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.

 

I came across an oral sex lover

Before I knew where the gay hangouts were, I had one significant affair. True, an unsuccessful one, as it soon became clear. It was sometime in the mid-1960s. I was already in my second year in the college. The institute was not prestigious, the student were not attractive - mainly from rural areas, and, basically, it was "Slavic colorlessness". Of all this faceless mass, only a few representatives of the Caucasus stood out clearly. It was they who attracted my attention, and with through various schemes and tricks I tried to get to know them (at the time everyone smoked, there were smoking rooms, people easily entered into conversation there, and this made my task easier).

I liked one student with very dark oily eyes. He was from another faculty. It took me a long time to get to know him. I studied his class schedule, “accidentally” appeared near him when his lectures ended, stalked him in different places. In the end, we got to know each other. His name was Basil, he turned out to be an ethnic Greek from Tbilisi, Georgia. He was several years older than me and lived in an institute hostel. We began to communicate and meet, walk and chat. One evening we went to the park, sat down on a bench and began kissing passionately. And it was he who started it first. Well, I thought, my dream has come true! I “ordered” it for myself, and here it was. I fell in love, was jealous of him, terrible pictures were drawn in my mind that he was with others, I was jealous of him over women who brazenly flirted with him. For a long time this bench in the park, where we first began to kiss, was a holy place for me, I often went to sit there.

It was necessary to somehow fuck, finally. He lived in a hostel, my parents were at home. I've been waiting a long time for the moment when I'll be alone in my apartment. And then one day my family went for the whole evening to the theater. It was then that I invited Basil. Everything started out great: I lit the candles, there was a bottle of wine, all sorts of conversations began. Then I laid an old fur coat in front of the stove with burning coals (like a fireplace). We lay down in front of the “fireplace”, and our passionate kisses, cuddling, caresses began again.

At this point, all my happiness began to quickly give way to disappointment. Something strange happened: Basil began to push my head closer to his dick (the dick was of a decent size, one might say, big). Although I had already heard about dick sucking, I was completely unprepared for this. I thought that he would fuck me in the ass, I already gave myself enemas,  but I just had to take his dick in my mouth. Sucking cock it is not enough, it can only be a prelude to real fucking.

And the most disgusting thing about it was that after I sucked his dick (supposedly he believed that it was some dirty action), he no longer kissed me. When I tried to approach his face, he abruptly turned away as if from someone infectious. He turned out to be fucking hygienist.

I didn’t like it very much right away, but by inertia I was still in love with him, still running after him, still waiting for situations of intimacy with him. I hoped that he would eventually fuck me, but every time the same thing happened. Kissing, sucking his cock, then not touching my lips as if I were a leper. Fie on him!

Then I found out that he didn’t fuck women either. His sex life was limited only to what we did from time to time - oral sex with me.

Finally, I got tired of it. We were friends, but I already avoided sexual activities with him. This began to bother him. I remember how he once asked: “Why don’t you want to be with me anymore, I have such a big one! You won't find anyone with that big one."

In the end, I started feeling physical disgust for him. Somehow I restrained myself, continued to play "friendship".

Despite the fact that we broke up, he invited me for a vacation to his place in Tbilisi. I flew there in January 1967, lived with him almost in the very center of the city (of course, with no sex). In Tbilisi, I was stunned by the looks of Georgian men. I stared at them. However, any dating did not work out, and there were no sexual innuendos. I did not yet know the meeting places for men. One day, Basil said to me as if in jest: “Just don’t meet men at the railway station.” I immediately rushed to the Tbilisi railway station, walked around there for a long time, sat in the waiting room, but it never occurred to me that I had to go into the public toilet there, where, apparently, something could happen.

Ten years passed. Someone knocked on our door. On the threshold stood a completely gray-haired, almost an old man - Basil. It seems that he stayed with us then and lived for several days. Allegedly, he got married, a child was born to him. It was in the year 1975, or about that time. In recent years, I travelled to Tbilisi and sought him out. He is retired and lives completely alone. He is eighty years old. It remains unclear to me what kind of mythical wife he has in Greece. He is basically a narcissist. So he lived out his life being proud of  his great tool, without getting along with anyone.

 

Things that did not happen

In earlier times, in public transport, you could exchange glances with guys and men. You look, he looks, and so on all the way. It's gone now, like so many other nice things. Nowadays if you look at someone a little longer than you should, they may ask: “What are you, a faggot?” Or even worse.

 One day I was returning from the City to my Suburb, and was wxchanging glances with a simple attractive straight man. Suddenly there was a stop, some minor insignificant stop. He gets up and leaves. Then he came up to my window in the carriage and began making signs - well, why are you sitting there, you dumbass, come out with me, let's go together ... But then the doors slammed shut and the train started moving. I stuck to the window. He waved his hand. I never met this man again, although I travelled by train along this route every day. I kept looking out for him. 

In 1967 I was in Georgia visiting my classmate. I was in a village located far from the capital. From there I was returning by train to Tbilisi. I was in a 3^rd class carriage, and every time I went for a smoke in the vestibule, one man stared at me, as if I were a holy icon. One time he followed me, also to smoke. Well, of course, in the vestibule we immediately started talking. It turned out that he was an Armenian from some Georgian village. It was just a normal ordinary man from the Caucasus, he had dark eyes. He never took his eyes off me! As if suddenly he met in me the man of his life. He travelled with his elderly mother, who paid no attention to anything. The station where they had to get off was approaching. The Armenian began to persuade me to get off with him and stay with him - "you will live with me." I refused, of course. Something told me that there would be no “happiness in life” there, and everything else was not worth getting off a long-distance train with God knows who and who knows where. So, I waved goodbye to him when the train started moving, and he slowly trudged somewhere with his elderly mother and luggage. He also gave me some sign of farewell.

 

 

Fear of the public bath

  

So I was overcome by the desire to see a naked man somewhere. I walked near the beaches, waiting for the moment when they change clothes in the bushes. But it would seem that the easiest thing was to go to a public bath! And - no, I couldn’t, I was embarrassed to undress among the crowd of people, I can’t even say why I was embarrassed. Apparently, it was some kind of an insurmountable psychological barrier.

In our Suburb there were two baths, I went there  but only in shower cabins separated from one another by thick stone walls. I kept planning for myself the day when I would finally go to a public bath, but I put it off for many years. In enclosed showers, of course, it was dreary. Someone was washing behind the wall, spitting, smoking. Sometimes two men bathed, their loud conversations could be heard. At the bottom there was a drain, one for two cabins, a rather large hole, and, bending down, one could look into the neighboring cabin and sometimes see something. Once I bent low to the floor and saw a spectacle that shocked me: a young man was fucking a radiator!

There were also bathrooms, where the ticket cost more. Once, having taken a ticket to the bathroom, I went there, pulled the door handle, it was unlocked, and there, in the bath, lay a man, a court of hanging clothes, a serviceman judging by the clothes on the hanger. He said: “do come here, come, what's wrong with that! Women wash with each other, so you and I will wash". I was confused, didn't know how to react to this, and quickly stepped back, slamming the door. Afterwards I regretted for a long time that I did not dare to go in and wash with him in the same bathroom. I pictured in my mind what could have happened in this case ...

It also happened that in the evenings I stood outside to the unevenly plastered windows of the men’s section of the public bath and tried to look at the naked men through the gaps. My presence near the windows of the men's bath did not raise questions from anyone, because it was a men's bath. At the same time many were lurking on the other side, where there were windows of the women's bath. They were chased from there and shamed.