Then one day Sasha messaged me. It was a summer evening. He was 20 years old, with curly hair and icy blue eyes. As he recalled, when his mother found out he was gay, she wept. He had appeared on my Tinder feed because he’d been in Moscow for a summer music festival, but now he was back home with his mother in Tuapse, a town on the Black Sea coast. A few days later he suggested talking 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 initially shot through with envy: He was openly gay yet clearly happy. I’d always wanted to live like that, but I didn’t have the conviction. It was hard to stay mad, though. I had never seen anyone more beautiful than this man. I liked looking at his tanned face, at his brown hair pulled back in a ponytail and the gap between his front teeth. And he liked me too. “I like it when you smile,” he told me. I realized I could go on staring at my phone screen for a long time, and this thought scared me.
I immediately knew who could help me. That very night I called the clinic in Nizhny Novgorod to arrange an appointment. On the other end of the phone, Jan Goland informed me that he had already “cured” 76 men of homosexuality. “If you truly want it,” he said, “you could be next.”
Jan Goland began his practice in 1957, 24 years after the Soviet Union criminalized sodomy at the behest of Joseph Stalin. After that ban was enacted, open homosexuals had only two paths: go to prison or to psychiatric clinics. Unlike in Western countries, the atheist Soviet authorities did not turn to the power of the church, instead convinced that a purely scientific approach could be applied.
According to Goland, the famed cosmonaut Alexei Leonov once brought a gay friend to him for an appointment. The “treatment” Goland provided turned out to be successful, and soon the first man to ever conduct a spacewalk decided that that the therapist was a true genius. “On Leonov’s initiative,” Goland told me when I visited his clinic in 2016, “a Center for the Psychotherapy of Homosexuality and Sexual Perversions was to be opened in our city, but the cosmonaut’s request was denied by the Ministry of Health of the USSR.”
That’s why Goland’s Coryphée Psychiatric Center can be found in the basement of a psychiatric hospital in Nizhny Novgorod. The walls are hung with abstract, almost hallucinogenic pictures by those he calls his “cured patients.” At the end of a hallway is Goland’s office, full of the detritus of his 60-year practice: the therapy diaries of patients, and audio and video cassettes on which Goland has recorded their troubles.
As we sat down in his office, his hands shook as he flipped through his patients’ diaries, and he spoke so slowly that I almost didn’t understand him—he apologized, explaining that he wasn’t wearing his dentures that day. He was 80 years old, and proudly informed me that he had cured one homosexual almost for every year of his life. “Some years,” he told me, “I even had three or four patients with sexual perversions coming to me from all over the country.” In 1993, the sodomy ban had been removed from the Criminal Code of a new, modern Russia, and he began to see fewer patients. But in 2013 the authorities once again played into his hands by enacting the new ban on “gay propaganda among minors.” (In October, the State Duma passed a bill extending this ban to all ages.)
Vadim Smyslov
Source link
