In the story “How I Became Like This,” the narrator necessarily claims “that of course he prefers it with women,” while sleeping exclusively with men. Following the misadventures of gay Russian men as they navigate the city’s chaotic cruising scene, Under House Arrest links romantic success to their ability to master an argot of misdirection and double entendre, a conspiratorial language that has its limits.
Featured in Kharitonov’s posthumous Under House Arrest, this story adeptly captures the tone of ’70s Petersburg’s queer underground. The two men who do end up in bed with each other are so unmoored by this game of heterosexual pretense that they’re unable to have sex, their sexuality thwarted both in speech and in action.
One of these men, using the network of his new identity, attempts to fulfill a long-held sexual fantasy with a pop idol. A well-off straight man is forcibly evicted by a member of the working class, each assuming the other’s vestments and accompanying material benefits. In seminal gay Russian writer Yevgeny Kharitonov’s “One Is Like This, Another Is Different,” nameless young men play with and are played by a charade of identities, worn and sloughed off in between sentences.
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