Passing through Dagestan

 

In the distant 1980, it seems, in the month of October, I decided to make a trip to the Transcaucasus, not my first trip to those parts. The first stop was Makhachkala, the capital of the Autonomous Republic of Dagestan. I managed to immediately rent a room at the “Dagestan Hotel”, although it was a double room and someone else stayed there too. I immediately found a local cruising area, it was on the sea promenade, there was also a toilet and benches nearby. Classic cruising area! I sat down on the bench. Immediately, a handsome, but small Azerbaijani, who seemed to have come from Baku, hurried up to me. He really wanted to fuck me, but I kept refusing. I suspected that he had a small dick (although I'm not a dick size addict, still size matters!). The fact that he has a small one was later revealed to me by one Latvian faggot, prowling the same boulevard. Tall, blonde, with a characteristic Latvian accent, an obvious "girl" and a lover of cocks, he did not leave me alone, stuck to me like a limpet. It has always been strange to me that “girls” are so stubbornly trying to pick me up. This one, from Riga, literally begged: “Well, let me at least suck!” I got angry and scolded her: “You are crazy, we are in Dagestan, where men are overflowing with the desire to fuck someone, but you have not found anyone better than me. Go look for Dagestani men!”

At the hotel, in the hall where the reception was, I met a Dagestani guy. He came to Makhachkala to visit or find out something about his brother, who was in a remand prison there. There were no places in the hotel, and I invited him to sleep in my room, on one bed. He immediately fell asleep, but in the morning his cock got hard. He had a desire to fuck me. He asked if he may. However, I refused him, because my ass was completely unprepared for this action. I still regret that it happened this way.

This is where my Makhachkala adventures ended. I was afraid to bring anyone to the hotel, I had all my things and money there, a large amount intended for the upcoming long journey.

I left by bus for Derbent. There also turned out to be a place in a hotel, and a young Azerbaijani was in the room with me. True, he left for the night, returned only in the morning and suddenly began to apologize to me for being absent (why apologize?). He said that he had fucked a Russian barmaid from a station restaurant.

Derbent. Railway station:

 

In the evening I decided to go out, trudged through this provincial town to the station (where else!). A strong wind was blowing from the Caspian Sea, pieces of paper and garbage were flying in the air, the streets were deserted. Only the outlines of the huge Derbent fortress stood out in this autumn darkness. I came to the railway station, where everything was lit up, there were people, some kind of movement, life. People gathered waiting for a train to Makhachkala. I just stood at the wall in the waiting room, looking at people. I glanced at a handsome young man, a Dagestani… Suddenly he came up to me and asked:

- Are you a queen?

I was taken aback by this question. But I quickly realized that he was not familiar with the subtleties of the Russian language, that he had heard this word somewhere, but did not know about its correct use. I had to answer something vague. It was clear to me that he simply had in mind sexual relations between men and my attitude towards them.

His name was Niko, a Dargin, he was waiting for a train to Makhachkala. We started talking, went out to the platform, smoked there. It turned out that he served in the army in the suburbs of Leningrad. Cunning faggots did the following trick there: there was a long line to the cinema (sometimes the tickets were sold out), they bought one more ticket for the show in advance and looked out at the end of the line for someone to sell this ticket to. Then, when they were seated in the auditorium, the faggot was next to this guy and in the dark did something with him, at least touched him. This is exactly what happened to Niko. He was touched in the cinema during the film, and then invited to the apartment, where there was a "gay party", a bunch of drinking faggots. “And then something unusual happened, Niko says. "My dick got hard, and of course I started doing it with them too."

But then he told me something remarkable. He began to invite me (somehow not very forcefully) to go back to Makhachkala. He promised to make me know people. They have everything there secretly and exclusively by word of mouth. There was something like a secret community of lovers of sex between men. But everything is very covert, no publicity. So Niko was in such a community. It seemed to me that he was not sure whether it was possible to bring new people there.

He left, and I remained on the dark platform, trudging into an empty hotel room.

My first trip abroad

Prague. Wenceslas Square.
 

We all pinned great hopes on foreign countries. Firstly, not a single East European socialist country had an article in their criminal codes penalizing for homosexuality. Secondly, it seemed to us that there were “a lot” and that “it is common”. It was difficult to go on a package tour or by invitation even to the countries of the Soviet bloc. Often it was not possible to choose a country for a tourist trip. And so it happened that the first country I went to was Czechoslovakia. It was August 1972. I bought a package tour for 12 days - Prague and other smaller cities, incl. Karlovy Vary. With me in the group was also my friend, Alik B., of the same orientation, but ten years older than me.

The very crossing of the USSR border was an exciting event. A strange feeling gripped almost everyone in the first moments when the train was no longer on the territory of the USSR. I kept repeating to myself: “I am not in the USSR, I am outside of it, I am abroad, here, right here, there is no more USSR!” The train crossed the border already after midnight, in the dark, and then many tourists clung to the windows, stood for a long time in order to see the abroad, something different from what we have become accustomed to in our entire life in the Soviet Union.

- Look, look, what houses! Look, the cars are not like ours! - was heard in the carriage.

In the morning we arrived in Prague. It struck the Soviet tourist primarily with crowded shops, an abundance of clothes and shoes. Everyone had the same problem: how to spend the exchanged rubles so as not to miscalculate and not make a mistake.

On the very first day of my arrival there was a scandal because of me. After we settled in a hotel our guides suddenly announced that everyone must go to the Lenin Museum and some cemetery of communist leaders without fail. I said: "I will not go!" I had to urgently run to the city center and look for a "special cafe for homosexuals", which I had already heard about. - I'm not going with the group! I insisted. The whole bus was waiting for me for a long time, but in the end they left without me.

I alone walked from the hotel to the city center, to Wenceslas Square (before going on this tour, I even learned Czech and could speak it well). There was an underground passage on Wenceslas Square, and there were toilets in it. I immediately rushed into the toilet. I saw that one person was leaning towards me. He looked completely unattractive to me, but I decided to get all the information from him - where is the cafe where they gather, and so on. He immediately took me upstairs and led me to this cafe, it was called "Europe". Moreover, he told me that “our people” were gathering on the second floor, so it was necessary to go up there right away.

It was very strange to be in a gay bar! All the men or young people were sitting there. I thought that the waiters, probably, were also like that. And everyone around knows it, and nobody bothers!

I ordered myself a beer. Met some faggots, apparently regulars. They told me that there was also a gay night club "TT", but I did not dare to go there. On another day, I brought my older friend Alik there, and he was completely stunned, petrified... “And everyone who sits here just like that?”, he asked. It seemed to him that cars with policemen and KGB officers must immediately drive up, arrest everyone and send them to prison.

Sexually, Czechoslovakia disappointed me greatly, although for a while I tried to convince myself that I really liked everything, and I enthusiastically told everyone about my trip. There were no active men in the places of gatherings of faggots, they were only "girls", and even more passive in their essence than the Russian ones. True, the Czech "girls" looked better than the Russian ones, they were dressed fashionably, often mimicking men. Apparently, the European “system” has taken root there, when “the less passive fucks the more passive”. Such people in Russia were called "lesbians" and "shifters". All this, among other things, was combined with the Czech language, which sounds childish to the Russian ear (with many diminutive suffixes), which further reduced the feeling of being masculine. I met someone in Prague, went to spend the night, it turned out that I had to fuck and fuck, and at the same time he also fell in love with me. I could not understand why I was chosen for this role.

I'm in Prague on Wenceslas Square

A similar thing happened in Karlovy Vary, where there was a cruising area. Again I met someone, then we rubbed against each other, it was not clear what we were doing and we thought that we had "great love".

The only good thing about these Czech acquaintances was that later these people came to the USSR, brought good clothes, deodorants, after-shaves, and sold all this to us at a reasonable price.

I forgot to mention that before the trip to Czechoslovakia, when it was not yet known whether I would be allowed to go there or not, a KGB officer came to my house. “Well, you understand that the decision about your trip is made by us ... So ... We are interested in what people are talking about in the tour group, what kind of conversations are being held there ...”

But more about the KGB - later.

Babette

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.

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.