Around 1973, Babette entered my circle of friends. So he was baptized among
us. He was then a little over twenty and studied at some university. Tall and
spectacular Slavic blonde. First of all, Babette introduced a new style of
dress and behavior. He created a new look, so to speak. Unlike the sluts from
the cruising area or boring intellectuals who walked around in what looked like
women's trouser suits and unkempt old women's sweaters, she began to dress
fashionably, in a Western way, to get or buy from foreigners beautiful shirts,
shoes, deodorants, colognes (all this was not available in the USSR). We met
gays from the socialist countries - from Hungary, Czechoslovakia or GDR - and
they sold fashionable things to us, because they needed Soviet money but the
official exchange rate in the USSR did not suit them.
Babette also introduced a new style of communication, a specific language
based on a witty play of words from gay jargon. So our meetings and walks
around the city center became fun and entertaining.
But Babette's main achievement was that he was the first to realize that it
was possible to approach people "not like that", i.e. straights. Why
go to gay meeting places, make daily rounds of them and each time make sure
that “there are the same people again” or that “there is no one suitable at
all”?
That's how Babette once one day came up to a straight man (or a man from
the Caucasus), said something to him, chattered him up and, in the end, had sex
with him. After a while it became a system. And after a while, I myself
switched to the same system. We can say that it was very successful. But more
on that later.
