David Remnick: A while back, a writer, Masha Gessen, came on the program to tell the story of a man named Evgeny Shtorn. This was 2019 June, Pride month, and our episode was about the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall Uprising. Masha and I were talking about the way that many countries were moving gradually toward acceptance of LGBT people but around the world, other nations were on the opposite trajectory. Russia was among those instituting new forms of legal repression.

Evgeny Shtorn was one of many people whose lives were disrupted by that backlash. In some ways, I look back at that conversation with a sense of foreboding about what's happening now in parts of America and other parts of the world. Here's Evgeny Shtorn speaking with Masha Gessen.

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Evgeny Shtorn: Grey and windy and rainy sometimes.

Masha Gessen: I was walking with Evgeny Shtorn in Galway, which is a coastal city in Ireland. This is early May and I had first heard of Evgeny a couple of years ago when some friends let me know that he was looking for help trying to get out of Russia. Something horrible was happening to him. I got some more details later. Evgeny, can you start by talking about how you ended up in Ireland? I think the story starts in Saint Petersburg.

Evgeny Shtorn: No, the story starts in the Soviet Union in 1983, when I was born in Kazakh Soviet Socialist Republic.

Masha Gessen: Evgeny was born in Kazakhstan when it was still part of the Soviet Union. When he was a teenager, there was a recruiting push for young Russian speakers from Kazakhstan to go study in Russia and he did, and that's also when he came out.

Evgeny Shtorn: I was practicing same sex in school with boys, but I wasn't gay man at that moment. It just when I moved to Saint Petersburg, when I first went to 69 nightclub and another one which I liked more was [unintelligible 00:02:20] singers.

Masha Gessen: The singers.

Evgeny Shtorn: That was the very moment when I just realized that this is my culture, this is my music, this is my style, this is where I feel comfortable and I really feel part of it.

Masha Gessen: How old were you?

Evgeny Shtorn: 17, 18.

Masha Gessen: So right as soon as you got to Saint Petersburg?

Evgeny Shtorn: Yes. It wasn't yet an identity let's say. This is something that I didn't have in Kazakhstan. Obviously, I was thinking I'm the only one there. [crosstalk]

Masha Gessen: Well, except for the other boys.

Evgeny Shtorn: I think they also thinking they are the only one. [chuckles] It was interesting.

Masha Gessen: In Saint Petersburg, Evgeny met Alexander, who became his partner.

Alexander Kondakov: He's very bright person, I would say, stands out and you easily identify as a person with whom you want to be close. I stayed overnight at his place at a certain point and never apart since then.

Masha Gessen: Alexander wasn't in Ireland when I was there. We talked to him over Skype. Evgeny and Alexander had a room in a communal apartment in Saint Petersburg. They also had a cat named Musa.

Evgeny Shtorn: She's like Garfield. She [unintelligible 00:03:39]

Masha Gessen: You and Alexander and Musa are living in Saint Petersburg.

Evgeny Shtorn: Yes we were living on Vasilievsky Island in a huge kommunalka. [crosstalk] Super terrible.

Masha Gessen: Alexander got a PhD in sociology and started working at a nonprofit doing research on LGBT issues. This is in the mid-2000s when the gay movement in Russia is developing. It's not like Western Europe, but things are moving in the right direction. People are becoming more open and there are more spaces appearing. They're not just like community spaces and bars, but there is research, there are discussion groups, there are film festivals. Things are moving along well.

Evgeny Shtorn: Well, we were living in a real bubble, the NGO world, no one judge you for being same-sex couple.

Masha Gessen: There's some trouble with Evgeny's papers. Back when he became a student, he applied for his Russian passport and got it easily. 10 years later, he's suddenly told that there was a problem. Evgeny went back to the embassy of Kazakhstan and they rescinded his citizenship as well. Suddenly he finds himself stateless. He doesn't have a passport and he doesn't have the ability to travel.

Alexander Kondakov: It's just the kind of disabling status on an everyday level. Every policeman who stops you and looks at your papers knows that something is wrong with you. If you want to check in in a hotel, huge issue every time. They look at the papers of a stateless person and they don't understand what the status is, but they definitely know that it's officially bad.

Masha Gessen: Russia tells him he actually has a path to citizenship. He can stay in the country on a residency permit and apply for a passport in five years. He can't break any laws and he's got to work. He gets a job at the same NGO as Alexander, the Centre for Independent Social Research. Meanwhile, Russian politics is changing in a big way. In 2012, Vladimir Putin returns to the presidency after months of mass demonstrations.

Putin is immediately looking for a way to discredit the demonstrators. LGBT people make the perfect scapegoat because we stand in for everything. We stand in for the West. We stand in for all the things that have changed in the last quarter century that make you uncomfortable. We also stand in for the promise of going back to an imaginary past without gay people. Of course, no Russian thinks that they've actually ever met a gay person in person so that makes it really easy to create this image of the villainous queer people.

First Saint Petersburg and then the federal parliament passed a ban on what they call propaganda of homosexuality or propaganda of non-traditional sexual relations. You can't have any positive or neutral coverage of LGBT issues in any kind of media. You can't have public demonstrations, but the biggest purpose of this law is to signal that there is second-class citizens in Russia outside the protection of the law. That means that hate crimes skyrocket. Evgeny actually decided to go back to school and his subject of study is hate crimes against LGBT people.

Evgeny Shtorn: I was analyzing the court decisions on the murders of gay men, how people were killed in Russia and usually it's normal situation where two people are drinking and then one of them is declaring or proposing.

Masha Gessen: There's drinking. It seems like there's going to be sex and instead, there's a murder.

Evgeny Shtorn: Basically, the homophobia is in a very private spaces and this was my main finding.

Masha Gessen: Evgeny's finding was in direct contradiction to the state's message, which was essentially, you can do whatever you want in the privacy of your own homes, we just don't want you corrupting our children. In fact, violence was coming to people's homes. While Putin is cracking down on LGBT people, the other attack is on NGOs. The foreign agents law requires NGOs that get foreign funding to submit to special reporting requirements. The whole thing is designed to paralyze their work and also to designate them as pariahs. The center where Alexander and Evgeny work ends up on the list.

Here's Evgeny, a stateless person working for a foreign agent NGO, and studying LGBT issues, and he goes and applies for his Russian passport.

Evgeny Shtorn: I got a phone call. Evgeny [Russian language]

Masha Gessen: Calling from the migration service.

Evgeny Shtorn: Calling from the migration service. We are working with your application on citizenship. I said, "What is wrong with it?" "No, no, no. Everything is okay. We just would have to discuss it with you personally. Could you please come tomorrow at 10:00 AM?"

Masha Gessen: The man on the phone gave him an address, his name and a phone number but when he arrived the next day, that migration office was closed. Evgeny called the number and the man came down to meet him.

Evgeny Shtorn: Young, my age, more or less, somehow good looking even, well-dressed, polite. Went with him to the first floor and it was nothing just a camera and an ordinary door. We entered, the thing that I saw and that really impacted me was this huge portrait of Andropov.

Masha Gessen: Andropov.

Evgeny Shtorn: Andropov, yes.

Masha Gessen: Andropov was the head of the KGB and a hero of Putin's and a former head of the Soviet Union.

Evgeny Shtorn: Yes. Then he shows his [Russian language]

Masha Gessen: His ID.

Evgeny Shtorn: His ID.

Masha Gessen: His FSB ID.

Evgeny Shtorn: FSB ID.

Masha Gessen: The FSB is the Federal Security Agency, the successor agency to the KGB. As soon as Evgeny saw the FSB ID, he knew he wasn't there to talk about a passport. The conversation with the agent lasted two hours. They talked about his master's thesis and about the murders of gay men and the work of the center.

Evgeny Shtorn: What was terrifying is mostly he was naming some people that I won't name here. He was particularly interested in certain individuals, foreigners.

Masha Gessen: He wanted you to talk about them.

Evgeny Shtorn: Yes.

Masha Gessen: The man wanted Evgeny to agree to be an informant.

Evgeny Shtorn: Basically, his main attitude was very polite, but in a very subtle, very tender way he mentioned the law on espionage and the law of the traitor of motherland.

Masha Gessen: The prison sentences are essentially life in prison.

Evgeny Shtorn: Yes. Basically, my main goal was to at least get out of there, but also not to damage other people.

Masha Gessen: At the end of the interview, the FSB agent asked if they could talk again. Evgeny said sure basically anything to get out of there. He gets out of there, called Alexander, said everything is okay. As soon as they got home, Evgeny wrote on a piece of paper FSB.

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Masha Gessen: We're in the center of Galloway, which is terribly touristy, terribly shoppingy. It's one of those places that don't feel like a place to live.

Evgeny Shtorn: Somewhere people are coming to relax, spending the weekends and holidays.

Masha Gessen: Evgeny managed to get himself on a plane to Ireland. Ireland is not a bad place to land. It's generally very friendly to persecuted people, especially in some ways to LGBT people. The prime minister is gay. The country held the first successful referendum on same-sex marriage. There are definitely worse places to apply for asylum than Ireland. For example, in the United States, you might end up in detention, and you don't qualify for any public assistance. Ireland has one of the slowest asylum processes in the world. To somebody who is stuck in the process, it can feel just interminable.

Evgeny is living in what's called direct provision, which is this network of hotels and hostels, and former convents which are run by private companies but funded by the state. He has a small room with a single bed. He gets three meals a day. He can cook. He cannot have overnight guests, which means that Alexander can't come and spend the night with him. Alexander is not in Ireland with Evgeny.

Alexander Kondakov: I would go wherever he is, but I'm just a citizen of Russia. I have to get a visa to any country I want to go. It's been more than a year and so we both are waiting and waiting and waiting. You want someone who's been with you 15 years right beside you and you cannot have it. We don't know what future is bringing us.

Evgeny Shtorn: I just can't visualize the future. I can't see it.

Masha Gessen: What do you think is preventing you from imagining the future?

Evgeny Shtorn: Tiredness, I'm very tired. Do you know this feeling to wake up tired after sleeping 10 hours you wake up and you're tired? This is the type of tiredness I have.

Masha Gessen: Evgeny is taking a course at the University in Galloway because he felt a depression coming on. He spends every day in the library. He leaves the hostel in the morning, he reads and he writes until the library closes at ten o'clock at night.

I met other queer migrants in Ireland, I met people from South Africa, from Zimbabwe. The thing is, in some ways, it's becoming harder for LGBT asylum seekers to find a place in the world. Many countries don't grant asylum on the basis of persecution because of sexual orientation or identity. The United States is one of those countries, but it's getting harder and harder to get into this country to seek asylum.

That possibility of getting refuge is actually narrowing just as the world is becoming more polarised in the treatment of LGBT people. In some parts of the world, we're seeing incredible advances in LGBT rights, including really striking ones like India. In other countries, we're seeing a horrifying backlash. Kenya's highest court recently upheld a ban on gay sex. A new law in Brunei has made gay sex punishable by death by stoning. Even as global culture is pulling more people out of the closet, when the culture becomes more repressive, there's no closet to go back into so people end up really exposed.

Evgeny Shtorn: I found myself in a sense of nullified belonging. I don't belong to any country. I don't belong to any ethnic group, anything. Actually, my only diaspora is queer LGBT diaspora. That's where I feel they're part of this queer nation. This is my diaspora.

David Remnick: Evgeny Shtorn speaking with Masha Gessen in 2019. Masha tells me that since our story first aired, Shtorn received refugee status, and his partner Alexander found a job in Ireland. They were married in March.

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