![new york magazine lgbt russian nyc gay pride 2015 new york magazine lgbt russian nyc gay pride 2015](https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-fz9LVtEs3RM/TpicDRZhS9I/AAAAAAAADag/EfPO4nHu8O0/s320/karate%2B%252819%2529.jpg)
“I used to sleep with women but am sleeping with men right now ” “gay online, straight at my job.” Lots of awkward pauses, fumbled words, me feeling like an asshole. I wanted to ask people about what this large-scale Pride meant to them to get to this question, it seemed important that I first gather how they identified: “bi-romantic/homo-sexual,” said a red-haired femme, who was also a volunteer. Queer standoffishness (an international language apparently) combined with an (actual) language barrier threw me into self-doubt.
![new york magazine lgbt russian nyc gay pride 2015 new york magazine lgbt russian nyc gay pride 2015](https://api.time.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/150520-homosexuality-america-04.jpg)
I glanced around the bar, notebook in hand, looking needy and pained. Inside, the volunteers registering EuroPriders were young and aloof, saying maybe three words to me between them. In the courtyard, a rainbow flag hung at half-mast almost immediately, one of the organizers pointed out to me that it was the first time in the city’s history that a rainbow flag had been publicly displayed. On my first day reporting on EuroPride, I arrived with my recorder and my notebook to the headquarters, stationed in a cultural center downtown. But by the time I got to Riga, it had become obvious that somewhere along the yellow brick road, I had stepped in shit. When had the embodied excitement of queer desire become stagnated as a problem in my mind? I wasn’t sure exactly. As John Waters said, “I always thought the privilege of being gay is that we don’t have to get married or go into the Army.” As a young queer, I had been guided by desire, and had expected that desire to never end or arrive at an agreed-upon happy ending. Suddenly my life was filled with wedding registries, bridal showers, reports of ring shopping-and though I was happy for my friends, another part of me balked (and was jealous). This feeling was made more terrible by the legalization of gay marriage. Yup, lesbians were the sickest and the sweetest. I was able to process the relationship by publishing a quietly rageful essay that enumerated the ways Alice Toklas used to torture Gertrude Stein-withhold sex, mess with her transcripts-and nurture her-typing up her notebooks for publishers, providing a constant flow of encouragement and praise.
New york magazine lgbt russian nyc gay pride 2015 how to#
In other words, we really knew how to hurt each other. As intimately, wholeheartedly and quickly as we were capable of giving love, we could also take it away, just as quickly. The experience had given me a new angle on gay life: where I used to think lesbian love was the best love, and lesbian people the best people, I was now certain that lesbians were in fact the absolute worst.
![new york magazine lgbt russian nyc gay pride 2015 new york magazine lgbt russian nyc gay pride 2015](https://s1.eestatic.com/2020/11/20/actualidad/actualidad_537457971_165638199_1024x576.jpg)
The last woman I’d really liked had evaporated into thin air after three intense months when it was all over, I was dazed, bruised and practically hallucinating from the impact of the crash-and-burn. When I still thought gay bars were utopian spaces filled with magical queer people. My present-tense queerness was more jaded than before, though. The world needed to know about this politically expedient, historic occasion, and, according to me, I was The Queer for the job. Since then Latvia’s “embattled gay rights movement,” “desperate for support and visibility,” had worked tirelessly to bring EuroPride to Riga, hoping “that an event of scale would bring international attention to this issue.” Or that’s how I pitched it anyway. Latvia’s first LGBT Pride march in 2006 had been violently attacked by a mob armed with human feces and holy water, placing the country on Amnesty International’s Human Rights Watch list. I came across a feminist anarchist punk named Marina, who agreed to accompany me to one or all of the city’s gay bars-a bar called Purvs, meaning “swamp” in Latvian, advertised as a club for " gejiem, lesbietēm, biseksuāļiem, transvestītiem.” I visited another of the city’s gay bars, Golden, on the following trip.Īfter my grandparents died, I didn’t return to Riga until the summer of 2015, when VICE Magazine (print, RIP) enlisted me to report on EuroPride Riga 2015-the first time in the event’s 24-year history that it would take place in a post-Soviet nation. On one trip in 2007, I did a search on MySpace for “lesbians” in the area.