Author: Dane Lowell
Submitted by: redadmin

Chapt. 21 - 1344 words
Columns :: Halloween: Church scarier than goblins

MOSCOW, Nov. 2, 2003 -- Comments:   Ratings:

Teaching Volodya cribbege
Halloween
Boys celebrate in gay clubs



MOSCOW, Nov. 2, 2003 -- Sometimes a chat is just a chat, like Volodya’s last night.

Still, a very pleasant one.

And I managed to keep my hands off him – at least off his private parts.

He says the conflict has eased a bit with his father, and he’s trying very hard not to cross him.

Aside from that, though, nothing has really changed. He still sees the girlfriend he’s engaged to only once a week – and not on Saturday night, which explains why he was able to make room for me on “Date Night No. 2.”

He brought a cake – it’s considered bad etiquette and very rude if you go to visit someone and don’t take a gift of some sort. Cakes are the most popular, but
Misha’s ex-Dima used to bring fruit and, once, even a watermelon. So we ate cake and drank the kozel – “goat” brand – Czech beer I had bought.

In Russia, “goat” has an even more negative implication than in America. It was a prison word to describe the victim of uninvited anal intercourse – the prison “cornhole-ee.” Some people still snicker when you order a “goat” in a kiosk or shop. But I’m not proud and it’s one of the best beers in Moscow.

When I first visited Russia 10 years with a tour of gay square dancers, I found out why so many Russians drank vodka: The beer wasn’t fit to drink. Literally. The situation changed just before I arrived – they must have known I was coming – when “Baltika” brand beer appeared, brewed in St. Peterburg by German biermeisters in a factory designed by the Germans. Since then many brewers of like quality have appeared on the scene and I now prefer Russian beer to the standard American mass produced schlock: Bud, Schlitz, Busch, Miller’s, etc.

So while we drank our “goat” and ate our cake last night, I taught Volodya how to play cribbage. “A super game,” he pronounced after he beat the shit out of me in our first match.

He also met Zhenya for the first time, and discovered that not only are they the same age, 19, but are from towns only a few kilometers apart and actually have friends in common.

So the coincidences continue. Volodya and I first met in Turkey four years ago; we share the friendship of Andrei Y ; and he and my adorable boyfriend practically know each other.

When Volodya left, he promised he’d be back next Saturday night because we had such a good time, “and you have such nice friends.”

Does he know – or imagine – that I am having sex with “such nice friends?” Would he care?

Will he ever become “such a nice friend” as Zhenya or Sasha?”

I doubt it. But even the remote possibility is enough to keep my fantasy high stoked and my rose colored glasses in place.


Yegor’s very close friend Atar, a native of Tbilisi, the capital of Georgia, dropped by the day before, on Halloween, and got rather drunk and very friendly. We held hands – at his instigation – and played smacky mouth, and could have had sex if I’d have said the word; but he really didn’t turn me on despite the fact that he’s only 24, very sweet, and, according to Yegor, has a rather substantial cock.

Halloween has taken hold in a big way in Russia over the last three years as a great excuse for a party. Costume rental is suddenly a big business, and devils, ghosts, and witches abound, which is causing the Russian Orthodox church considerable consternation. A couple of years ago a columnist for the English language Moscow Times tried to organize a Halloween party for her daughter’s first grade class and was soundly castigated. The children were given a lecture on the evil inherent in the very thought of glorifying the creatures of the nether world.

And now the Department of Education has flatly forbidden schools to celebrate it. One of my students, Olga, an accountant with the Corning fiber optic company, approves the ban, and agrees with the Department of Education that “we have enough traditional Russian holidays to celebrate without borrowing any foreign ones.”

But her colleague Irina, mother of a 6-year-old, disagrees. She sees it as “one more day for the children to have fun. Why shouldn’t they celebrate Halloween?”

In response to Olga’s query about Halloween in America, I told her about the “trick or treat” custom of kiddies in neighborhoods.

“What’s a trick?” she asked. So I told her about one of the most common “tricks” of Iowa farm teenagers when I was a kid. Halloween was the excuse to get your revenge on a neighboring carmudgeon or maybe somebody you just didn’t like. When the poor bastard would go out to take his morning constitutional on Nov. 1, he’d find his outhouse lying on its back with nothing but a couple of stinking holes staring back at him out of the ground.

The “trick or treat” – sans trick nowadays -- custom hasn’t yet made its way here. As it turns out, though, in pre-revolutionary Russia during “Svyatki,” the week before Russian Orthodox Christmas on Jan. 7, kids used to go from house to house asking for gifts like they do in America on Halloween. The practice continued in the villages up until World War II, but today it’s only a quaint memory, Olga says.

The church’s condemnation of Halloween notwithstanding, Satan seems to have prevailed mightily over the last three years, and the event has now become modishly popular among teenagers and young adults. So Yegor, Zhenya, Anton, and Atar set out about 10:30 on Halloween night to celebrate with fellow gays at the Three Monkeys club. I didn’t go because I had a morning class the next day. Instead, I watched Johnny Depp in “Dead Man” on my VCR player with Sasha before he and I bedded down for the night.


All three of the boys were clamoring for costumes, but the only thing I could offer was the Stetson hat I had bought in San Francisco 15 years ago and the Western shirt and bolo tie I used to wear to gay square dances. Since I had given the shirt and the bolo to Anton a year ago, he had first dibbs.

To my surprise he showed up about midnight. “Aren’t you going to the club?” “No.” “Why not?” “I don’t want to,” he mumbled as he started getting ready for bed. Apparently another fun night with Denis.

Yegor and Zhenya showed up about 7:30 the next morning and immediately passed out for the rest of the day. This is SOP for club-goers. Since the metro quits running at 1 a.m., and since the vast majority of young clubbers don’t have cars and can’t afford taxis, they spend the entire night at the club dancing and drinking till the metro starts running the next morning at 5:30.

When Yegor finally stirred that afternoon, I learned that Atar had been turned away at the door of the Three Monkeys because he had been too drunk.

Many restaurants now also celebrate Halloween, and drag shows have become very popular. As in America, a lot of guys – queer and otherwise – use the occasion to fulfill their fantasies and get dressed up in mama’s – or somebody else’s -- clothes. Cute – and some not-so-cute -- guys in drag have become a fairly common sight in the city center on Halloween night.

When I was living in Wash., DC, the site for the weekly Lambda Square gay square dancing was the Swedenborgian church on 16th St. One year we had a Halloween Square dance and Chuckie, the youngest, most adorably cute guy in the club was dressed fit to kill in his miniskirt and deb sweater. As we left the church, a Mustang full of Georgetown U. Jocks screeched to the curb and invited him to join their party.

“Oh, honey,” he shrieked to the rest of us in his Atlanta accent, “Ah just made rent.”

The Mustang full of red-faced frat boys burned rubber for two blocks.

This was not among the reminiscences I related to Olga.