I met him at "Three Monkeys," a gay club in Moscow. He very insistently, almost to the point of force, dragged me away from the dance floor, throwing down 20 euros on the way to tip the coat attendant. "Kind, but that’s not a way to impress us," I barely had time to think before finding myself in the back seat of a black Lexus. Arseny took a seat next to me. "Andrusha, let’s go home," he said to the driver. "Ok. Ok. You’ve amazed me," my heart, as Francoise Sagan wrote, began to beat a signal to surrender.

As he was fucking me on a huge bed, every now and again I felt a large, cold gold cross beating against my spine. I once had a friend Sasha, who loved to suck dick. We were sitting around one day, watching television, and suddenly I noticed that Sasha began removing his cross. "Here we go," I thought to myself in these moments, "he wants my soft dick in his mouth." For some unknown reason, which Sasha was always too embarrassed to reveal, he couldn’t bring himself to have sex with his cross on. Arseny, as you remember, wore a beard and, as you have already gathered, was not afraid of God between the sheets.

Only the next morning, of course, were we able to discuss the "beard". "What’s your profession?" I asked as if by chance, smoothly gliding my gaze across the lacquered surfaces of the Italian kitchen of Arseny’s high-rise apartment. "I am the prior of one of churches near metro station Krassnie Vorota." Among the masses, my reaction would be characterized as "his jaw dropped to the table, the queen dropped to the floor." "My dear," I was barely able to squeeze out of my surprise, and then, switching on the journalist, "And how do you manage to combine your visits to ‘Three Monkeys’ with the church?"

As he explained it, Arseny doesn’t, of course, advertise his inclinations at work, but doesn’t hide it from the help staff (for instance, the driver who picked us up in the morning). "Basically I am just their manager, a supervisor, you know, I am not their spiritual leader, don’t preach to them."

"The Church would look at homosexuality completely differently, if society itself were ready for it. We are an organization full of fags. In daily life, no one pays any attention to it at all, we are after all educated people, but in rhetoric with society we have to take a rigid stance," Arseny reluctantly, although concisely, answered my questions. It turns out that our clergy are not as simple as they would like to seem.

I myself knew an old anecdote about a homosexual priest who preached in the late 90s in a town not far from Moscow, until he died from HIV, but thought that that situation was quite out of the ordinary. As Arseny told me, stories connected one way or another with the "theme (of homosexuality)" in the Russian Orthodox Church comes up rather often. For instance, recently a situation like this happened in one of the Orthodox schools for boys. A teacher seduced (put on the right path?) an adolescent. But each and every time, these situations are miraculously (by divine intervention perhaps?) hushed up to such an extent that not even the tabloid "Life" gets wind of it. Arseny wouldn’t tell me anything else, no matter how I insisted.

The conversation turned to a more personal tone. For five years, Arseny lived together with a guy, a soldier, who one day left him, saying that he wanted to provide for himself. What happened in actuality is, of course, not hard to imagine, but that, in fact, is none of my bloody business. As of now, the prior is still looking.

"A distinguished bachelor, single, rich, with a large apartment not far from the center - let’s marry him!" peeped my mind. But my heart resisted, "But what about his 15 cm cock?!" God help him!