I sit under the table, like I used to hide behind toilet cubicles in kindergarten. That was where I hid to look at half-naked men covered in mud—pages torn from my mother’s magazine featuring an article about mud baths. Silently, I hand you the photos and whisper:

This is Alexa. She and her friend Tropikanka are former drag queens. Now they run a banquet hall in my city. Even though they could just rent out the space, they try to throw parties for people, even cooking for them. Very gay, right? I mean, the word gay comes from Old French and originally meant cheerful, joyful. I don’t feel that way at all. Most of the time, I think I’m sad.

And this is me and my friend. He was born and lived for a long time in a village across from mine. Here, we’re trying to reconstruct how he once burned his diary filled with queer memories before moving to the city—so that no one would find it and read it. The word queer doesn’t quite suit me either. Queer is a reclaimed slur, but only for those who know English well enough to understand its history and for whom it was once an insult. To me, it’s just a word.

And this is a bench by the cradle, a lullaby in our museum of wooden architecture—a very touristy place. Once, I read an ethnographic study by Shchepanskaya, which mentioned that in our region, the word raspetukh or raspetushye was used. There’s no evidence that it was an identity in the first-person sense—only third-person accounts, so it’s more of a designation. The study told the story of Olya-deva, who was a healer and milked cows. It was described almost as if it were an identity, but after digging through other materials, I found no first-person testimonies. So I decided to go to Sura, where, according to the ethnographer, Olya-deva had been born.
I stayed with an elderly woman there, and she told me she knew about Olya-deva. She also told me about Raya-nanny, who used to ask people in Sura if she could babysit their children. She recounted this without judgment, as if it were just a part of life—nothing like the way Shchepanskaya had described it.
I’ve been babysitting my younger cousins since childhood. I love children and seem to get along with them well. Sometimes, I don’t understand—do I, like Raya-nanny, simply want to look after children, or do I actually want to have my own? In general, the phrase to have children is strange to me—like to acquire them. I don’t want that.

And this is a house burning in my city. Fires happen often because we have many old wooden houses that developers want to tear down to make way for new buildings. While researching raspetushye, I came across Skulachev’s work. In it, locals compared raspetukhs to a fiery serpent created by bad people to set fire to their enemies’ homes. This study came from the region farthest from the sea, and I wondered: Could this be because of the strong influence of another, more homophobic culture? This story feels eerily similar to what’s happening now.
Being me is treated as a crime, even though I don’t fully understand what being me means. All I know is that, nowadays, it definitely means knowing how to hide. My mother and I have a silent agreement—she doesn’t talk to me about the war, and I don’t talk to her about my personal life. Once, she told me that after I said, This isn’t a part of my life you’d want to know about, she cried all evening. I replied that I didn’t want to hide anything, to which she said, Better not say anything at all.

There’s another text, by the anthropologist Maksimov. It includes a section about Kolezhma. This book can be found in almost every home in Pomorye. In one of the editions, that section was simply missing. I still don’t understand why it was removed—or why it was included in the first place.

There’s a theory that the word petukh (rooster/cock), now an insult in Russian prisons, originated in Pomorye. Many Russian insults come from prison slang. This theory makes sense to me—our region had many GULAG camps, and most people know about the Solovetsky Special Purpose Camp. This, too, is a story about being a crime. People didn’t end up labeled petukhs only because of their sexuality or identity. For years, homosexuality and crime were intertwined, both inside and outside of prison. Hierarchies formed, and homosexuals were always pushed to the margins—even within the most marginalized societies.
I don’t know much about prison, but with everything happening now, it feels like I need to learn more.