Lyudmila and Natasha by Friedman Misha;

Author:Friedman, Misha; [Friedman, Misha; Sharlet, Jeff]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The New Press

This is a story about Russia, but it could be about anywhere. Last year, the Supreme Court of India, home to a much bigger, more vibrant out population than Russians can even dream of, undid the de facto legalization of homosexuality that had occurred just four years previous; a court in Australia invalidated the gay marriages it had allowed for five days; and Africa’s most populous, dynamic nation, Nigeria, followed the example of Uganda by making homosexuality—already long illegal—a kind of public enemy, an organizing principle; and somewhere in America—many, many places in America— some kid is being kicked out of his house or being beaten or Googling how many pills it will take, or fingering the blade, or driving toward a tree now. We will know why some of them died. Others will just be gone.

And yes, it gets better—it will get better in Russia, too. This is what my friend Tanya told me one night in Saint Petersburg, riding back into the city from a gathering of homophobic organizations at which she’d translated my questions and a series of ever-more frightening answers as our hosts entertained us with an iPad slideshow of bloody faces—their “greatest hits,” one man joked. The haters also like to take pictures. “Those fuckers,” Tanya said as we rode back to the city. “They’re going to lose,” I said. And it is probably true—if Article 6.21 represents something darker than a backlash, a new kind of nationalism, it is nonetheless not likely the future. And on such grounds, too many good people ignore the new Russian homophobia, as if they can simply wait for it to pass.

Someday. But what about the meantime? Russians do not speak of lives ruined; they say they are broken. It’s a more precise term: not romantic but mechanical. A continuity, a story, a life: shattered.

Lyudmila and Natasha are not, in these pages, at least, shattered. Broken up at times, but not broken. “Stressed,” as Friedman writes, but enduring. Only enduring is too plodding a term for the movement Friedman follows. See them curled into a ball together (page 36), Lyudmila’s red hair veiling Natasha’s wary eyes. Or lying down, forehead to forehead (page 38), their hair and their lashes and even their ears echoing, as if drawn in one continuous sweeping line, as if the lines of their faces were letters written in a private language. Swoon for Lyudmila and Natasha on page 130, the grain of the photograph making them as one, laugh with them on page 145, see them between the dark coats of a crowded subway car, their foreheads touching again, their true pose together, recurring throughout the book, an act of physical telepathy. Watch them return to one another again and again, like currents in a river, one that Misha Friedman has allowed us to hold on to for a brief while.

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