At first it was just someone else’s story. In the summer of 2016, when I was 21 years old, I was writing for a Moscow-based news website when I first heard about the human rights activist Dima Zhdanov, who had been in a wheelchair for a number of years—the result of a failed suicide attempt. When I interviewed him, he told me about the evening he came home to find that his boyfriend had been beaten and raped by two unidentified men who then fled the scene. Stepping over the mutilated body of his partner, who was barely alive, Zhdanov climbed over his balcony railing and let himself fall. When he was later found on the sidewalk, he could no longer move.
I soon published an article about Zhdanov, which my news site labeled for readers aged 18 and over—the standard age limit imposed on all stories about gays published in Russia since the summer of 2013, when Vladimir Putin signed a law banning the distribution of so-called “gay propaganda” among minors. After we ran the piece, I pitched my editor a follow-up story. It was clear that gays in Russia had serious reason to fear for their lives. In Moscow, St. Petersburg, and other major Russian cities, members of the Dobrоta gang (whose name, in a sinister twist, means “Kindness”) were seeking out gays on Grindr and Hornet, then going to their homes to beat and extort them. That kind of existential threat made my editor curious. If both roving gangs and the regime itself were trying to purge Russia of gays, did gays ever feel compelled to try to alter their sexuality themselves?
My assignment was to track down gay men who had done just this, and I had two weeks to file the piece. But a month later I had yet to make any progress. For one thing, I typically avoided talking to gay people, which almost certainly stemmed from my deep-seated homophobia. I remember saying “I hate faggots” to one of my female classmates at college. I avoided the streets where I knew there to be underground gay clubs—I didn’t want any of their patrons to take me for one of them. When yet another attempt was made to hold a gay parade in Moscow, I rubbed my hands together and thought: “Three, two, one… and here come the police with their batons.” In my school years the worst possible insult was to be called a “petukh” or “rooster”—prison slang for a passive homosexual who is routinely raped by other men. The worst thing my mother ever said to me was, “Why are you growing your hair long? You’re not gay.”
Even the encounter with Zhdanov had not awakened any compassion in me. (Now, rereading the story I wrote, I see how I described him, in a single word—“a loser.”) That kind of homophobia was not uncommon; Russia was an incredibly homophobic country. Barbershops refused to admit gay patrons. Putin signed a law banning the adoption of children by same-sex couples. I remember a state TV host declaring that hearts from gay organ donors were unsuitable for transplants, suggesting they instead be burned and buried. And Patriarch Kirill, the head of the Russian Orthodox Church—the church into which I was baptized—asserted that homosexuality was a “loss of morality.”
In this homophobic society, it was far easier for me to hate gay people than to face what I’d been avoiding since my childhood: That I myself was gay.
I’m five years old and in kindergarten, lying on a bed beside the neighbor boy. We pull down our underwear and take turns putting each other’s penises in our mouths—and in the evening I innocently tell my parents about it. This is the first sexual memory I have. “You’re a petukh,” says my father as he hits me across the face. “If this happens again, I’ll bury you alive.” My teachers, the other boy’s family, and all of my relatives would learn about the incident. The village where I grew up was small, and soon I no longer wanted to leave the house.
Flash forward: I’m seven years old and at my grandmother’s house. A relative sitting at the computer asks me to get down on my knees, then shoves his penis in my mouth, throws his head back, and sighs. Later, I spit out his sticky pubic hair while we have dinner with the rest of the family. This goes on for a year: in his bedroom while the rest of the family are at the market, in his car, in the bathroom. (Because I’m just a kid, what harm is there in a little bath?) He calls me down to the basement and hoists me onto his lap. He’s not wearing any underwear; it’s dry, it hurts. He says that we’ll continue a little later. I find men attractive. He knows this, he uses it—and it’s our little secret. It all comes to an end when my grandfather walks in on us and sees the semen flowing from my mouth onto the floor. My mother cries and beats me. They keep me at home for another six months, and each member of the family makes an unspoken vow to forget it all, as if nothing had ever happened.
Now I’m 14 years old, living with my parents in an apartment in Moscow. On a social network I make a fake profile posing as a woman. I tell myself that this is just a way to learn how to better communicate with other men. My name is Alina. I work in a library and live in a penthouse. I’m sensitive yet vulgar. Men like Alina. They write to me describing how they want to do me in my car, and I feel good—I get aroused. Alina gets messages from a national rowing champion and a TV presenter, from flight attendants and the personal guard of a high-ranking Chechnyan politician. Years pass and I hardly use my own online profile, while in Alina’s chats I receive thousands of dick pics and requests to meet up. Alina never ages. When I talk about her, I sometimes forget that she’s just me.
I’m 18 years old and back in my village. Six pallbearers are carrying my grandfather’s coffin. I’m crying, but not because he’s no longer here—I’m glad that he’s dead and will never again remember what he witnessed. I feel lighter, and that same evening Alina gets a DM from a man in a neighboring village. She confesses for the first time that Alina is in fact me, but the man is so turned on that it doesn’t matter. Within an hour we are sitting in his car, parked in an open field. On his penis there’s a large birthmark and a white, foul-smelling film. Liquid fills my mouth, then he abruptly asks me to get out and drives off. Standing in front of the bathroom mirror I yank out my tongue and run a razor across it, trying to cleanse myself with the taste of blood and soap.
It felt like some kind of schizophrenia: I would masturbate to pictures of men’s torsos sent to Alina, all the while denying the reality that Alina didn’t even exist. As I dreamed of having sex with these men I matched with, feelings of self-loathing took hold. Then I began to binge-eat. My goal was to make myself look hopelessly obese, so that my loneliness would seem more logical. At six feet tall, I soon weighed over 240 pounds. One time I went to the bathroom and found that I couldn’t pee; a spasm had caused the folds around my groin to suck in my penis until it had disappeared completely.
When he assigned me the piece on conversion therapy, my editor didn’t know anything about my sexual orientation or my history with men. Nor did anyone else outside my family. And I wanted to keep it that way. I didn’t want to have to explain my past. Then I had an idea: Conversion therapy might not just be a good story, it could be my chance to leave that past behind, to permanently cure what I’d come to think of as my disease.
From that moment on, the article ceased to be just a piece for the website; it was now the basis for my own personal plan of action. Except I couldn’t find any information online about conversion practices in Russia. All I had to go on were accounts of the Western experience of conversion therapy, like Sad to Be Gay, a 2005 BBC documentary that follows a reporter at a Christian conversion therapy clinic in Tennessee. The journalist in that film said he was ready to swallow a pill that would cure his homosexuality. I wanted one for myself.
But I soon found that conversion therapy is less linked to religion in Russia than it is in America. There were no church groups for me to infiltrate, so I devised a new way to go undercover for my reporting: Tinder. This time I added my own photos, and quickly began chatting with guys. I wrote the same thing to everyone: “I am a journalist writing a story about people who have been treated for homosexuality.” Which was mostly true, except for one thing: I pretended to be hetero. As with my creation of Alina, I still felt that I needed a disguise—to admit that I was gay would have seemed like a one-way ticket to a new life that I wasn’t prepared for.
As it turned out, Tinder was fertile ground for my research. First I met Ivan, from Moscow. In 2012, when he was 16, his parents had taken him to the Moscow Center for Legal and Psychological Assistance in Extreme Situations in an attempt to suppress his attraction to men. Headed by Mikhail Vinogradov, a psychiatrist who regularly appeared on the Russian TV show Battle of the Psychics, the center regularly employs psychics and parapsychologists. When this “treatment” was unsuccessful, his parents sent him to the Marshak Clinic—a drug and alcohol rehabilitation center outside Moscow. When Ivan left the clinic, he found he no longer had a home: His grandfather wouldn’t let him into the family’s apartment, simply telling him, “Ivan no longer lives here.”
But my main source of information was Andrey Gogin, a man who concealed his face in all of his Tinder photos. He told me his treatment began back in 1989, when, with his mother, he went to a sexology clinic in Moscow to consult a psychiatrist by the name of Sergei Agarkov. Andrey recalled that his treatment alternated between the administration of unknown drugs and hypnosis sessions, as is common practice in conversion psychiatry, but he said it didn’t work. Then Agarkov sent him to the sexologist Sergei Liebig in St. Petersburg, who in turn sent him to Nizhny Novgorod, to see the renowned sex pathologist Jan Goland. By the time Andrey and I began our correspondence, both Agarkov and Liebig had died, but judging by recent articles on his clinic’s website, I saw that Jan Goland was still treating patients for “sexual perversions.”
Andrey spoke to me about the impact of his treatment. He said that Goland used a three-stage conversion process: During the first stage, with the help of hypnosis, patients are plunged into what Goland called a “sexual-psychological vacuum,” a void between sexual orientations where homosexuals are no longer interested in men but not yet interested in women. At this point, patients are shown videos of Goland’s former clients recounting stories of their “recovery.” (According to Andrey, Goland once recommended to Agarkov that patients also be given high doses of caffeine and apomorphine, a drug used to induce nausea and vomiting, while the psychiatrist turns on gay erotic videos. Goland denies giving patients any medication.)
The second stage of therapy seeks to strengthen the patient’s attraction to women: He is made to watch heterosexual erotica and told to take note of attractive features in women when walking around town. For the third stage, Andrey told me, the patient must have sex with a woman and describe the experience in detail to Goland.
In Andrey’s case, problems arose during the second stage. “I didn’t begin to feel attracted to women,” he wrote to me. “Instead, my sexuality felt clogged up.” He would get a headache if he was riding on the bus and passed a guy wearing shorts. Standing in line behind young men and smelling the once-appealing tang of male sweat would bring on attacks of fear and anxiety. “I feel nauseous when I walk on the beach and see boys in swimming trunks,” he wrote. After his therapy, Andrey became depressed, ballooned up to 400 pounds, and began to contemplate suicide.
I had begun to grapple with severe depression myself. Thoughts of suicide came to me from time to time, but they were always subdued, partly by fear, partly by the idea of my mother, drowning in loans, having to pay for my funeral. And I turned a blind eye to the other side effects of conversion therapy that Andrey described. They were nothing compared to the feeling of inner purity I would have if I could actually make the transition to being straight.
My correspondence with Andrey led me to the website of the clinic in Nizhny Novgorod, where I read about dozens of “cured” homosexuals. But for several weeks I put off dialing Jan Goland’s number. I was too embarrassed to call a psychiatrist and admit to being gay. Unlike the guys on Tinder, there was no point in lying to him. In the meantime, I focused instead on searching Tinder for more men who had undergone conversion therapy. With each new match, I noticed that I was beginning to feel less like a journalist looking for sources, and more like a man looking for lovers.
Then one day Sasha messaged me. It was a summer evening. He was 20 years old, with curly hair and icy blue eyes. As he recalled, when his mother found out he was gay, she wept. He had appeared on my Tinder feed because he’d been in Moscow for a summer music festival, but now he was back home with his mother in Tuapse, a town on the Black Sea coast. A few days later he suggested talking on FaceTime. I agreed, telling myself it was just a phone interview for my research.
We talked for about ten minutes. As Sasha spoke, I was initially shot through with envy: He was openly gay yet clearly happy. I’d always wanted to live like that, but I didn’t have the conviction. It was hard to stay mad, though. I had never seen anyone more beautiful than this man. I liked looking at his tanned face, at his brown hair pulled back in a ponytail and the gap between his front teeth. And he liked me too. “I like it when you smile,” he told me. I realized I could go on staring at my phone screen for a long time, and this thought scared me.
I immediately knew who could help me. That very night I called the clinic in Nizhny Novgorod to arrange an appointment. On the other end of the phone, Jan Goland informed me that he had already “cured” 76 men of homosexuality. “If you truly want it,” he said, “you could be next.”
Jan Goland began his practice in 1957, 24 years after the Soviet Union criminalized sodomy at the behest of Joseph Stalin. After that ban was enacted, open homosexuals had only two paths: go to prison or to psychiatric clinics. Unlike in Western countries, the atheist Soviet authorities did not turn to the power of the church, instead convinced that a purely scientific approach could be applied.
According to Goland, the famed cosmonaut Alexei Leonov once brought a gay friend to him for an appointment. The “treatment” Goland provided turned out to be successful, and soon the first man to ever conduct a spacewalk decided that that the therapist was a true genius. “On Leonov’s initiative,” Goland told me when I visited his clinic in 2016, “a Center for the Psychotherapy of Homosexuality and Sexual Perversions was to be opened in our city, but the cosmonaut’s request was denied by the Ministry of Health of the USSR.”
That’s why Goland’s Coryphée Psychiatric Center can be found in the basement of a psychiatric hospital in Nizhny Novgorod. The walls are hung with abstract, almost hallucinogenic pictures by those he calls his “cured patients.” At the end of a hallway is Goland’s office, full of the detritus of his 60-year practice: the therapy diaries of patients, and audio and video cassettes on which Goland has recorded their troubles.
As we sat down in his office, his hands shook as he flipped through his patients’ diaries, and he spoke so slowly that I almost didn’t understand him—he apologized, explaining that he wasn’t wearing his dentures that day. He was 80 years old, and proudly informed me that he had cured one homosexual almost for every year of his life. “Some years,” he told me, “I even had three or four patients with sexual perversions coming to me from all over the country.” In 1993, the sodomy ban had been removed from the Criminal Code of a new, modern Russia, and he began to see fewer patients. But in 2013 the authorities once again played into his hands by enacting the new ban on “gay propaganda among minors.” (In October, the State Duma passed a bill extending this ban to all ages.)
At his clinic, Goland told me about a patient who, once “cured” of homosexuality, “developed schizophrenia, yet remained heterosexual.” He spoke of an economist and Riga native who “became obsessed with sex with women.” He continued: “In every one of them I was able to build an indifferent, icy attitude toward members of their own sex, and all thanks to autogenic training and hypnosis. By submerging them in these states, I taught them how to crack their minds like a walnut.”
The consultation with Goland cost $300, which my editors paid. But the doctor told me I would need two or three sessions a week at the same rate—fees the website could not cover. I wasn’t sure how I’d pay for the sessions, but for a start, I planned to sell my laptop and cell phone. I’d have to make other concessions too: Goland said I would need to relocate from Moscow to Nizhny Novgorod for at least a year. He advised me to find the book A Parent’s Guide to Preventing Homosexuality and read it through carefully. And he admonished me that the treatment required a wholesale detachment from potentially sexual situations with men: no more gyms or banyas. In order to exert total control, he even had one of his patients living in the clinic itself, working as a security guard.
Finally, he invited me to sit down in front of the camera. On the walls hung diplomas from international symposiums, none of which I was able to find any information about when I later searched for them online. “This video will not be seen by anyone but me,” he said before he began the recording.
For the first time in my life, I decided to open up about my story.
I told him about what happened with the other boy in preschool. About my father’s threats and my mother’s tears. About my relative locking me in the basement. About Alina’s rendezvous with a stranger in a parked car. I described everything Alina had written to those men: how their bodies excited her, how she wanted their caresses and intimacy.
Sitting in front of Goland, it dawned on me, as each memory arose, that I had already carried out the treatment I was exploring. I had been treating myself for years leading up to this moment: hypnotizing myself, making myself vomit. I had been trying, for much of my life, to “cure” myself. But it wasn’t until that moment that I realized I’d been healthy my whole life. I was already cured.
When Goland finished recording me he clapped his hands together: “Ha!” he exclaimed joyfully. “I see real potential in you! Come back with your things in a week’s time and we’ll get to work.” The camera remained pointed at me while Goland wrote out a referral. But the man I saw reflected back at me in the lens was already a different person.
A week later I found myself sitting on a wild beach near Tuapse, watching the waves of the Black Sea crash against a cliff, swallowing saltwater. Shedding all my clothes, I walked into the water and felt a sudden pain. I looked down and saw thin lines of blood coming from my knee, cut on the coral. It was August 16, 2016. I will remember that day—and that scar—for the rest of my life, because Sasha was next to me. It was his city, his home, his sea. Swimming over to me, he bent down to my leg and put his lips to the wound. There was one month left before my 22nd birthday, and I had only then allowed myself to love a man for the first time.
I would introduce him to my mother soon, telling her that he was my friend. Later she would discover the true nature of our relationship when she entered my room without knocking. Some time after that, while we were driving in the car, she turned to me and said, “I did not expect this from you. What if someone else finds out?” It would take her another five years to decide that she still loved me and that, no matter what, I was still her only son.
As for the story about conversion therapy, I never did write it; I was too happy living my new life. One month after I returned from Nizhny Novgorod, I came out to my friends, but they just shrugged: “We knew you were gay when we first saw you,” one of them told me. In the editorial offices of Russian magazines where I worked, everybody already knew I was living with a boyfriend.
My physical appearance changed too. I started to compete as a runner and lost 80 pounds. My stretch marks disappeared, and the veins on my arms started to bulge. Soon I jettisoned a final part of my past: Alina. With one click, the woman I had pretended to be for over seven years ceased to exist.
Last June, I visited Goland again. I was now writing a book about conversion therapy, and I’d gone to collect details. My appearance was so changed that he didn’t recognize me—he saw me as just another desperate patient. I paid him another $300 for our session. At the end of our visit, Goland again invited me to start treatment, saying that he saw potential in me. “I have a feeling our therapy can bear fruit,” he told me. “You have potential, your mind still works.”
It wasn’t until later, when I was writing this story, that I called to tell him I was a journalist. I told him that in most developed countries, conversion therapy was considered a form of torture. He sighed with anger. “This is the work of gay lobbyists,” he told me. “Most psychiatrists who meet gay people see homosexuality as an illness. The happiest homosexual is the homosexual in the grave.”
It took me five years to find the strength to start writing my story. In that same window of time, Goland had taken seven more men into his basement office.
Vadim Smyslov, a former features editor at GQ Russia, is at work on a book about his experience in conversion therapy.