The Georgian Military Road: An Unexpected Pilgrimage

The last time I spoke Russian had been years before, in 2012, when I took Russian classes in Perm, a settlement located in the western foothills of the Ural Mountains. A Soviet closed city and driving force in the aeronautics and armaments industries, Perm only began appearing on maps in the 1990s, around the same time officials changed its name from Molotov and stopped referring to it as "Gateway to the Gulag." In Perm, I took lodgings in an apartment owned by a retired schoolteacher. Widowed, with two grown sons, Tatiana Ivanovna was a heavyset woman who wore gingham nighties and bright slippers that I learnt to call тапочки; who swore by two slices of mutton fat for breakfast and thin noodle soup for lunch; who kept jars of salted gherkins on the balcony; who liked fermented milk, cats, and figurines of dancing ballerinas and Cossacks; who knew the daytime-TV schedule by rote; and who read romance paperbacks, stopping only to click on the radio at 11:00 p.m., when female callers aired their romantic dilemmas to the show's psychologist host, a man who invariably advised them to listen to their husbands, try harder with their makeup, or buy new stockings.

The last time I spoke Russian, I sat watching television with Tatiana Ivanovna, the bulky set wavering blue-white over the china statuettes. An effeminate male presenter hosted an American talk show dubbed into Russian. Tatiana readjusted the tasselled cushions: "Why is there so much homosexuality in America, when that illness doesn't exist in Russia?"

The last time I spoke Russian, I listened as the men who drove me and a friend home talked about faggots—that if they saw a faggot, they'd beat that man, for their wives, for their children, they'd remove that piece of shit from the ground.

The last time I spoke Russian, I met a masculine-presenting photographer, a woman who'd been hired because she was well connected, good at her job. A woman who worked quietly, always gentle when asking someone to change poses, shift places. A woman who invited her employers to an exhibition of her work—men who handed her a drink, talked of photography, then joked out of earshot: She must fuck dogs, looking like that.

The last time I spoke Russian, I shared dinner with a closeted gay man who, at forty-nine, slept with a gun at his bedside, who admitted to waking in a cold sweat, to vomiting, to having put himself in a bathtub one night after almost being found having sex with another man so he could shake and vomit and piss and shit until he could finally deal with it, until he could clean the bath, could rinse his body from itself.

The last time I spoke Russian, I was in a relationship with a man. I presented as female, passed for cisgendered and heterosexual. In one of the world's most homophobic countries, my sexuality, always snarling to the side of me, finally caught up. Bit into this body until it showed itself, raw, bloodied. I left Russia single.

It would take another three years for me to come to terms with my gender.

Some six years after living in Perm, I would take a trip to Georgia—the first time I would return to Eastern Europe as openly queer and transmasculine.

________

The Georgian Military Road gradually evolved from dirt path to horse track as travellers, silk route traders, and invaders wound their way between Tbilisi, Georgia, and Vladikavkaz, Russia.

The mountain pass first appeared in the writings of Strabo and Pliny the Elder, reappearing millennia later in the diaries of Mikhail Lermontov. It eventually found its way into the travel literature of Baedeker's Russia 1914, the guide insisting the route's beauty warranted its ten-hour journey time.

Imperial Russian troops traversed the pass in 1769 in a military effort that would see Georgia shift from Persian to Russian rule. Not long...