First steps. Continuation

So, first they showed me the Saigon cafeteria, then they took me to Catherine's garden (see photo). “This is the main place,” they said. Wow, - I thought, - I passed by this place so many times, and how could I not notice that this is the very “secret meeting place” for “such” people!

Around the garden, on the outside pavement, there were benches, a row of them. In the light of the evening lanterns, one could see a lot of people were sitting on these benches. Others were walking up and down or just passing by. I immediately began to regret the missed opportunities. I had suffered for so long, but it was here, right in the center of the city, where “our” people seem to be gathering and where life was going on. How much I have missed!

Someone sat down next to me and we started talking. At the first inspection of those gathered in the cruising area, I was somewhat disappointed. There wasn’t anyone at all who could grab my attention. In other words, there were no real men there. Instead there were some drab creatures of different ages, badly dressed and filthy, staring at me because I was new.

It seems that on the very first evening I met a few regulars. They all had nicknames - female names, and they spoke in the feminine ("she", "her"). They invited me to take a walk down Main Street. They showed me a place at the central store (“our people are also standing here”), then we walked to the Moskovski railway station. There were several public toilets at the Moskovski railway station, and we went around them. Inside and at the exit of them there were faggots (there was no such word then) - unattractive, sloppy, unfashionable, ugly, unmanly. Not men, not guys, in general.

But there was a feeling that I joined some kind of secret society. It was strange that it existed under Soviet rule. It turned out that under the Soviet regime there was a certain “gap”, an oversight, that there was a secret community of people who recognized each other, winked at each other and did something that was condemned by society and even punishable by law. Under that regime I often felt like some kind of scout, saboteur, spy.

Over time, I learned about other places in the center of the City. It was the Central Department Store courtyard with four public toilets. Groups of faggots were standing in the entrance halls of the toilets, smoking. They were of different  ages, unattractive in every way, strangely dressed as if they were in women's pantsuits. Some were just freaks. Much later, already in the 1970s, a gay German from West Germany asked me: “How is it that you have such unattractive faggots in Russia (“nicht attraktiv”)? In Germany, such people look very different, they take care of their appearance, they dress fashionably, they run ahead of fashion.” Later I realized that our Russian faggots in those days copied Soviet women of low social status. They dressed like Soviet aunties and behaved accordingly.

At that time I still thought that I was unlucky, that I just had to come on the right day, at the right time, maybe on a weekend, when, as they said, “especially many people gather.” It also seemed to me that somewhere secretly there are people who do not show up in such places at all, and that you can somehow find them.

All in all I got into a kind of trap of futility. Every day I began to make rounds of all these places along the same route. I met some "guys" occasionally, but it’s sickening to remember this, because it was not worth the effort.

I felt frustrated because you just had to step a little aside from the cruising area, from the meeting place of freak faggots, and you could see many normal handsome guys and men. My eyes were spoiled for choice. However it will take a few more years, before I realized the futility of finding a partner in cruising areas. I will stop visiting them and focus my attention on the guys and men elsewhere. I'll switch to straight men.