Town upbringing to Moscow clubs
HOW HIS EXPERIENCES OF WORK, LIFE AND LOVE HAVE INSPIRED HIS NOVEL
street with offers to buy my trainers. And once, I ‘bribed’ a female doctor with a pair of French-made stockings. She was supposed to examine me and certify me fit to use public swimming pools – but she just took the stockings without a word and wrote out the certificate.”
While living in Russia, Paul discovered the ‘underground’ gay scene. “At one point, I didn’t think gay people even existed in Russia. That’s what Vladimir Putin seems to want as well.
“But, of course, there are LGBT people, just like anywhere. Still, I was fascinated by the underground gay scene in Moscow in the early 1990s – there were spots where guys hung out looking for hook-ups near the Bolshoi Theatre and in one particular metro station.
“Then, in early 1992, I think, there were the first gay club nights. These days, we’d call them ‘popup’ because they’d shift the venue from one week to the next, just to try to keep hidden.
“And they’d be held in all sorts of places, like a cinema foyer or a factory canteen. The music was mainly pirated Western pop and there’d be a great atmosphere because I’d see everyone I knew – there was nowhere else to go.
“But there was danger too. I narrowly escaped getting beaten up once and other mates of mine weren’t so lucky. “Again, it was a story of what was ‘allowed’ and what you could get away with. Same-sex relations were made legal under Yeltsin in 1993, but these days, under Putin, it’s a crime to ‘promote’ homosexuality.”
Paul, now 58, says the early gay dance parties in Moscow were “more like school discos in that the set-up would be like a canteen with the tables cleared away and in that you knew everyone.”
“That was the case when I was there from 1991-94. I recall one disco being held in a space at the Olympic village, another couple were in cinema foyers. That scene had evolved by the time I went back to visit in 1997 and 1998, by which time there was a ‘permanent’ club called ‘Chance.’ It had a
I was painfully aware of being ‘different’, shall we say, from other boys around me... That’s maybe why I dreamt of stories, travel, escape Paul David Gould
huge ‘fish tank’ with a couple of scantily clad guys swimming in it! I did say Moscow was surprisingly raunchy.”
Paul is dismayed by the current political leadership in Russia and doubts that he will ever return.
“The war in Ukraine is sickening. It has dashed all hope. I hoped to see Russia become a friendly and peaceful democratic nation. I’m never going again. Putin is absolutely sick.”
Last Dance at the Discotheque for Deviants is out on June 8.