain the strength to start writing my story. In that same period of time, Goland had ruined the lives of seven other men.
Vadim Smyslov, former editor-in-chief of GQ Russia, is recently publishing a book about his experience in conversion therapy.
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