Uzbekistan Blues
Friday, July 14, 2006
 
Cruising around Tashkent

The following week, I didn’t sleep well at night. My air conditioner was officially broken. My apartment retained the heat of the day like a furnace and I would open the windows, lie on a cushion on the floor with a fan pointed at me, twisting and turning over a sweat drenched pillow. It was impossible to sleep. Outside, it was only slightly cooler and the streets were alive with others unable to sleep in the heat, and often less fortunate than me – not even owning air conditioners, even broken ones. An adventurous streak overtook me. I wanted to explore.

I felt like I saw everything around me with new eyes. My recent awareness of a gay scene in Tashkent was like a revelation. I felt like there were others, many others, just like me. I’d look back at the people on the poorly illuminated streets instead of looking down, as I always had, self-conscious of all the stares my way. And I had a sense that the stares weren’t only because I was a foreigner. In some of the looks I recognized a curiosity a little less innocent than simply that.

I walked through the park, to the opera house with its outdoor cafes, down the promenade that they now called “Broadway,” full of vendors and cafes and karaoke booths, down to the Amir Timur Square, which boasted a large bronze sculpture of the great Mongol conqueror Tamerlane on horseback.
If you went behind the horse on the left side and looked under the horse’s leg, you could see the horse’s enormous testicles. How poetic that this was a spot where gays, prostitutes, and their johns clustered at night. You could see the visitors from out-of-town looking up the left leg, to see the legendary balls. I too, when I first arrived, was shown them – there were balls, but no shaft. And I was told that as the lore goes, when the statue was first erected in the early 1990’s, when independent Uzbekistan adopted Tamerlane as its national hero, there had been one, a very large one. But it was later removed.

I walked around the sculpture with a bottle of beer with that liberated feeling of walking and drinking that you just can’t enjoy in the US anymore. I decided I wouldn’t sit down and get sucked into a conversation with a stranger, as I had with Kirill a week earlier. I just walked, drank, and observed the small groups of boys talking, some looking at me as I walked by, unwilling to engage. I passed groups of prostitutes, or what they called “butterflies of the night,” flashing a golden-toothed smile at me and saying, “good evening.”

There was Kirill, with a group of boys he separated from to approach me. He apologized for being drunk and obnoxious the other day. Was I offended, he asked, he hoped not, and, would I want to buy a watch? He had a gold watch he had to sell because he needed money.

Everyone here always seemed to need money, and somehow managed to survive without it, or with very little of it. I wondered if when people saw me, or any foreigner for that matter, they saw dollar signs. I’d developed something of a complex over that. I curtly said that I didn’t want a watch and walked on, saying that I needed to go.

Then a figure emerged from the shadows, seeming to leap from a small wall that surrounded a flower garden, approaching me, calling my name and saying, in perfect English, “is it you?” Under the streetlamp light, I could see that he was young, in his 20’s, tall, handsome, but unfamiliar.

“Yes,” I said, “do I know you?” He explained that I knew him – his name was Aziz, and that I knew his brother Farhod, with whom I had some professional dealings. I couldn’t remember Aziz or his brother, which struck me as unusual; I have an uncannily good memory for names and faces. I decided to act as though I remembered his brother and told Aziz to send him my best, that he should call me sometime or drop in at my office.

“Be careful,” he warned me. “Those guys are blues. This park is full of blues and bitches.” Again, this confused me; I had assumed that Aziz was just another gay guy, like me, cruising the square, maybe ashamed to admit it, somewhat like me. I told him that I wasn’t afraid of blues or bitches and asked him what he was doing out so late among them. I, after all, had an excuse: I lived nearby and was escaping the heat, having a beer before bed.

He told me he was studying at the SNB Institute (SNB is the successor agency to the KGB). He was supposed to observe the square in advance of the Independence Day celebrations that would be taking place in a few weeks. At those celebrations, Tashkent’s parks fill up with crowds of visitors from the provinces and can become targets for terrorists. Since 1999, after 14 explosions rocked Tashkent, the government constantly raised the specter of terrorism from Islamic militants. But though there are scores of theories running around Tashkent about who might really be behind them.

I had a deep inclination to dislike the secret services and the way the government used them to instill a sense of paranoia in the population as a tool for subordination. Interestingly enough, though people were scared by them, they were tired of them but used to them, accepting them as just another nuisance in life that you have to learn to live with. People can get used to anything; I learned this lesson every day in Uzbekistan.

“Are we in danger?” I asked with a note of skepticism in my voice.

“We always are,” he said.

“Well, then I will make sure I will stay away from the park on Independence Day.” I told Aziz that it was time for me to go to bed and I walked back home confused.

Who was this Aziz, really? Was he really who he said he was? Or was he just another gay guy, caught cruising in the park and making a plausible sounding excuse to a seemingly gullible foreigner because he was afraid of being discovered. Did I really know his brother? Or was this all some plot to play with my head or to bait me. Was Aziz a pretty young thing that the police or security services used to bait gays, perhaps foreign gays, since he spoke good English? I’d heard stories along these lines of young attractive men used as bait for gays in the parks so that the police could later blackmail them for having violated the law against Besakalbazlyk from Article 120 from the Uzbek penal code.

Or was he was just trailing me? There was a belief so commonly repeated among the expatriates, that it was almost taken as gospel, that every foreigner had a secret service person trailing them, informing on their doings and whereabouts, so that the government could be on top of your every movement. This person could be someone you work with, someone you believe to be your friend, your lover, your driver, your pet… It was impossible to know for sure, and thinking about it too much only made you crazy with paranoia. For the longest time, I did wonder about people I knew or worked with or even felt quite close to, and it was burrowed deep in my subconscious. But after time, like the Uzbeks, I just accepted it as a nuisance that you have to learn to live with.
 
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