Chapter 9

May 12 1991

Another 4 day marathon Soviet holiday down the drain. I realize now why I'm attracted to Boris and PB, both straight as arrows (and Denis?).

Boris looks uncannily like mother - dark, tall, a big toothy smile, a big nose, a seriousness tempered by self-effacement. He must have looked dazzling in a uniform. Paul too has a big smile, and the same mysterious, dark, penetrating gaze. D also is tall, dark and handsome.

They're made from the same male-mother mold. So my love of men is locked into an Oedipal embrace - unfortunately with a repressed Puritan mother.

Denis is somehow my way out of this. I feel like a dirty old man, and distaste for my physical passion sometimes overcomes me. I realized this walking along the path to my apt tonight, but the passion is stronger than the repressive super ego. He phoned at 5:00am again this morning in answer to my telegram. "Do you come?" he asked slightly nervously towards the end of the conversation. "When I think of you," I answered, excited. Our rushed orgies left little time for soppy romanticism, and lots for being friends and being silly.

His smile is more seductive than Boris's or Paul's, and his eyes are quick and perceptive. That's HIS mother in him, though he has the softer, playful character of Sasha. His love is playful. I guess I'm a bit like his pet Daschund. But he lets me take control sometimes (meaning he's still in control?) and become one with him in the driver's seat. How I miss him!

I became red hot with anger today - the photo store "closed for technical reasons" and the post office closed for their 2-hour lunch. I shouted at the director and immediately regretted my uncontrolled rage. It makes it harder to go back to the scene of my outburst, but maybe it helps move the mountain. I hope so for Russia's sake, but does reality have to be so full of rage? Poor Russia. Poor me.

How we need a Buddhist outlook - soft energy and youthfulness. I'm keeping immature, if not youthful. I feel the urge to proselytize: sexual freedom, spiritual freedom, economic freedom.

Dream: Mother is English editor at MN and I work for her. I feel completely neutral and respect her considering her age, etc. for taking this on.
Meaning: Shows some release of the irrational hate and resentment, due to the healing process as a result of loving D - more self-confidence and a positive attitude towards sex.

May 25, 1991

GP, MN, apt hunting (now that I'm leaving MN this summer), Lyonia (dumb, joyous, unkempt 16 year old), D so far away.

I renewed my crazy obsession with Lyonia. No overt sex, but how erotic, sitting close on his bed in his cavernous, rundown apt on Gorky Street. A flood of hormones as we plan a trip to the Moscow Pool. We hurried to get to Macdonald's before closing, and smoked in the park as he huddled against me in the cool evening air. So anxious to stay over with me at my 'palace'. How I want to wrestle with him and come.

I invited GP volunteers over to help with mailings. No soulmate, but some characters: 14 year old Anton - shy, gangling, full of laughter; Dima, a nascent gay, his feminine soul shining through unconsciously.

Should I jump into a rocky (maybe dangerous) relationship with Lyonia?

June 1, 1991

Two things struck me today.

1/ I'm a sitting duck health-wise. Aging bachelors have a much higher death-rate than husbands or members of a stable gay partnership. I feel every day that it doesn't matter if I live or not. I constantly reflect on my almost 40 years as not a bad life - some real love, adventures, spiritual experiences, sex. It must be all downhill now - graying, my constantly twisting ankle, wrinkles, sagging flesh, pains now here, now there... I'm often intensely depressed and lonely, fearful that I look like a pathetic ass. But still pushing on.

I have the choice to make peace with my flailing libido and relax, accept my aging as a liberation, a descent into wisdom, a time to truly enjoy what I feel (and know through experience) is true, not wasting my time in the illusions which plague my straight contemporaries.

My odd sex life is really more a path of liberation - my own - forcing me to confront my obsession with maya, which most people (my family) are caught up in. In his memoirs, Theroux's prolix humping, especially of his wife, is boring and silly, tedious in its repetitiveness. And his grim self-centredness screams of the rootless repressed Yank.

So can I make the transition? Can I find peace with myself so I don't unconsciously keep trying to destroy my wonderful (but aging) body, so as to give birth (time to mature) to my spirit? It feels so easy to give up, to dull my ache with grass, fill my time with superficial relationships, petty worries about work. It's like I have a well of guilt which is, well, constantly welling up, looking for something to pour itself into. Such a battle to still the waters, change them into wine (or maybe spirit?).

2/ I feel a soothing energy from 15 year olds. Anton's simple, playful, friendly admiration, even Lyonia's more calculated but all the same natural seductiveness. I should accept the feeling, not fight it. It's nice not to have to feel the burning sexual desire for Anton which I feel for Lyonia. It was the same with D at first - just a timeless fullness, though when the sex came, it was more powerful and enduring than I've ever felt before or after. The idea of sex or even friendship with someone my own age is almost repulsive except for Eric and Paul, though even with them, it's much better in the abstract than the flesh. I must experience the joy of different ages of man, to free myself of living-in-others'-opinions (Rousseau), which frowns on this. What will happen when D comes back? One thing I know - it's best to be indifferent, to enjoy each moment, not to pine or wait. Otherwise it will only be a disappointment. You can't capture joy; the attempt only kills it (Blake).

So what's been happening in Mayaland!? Silly Mark, a British gay activist, barged in for an evening (Did he want to fuck? Probably.) He came as the guest of the Russian gay activist from the US and Canada Institute, Volodya, that I almost made the mistake of fucking with. (Thank God he turned down my masturbating at the baths.)

To my discomfort, Valera Vishniakov, a lonely, unattractive, slightly lisping (possibly closet) student appeared, uninvited. I jumped at the diversion to change my fish tank water, dumping poor Fish out to clean the jar. Fish would not cooperate, and ended up with a rock pile on his head. He lasted another week with a nasty grey wound on his head, and one morning I found him wedged motionless, apparently peering out at Sandra's crude wintry New England post card, fantasy his only escape from harsh reality.

12:40. I had 20 minutes till the pet store closed for lunch. Determined not to be beaten by the system and lose a few hours of companionfish, I leaped up and rushed out the door. Soviet roads are NOT made for unaware 200 yard dashes. Crossing the street, my ankle gave way, and I rolled over into a heap at the curb, barely avoding the wheels of an angry truck. My resultant sprained ankle and sore knee are some kind cosmic revenge, i.e., my karma saying "Stop jumping around, screaming at phlegmatic, bureaucrats, cursing your self-imposed imprisonment."

June 19, 1991

Sergei Shcherbakov, whom I met at Dombai skiing (in a darkened video room, when he drunkeningly dropped his head on my shoulder - say no more) phoned out of the blue Saturday and came over for a dizzy glorious few hours of drinking, playing and sleeping. His big burning brown eyes and dazzling smile, wiry graceful body, his sexy sodier's uniform... ARGH! He sweeps me off my feet with his carefree youthful joie de vivre.

What a contrast with sour tight-assed Gocha, a Georgian whom I met earlier at the gay banya and invited back, thinking we would fuck. "I don't do that sort of thing," he mumbled when I made moves to sleep with him. I wrote him off as another Achiko. Does sex never go through the minds of these Georgian guys? He phoned Sunday morning and invited me to a performance of Cinderella by the Bolshoi at the Palace of Cogresses in the Kremlin, and was most cold when I showed up with Sergei. He even had an extra ticket but refused to give it to Sergei, trying to sell it for bucks. Why I bothered with a stupid ballet when I had the most beautiful guy in the world beside me I'll never understand. All I thought of was my own role as Cinderella with Sergei as my prince, and my hangover as the 12:00pm pumpkin call.

I realize how I'm a kind of Cinderfella here - transformed into a magical prince(ss) with the tell-tale glass slipper (Adidas), looking for my prince charming. And also the prince who finds his prince(ss) only to lose him/her and forced to search. The prince even indulges in a hooka of drugged forgetfulness in the Bolshoi production, but spurns it to search for real happness.

Is coming here being a big fish in a little pond, or is it a re-enactment of this eternal myth, or both?

Rereading Jung and The Search for Romantic Love: Tristan and Isolde is really the same myth. Yearning for spiritual wholeness through reintegration of the anima/ soul - marriage within. Human love should not try to take the place of spiritual wholeness but help lead to it. The decline of religion has subverted this, making human romantic love a defective substitute for the search for spiritual wholeness.

Denis and others must not be confused with spiritual striving, but neither should spirit deny sensual fulfillment. I must withdraw my projection of anima onto D and re-integrate it into myself. Only then can my love for him not be tragic/ false, but be a basis for physical/ ego union and happiness in the real world. I am responsible for my own happiness damn it! The sacred is not reducible to the secular, just as the secular can't take the place of the sacred.

The soul demands we play all the archetypal roles - lover/ beloved, warrior/ musician/ priest, prince/ Cinderella, betrayer/ betrayed, oppressor/ oppressed ... The soul REVEALS itself to the ego through these u archetypes, while the ego should REVERE the soul in their mutual dialectic.{Dancing with the Wolves]

July 16, 1991

Reading Myths and Mysticism of Same Sex Love by Christine Downing. It's not so much the physical act, as the focussing of passion (root: passive, feminine) on the same sex that is fundamental. I never even fucked with Sergei Shcherbakov or Valera(s), only fucked once with Kostya, Paul and many others, and didn't do much more than masturbate with D, while I have a fuller, lasting sexual relationship it seems with Lyonia, but these relationships have all been intense (passionate) and vital for me. I'm getting in touch with the feminine in me (not just the passive, but the birth-giving, nourishing, sensual side of me (my anima?). In the process, I've become a male mother (and father) to my friends in Moscow, just as Paul and Eric are like a mother to me. With Lyonia, I'm mother, father and suckling babe (a Pasolini Trinity?). In fact I seem to be living out a variation on Pasolini's Teorema with Lyonia's, Denis's and Kostya's families.

I can see a parallel between my infatuations and Jung's infatuation with Freud, whose theories he called cloud-cuckoo-land, reaching for the phallic paradise (in society this is revealed in religion, music, sport, buildings). His return to reality meant suppressing or overcoming his erotic attraction to Freud. I have to go beyond this phallic mothering to more mutual relationships, or they will remain infatuations.

There is a parallel between Marx and Freud that I feel now. For Marx, value is mediated (and thus alienated and distorted) by price, leading to exploitation. For Freud, both gay and straight are natural expressions of sexuality, but mediated by society, male and female are role-defined, leading to neurosis. Castration fears, birth envy, arbitrary role definition, homophobia... these are the price we pay for living in the societies we are fated to live in.

I feel freer from complexes than 3 years ago - the masochism of my relationship with Paul, the passivity of drugs and self-repression. I'm still depressed, but the forced abstinence from dope and the adventures with my various adoptees have helped give me a phallic centredness. I'm not just fantasizing a phallic mother who makes love to me as my mother without the incest. I'm giving birth when I come, I'm being born when my partner comes.

As I see it Jung's message is that whether homo or hetero, you shouldn't expect too much from sex (vs Freud). It's a false, temporary paradise. The real one is spiritual. Sex is a symbolic way to experience the eternal. Through sexual growth (ability to balance the m/f, phallic physical/ intellectual, the various archetypes) you experience the many sides of being human and grow spiritually. Therapy is identifying one's myths, not trying to make sex the answer to our spiritual longing. Jung is more optimistic than Freud.

For Freud, we're all mostly caught up in the Oedipal archetype. For Jung, we're potentially all the archetypes. For Freud, incest is sexual possession of the mother. For Jung, incest is symbolic longing for a return to the womb and rebirth. For Freud, the best we can be is passibly neurotic; for Jung, we can find healthier catharsis through reliving the archetypal myths consciously through our relations, bringing the spiritual into the material world. There is a symbiosis at work here: the material world lets us celebrate the spiritual, and the spiritual gives meaning to the material world.

July 28, 1997

I just returned from Canada after 1 1/2 years away. My former students have duly forgotten me, but it doesn't really matter. My connecting with them (Mario, Brian Kenny and others) was a beautiful rite of passage (theirs and mine) which belongs as a memory. Just as my affair with Viktor here and others (I hope). Lyonia is more than this. He came over as soon as I returned and came twice the first night, but after 24 hrs with him we were both irritable, and he keeps his emotional distance. While home, I told Paul I wanted to wean myself from sex over the next 10 years. Like weaning the first time around, it will be hard. I'm looking for the mothering in my oral sex, for the fathering in frottage.

I do enjoy these roles and their symbolic fulfillment through my network of young male friends. And the sex part is so tempting - they're sexual animals and it's mutually exciting. I'm living the Dorian Gray syndrome to the full, but then, so did Oscar Wilde, and his life, though tragic, was supremely human and lived to the full.

It was all so easy under slavery in small Greek democratic cities. The white free male on top, the women, children and slaves on the bottom. Male/ youth sex was the norm (though penetration was supposedly frowned upon as harming the youth's manhood, and a shame for an older male to be penetrated). It was a phallic-based sexuality: women were not thought of as active sexually, though some goddesses sure suggest otherwise.

How perverse our sexuality is in light of this - defining people as homo/ hetero (before there were only m/m or m/f acts), outlawing relations between those less than and greater than 21, creating a veritable culture of sex scandals, making thousands of people with natural beautiful feelings feel like criminals. I bet the suicide rate in ancient Greece was infinitessimal, despite Socrates.

Thank God I was able to escape even for a few years, and make myself unusual and desirable enough to break through the stifling social norms. While Russia is just as homophobic as Canada, at least the glaze of smug sexual equality is absent, and the old morality has collapsed. North American was unbearably smug. I returned to a glorious evening - met at the airport by Volodya Zubok (D's closest boyhood friend), dinner with MGU Valera, fucking with Lyonia, and a drunken revelry with Danya.

August 12, 1991

I feel bruised by my obsessive fucking with Lyonia. It was almost a week before I could jack off after our last session, recalling D, intimacy and a sense of religious ecstasy with Hermann, the Old Believer who disappeared, and finally my crazy night in Tashkent with the dark beautiful Uzbek back in '79. Blowing Lyonia has lost its appeal. No real intimacy or respect. Routine.

Shtukun has a rough sweetness, you feel immediate contact. His angular, wiry, tall body and craggy, inviting smile. When he described his horrifying prison experience (after beating up an African student, either avenging a cracked sense of self-respect or a simple case of racism) and his 16 months exile from Moscow in a work prison in Ryazan, my heart went out to him. Lyonia is a wild, hurt, damaged soul. Sometimes I'd like to be rid of him, but I've got to take some responsiblity for my darker side. The only way to survive in a hostile world is to integrate your unconscious, id, obsessions, with your conscious life. We'll go to Mcdonald's tomorrow, I'll put him off for a week, and try to make a Platonic relation.

I feel I've gotten over D somewhat. He's not the crutch and only source of love like I imagined before. It's dangerous and self-defeating putting all your eggs in one basket (please excuse the Russian pun, balls = eggs). I can love and find different degrees of intimacy with all - I have to - including with GP work contacts and the straight world out there.

I have to have some instinctual attraction to the people/ work I occupy my time with. But that's part of integrating my unconscious/ conscious. I have to make relations that are more subtle than just swallowing cum.

My soldier friend Sergei called out of the blue, inviting me to Minsk. Wow!

August 30, 1991 (Monday)

The failed coup was a stab in the heart for me. As I trudged off to the barricades that Tuesday on the Metro and followed the crowds - young and often couples in love - passed the American Embassy to the White House (!), I was filled with a feeling of quiet power - the positive power of people who passionately believe in themselves and what they believe.

The black and white of it all - the pitiful twitch of a huge, ugly dragon, being slain by the white knight and his spiritual soldiers. It cut right to the soul. It brought tears to my eyes - for them, the frightened, hurt underdog, and for me as one of them (not to mention my precarious future here, both at MN and GP, if 'perestroika' had been brought to a halt).

We listened to the clandestine Radio Echo Tuesday night broadcasting Yeltsin's angry, rousing call to defend democracy against the communist dictatorship. It was spooky and stirring in my gloomy spartan apt with MGU Valera and Volodya Zubok, but gave me hope.

Our MN collective was as one. We sought solace in our basic goodness. Vadim was right this evening in our bar, supping cognac with Patricia. "Everyone in our group is basically good." He was being the devil's advocate, teasing us about the US and the slave mentality of the Soviet people, but still admitted that. Maybe democracy has a chance here. And there's a communal goodness as a legacy to the tragic failure of the revolution. I hope it isn't swamped by our more sophisticated slavery.

Today I was given a bit of the Dzerzhinksy monument that the crowd tore down last night. One of the translators at MN, Sasha Sokolov, was there and cut off a chunk, which he is crushing to bits to pass on to friends. Mossoviet was even debating storming the KGB building earlier today. Both Tuesday and Wednesday after work I went back to the White House. Tuesday there were 30,000, Wednesday there were 500,000, with a huge Russian national flag drapping the impromptu stage facing away from the river towards the Krasnopresnya and the monument to the workers of 1917. Russian laws have precedent over Soviet ones not only on paper now. Wednesday evening, I walked among the burnt buses and saw the flowers, icons and candles marking the spots where the young defenders died. The post-holocaust scenario was left intact till the memorial service on Saturday on Manezh Square, led by Afghan war vets.

The putschists were a pathetic lot on TV: Yanaev shaking (was he drunk?), the others sitting like they were made of stone. Pugo very honorably committed suicide when he realized his vision of society was impossible. Yanaev's petty vision of presiding over a new stagnation, like his mentor Brezhnev, was crushed. KGB head Kriuchkov, Yazov, and Pugo, as well as Starodubstov, the collective farmer wunderkind (who suffered prison under Brezhnev for his reform zeal) saw the collapse of their worldview as a tragedy. And it is. But then so is history for the most part. (Marx: "Wokers of the world... I'M SORRY!" is graffiti scrawled on the bust of Marx across from the Bolshoi Theater). Funnily enough, the naive American stylist, Anne, tall and ungainly, whom I'm convinced Patricia is madly in love with, echoed my thoughts, unprompted, today: "I kind of feel sorry for the coup leaders. They seem so pathetic now." As for Gorbie, it's all over for him. He let the genie out of the bottle and Yeltsin grabbed it and made it his own. Gorbachev has the unenviable role of throwing himself on the funeral pyre of party and empire, whether he does so willingly or not.

Welcome to the real world, Russia. I just hope you keep some of your romance and mystery. Don't become the blase land of cotton wool the rest of us live in. But then, as I've come to realize, it's all in your mind anyway.

August 31, 1991

Another tantalizing afternoon with Lyonia. He leaned over to bury his nose in my shirt, and pulled my erection out to look at. He would let me play a bit with him and hold his erection, and then pull back. Meanwhile his mother is lying in bed in the other room, a few feet away. I put him off when he phones and then hunger for him. I don't let him come over to my apt as he would be here all the time and turn it into a dump. Fucking at his place is dangerous, but seems so innocent. I encourage him to fuck with a woman - push him along the 'right path'. It's hard to ride the tiger.

My fantasies rushed past me as I came yesterday - twice. Denis, Lyonia, Shtukun, Marat(s)... Marat 1 is a tall swarthy Karakalpak boxer who is at the Workers' Prep Faculty of MGU, hoping to study law. I picked him up (or he me) is a park nearby, and though we don't fuck, he sleeps over and smothers me with lots of Eastern sensuality. Marat 2 is a Kazakh conscript that I buy dope from, short with a dazzling smile, though his body is fat and his legs bowed. I'd like to be fucked by a soldier - what can I say? The peacenik from pip-squeak Canada. Funny how I'm about to meet McTaggart, the granddad of GP, and another Canadian peacenik with a Russian bent (and love interest). I can't explain Lyonia or Marat. Maybe Denis - he's the witholding, manipulative, playful mother to my suffering, slavish, slightly baleful father. But I write here because I need to feel them, to know their truth, however fleeting. Just like I needed to feel the emotional tidal wave at the White House to know the truth of democracy, no, humanity.

I'm sad because I'm happy.

September 13, 1991

Ha! Friday the 13th. My last day at MN; it's lost its crazy hold on me at last. It was fun, and Voronin commissioned an article from me on GP, but I've got my growing role at GP on my mind. I'm falling into a KGB Gensec role - making contact with activists across the country, mailing out thousands of letters and reading all the incoming mail.

Shtukun has seduced me. I've fallen again (in love, of course), but he's avoiding me now, and his mother's as bad as the rest, hanging up or confronting me: "What do you want from my son?" We went to Regicide, about the murder of Tsar Nikolai and family, starring Michael Macdowell, after a blissful Saturday vegging out. He woke me up in the night in the bed beside me - "I'm cold", though it was definitely not cold - and I threw my blanket over him. He hesitatingly caressed my foot with his and I moved slightly closer, jacking off. Our heads touched, and he caressed my forehead with his. I moved on top of him as we kissed. He spread his legs, bent at the knees, and I mounted him and came almost immediately. He embraced me and caressed my back, our heads together, and whispered "Next time."

But then he stood me up Friday and Saturday nights and hasn't phoned. Is he really unstable, belonging in his 'psikh dom' [psyichiatric hospital), where he went to avoid the army? Am I? Is he angry and resentful of our illicit passion? Will he give us away? Betray me to Denis?

I would like to help him - give him something more precious than a baseball cap, a t-shirt, booze and grass (or even sex) - though all the above are beautiful with him. He has a wonderful wild, elusive smell, and a sad, old, sexy, wise smile.

How dull everyone else seems in comparison. I'm not so angry anymore for having my pride hurt when he stood me up. I'd rather get stoned and fantasize our gentle funny playful times together than sit with Marat or Daniel, knowing they won't go that extra step. When Daniel appeared last night to wheedle a bottle of wine from me for his girlfriend, I was resentful. I'd have given both bottles to Volodya without a thought.

Ah, Denis, forgive me my philandering. I love you, though a long-term relationship is hard to imagine. Will you still want to fuck when you come back? Will I?

September 16, 1991

A close call. The short colourblind Lyosha, soldier acquaintance via Daniel, showed up with some thugs to rob me. I stupidly opened the door not on the chain, and they barged in. His story was I insulted him by not taking his clothes to keep for when he wants to change into civilian dress, which is illegal for conscripts to do. [I learned later he was already AWOL.]

I knew immediately what they were up to and panicked, then calmed down and talked with him about Marat while his friends drank my cognac.

He said he was leaving soon for Kazakhstan. He brought some grass but said, "This will poison you."

They hinted at the computer as we sat around. Lyosha told me to pour some whiskey, that we would toast my moving to a new apt, as his friend Sergei gathered up the tape deck and some tapes, stuffing them in his bag. Wiping my face in his shit, toasting his victory.

To avoid being killed or mugged, or losing the computer and money, which belonged to GP, I played along with them.

Sergei and Alexei wanted to beat it - the first sign of them losing momentum. Up to that point, it had been a cool tour de force - smiles, joking, drinking.

But Lyosha, like a Genet con, couldn't leave well enough alone. "I want some Marlboros."
"I don't have any."
Then "Where's your little dope jar? Maybe I'll just have a look around for it. Maybe I'll find some dollars."
"Let's go," insisted Alexei. "No, no. I want some dollars," said Lyosha calmly.

I slowly picked up the dope jar from the table and threw it gently out the (thank God) open window, and then moved for the door. Either they didn't know what I was doing, or they weren't into mugging. Lyosha's two helpers actually looked well-groomed and intelligent. Only Lyosha tried to stop me, but I reached the door. He's more bark than bite, it seems, and I'm not unfit.

Foolishly they had not bothered to lock the door. I rushed out into the hall and rang the doorbell of the neighbour, who just happens to work for the militia, and screamed for help. No militiaman, but the other neighbours, an architect and his father, came out and I knew I was safe. Thank God that after 2 years being empty, the apt next door had new tenants.

By that time, Sergei had fled down the stairs. Alexei tried to threaten the neighbour, but the neighbour noticed the cassettes falling out of his bag and said "Who's are these?" "Mine," I said, taking courage and the cassettes back. But Lyosha played the blackmailer to the end, threatening me with 'the evidence' on the street. "One of my friends left his leather jacket behind," meaning my jacket. By then I had closed and locked the door. "I'll be back," he threatened as he headed down the stairs.

I'm resolved not to let myself get sucked down into the hell-hole of post-Soviet barbarianism. I'll keep my home simple and stop being so desperate for risky adventures. I survived this time by controlling my desperation - at the door when they barged in, and when Lyosha tipped the balance with his demand for dollars.

Tomorrow is Denis's birthday. Happy birthday, Denis!