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Q&A for B-School
1. Why don’t you self-publish your book?
The most obvious answer would be – I don’t have the money. But it’s superficial. The reality is, as the author I clearly envision how the story of such format needs to be strategically marketed and brought to the attention of its target audience. It cannot be done on my own, no matter how much money I have. The success of a project like this, aside from its artistic value, requires the involvement of major production companies and creative professionals with great expertise in the field. So self-publishing, although technically possible if I had the money, is an unviable option in terms of the long-term success of this work.
2. Do you ultimately want a career as a writer?
No, writing is NOT what I want as a primary career. I wrote this book, and it’s great, but I’m a performing artist in the first place. Music is what makes me feel most vulnerable, most alive, and most connected to others – and that’s how I know it’s the way to go (yes, despite my age, absence of superhuman good looks, and the baggage of intersectional trauma). By the way, that’s why networking around my book is strategically important – I need to find and build meaningful relationships with creatives who share my values and my mission and are already successful in the area. Coming from a third-world country and the background of huge socioeconomic disadvantage, there’s no possibility of linear, evolutionary growth towards my career goals. It can only happen by virtue of a breakthrough – if someone influential pays attention to the quality of my creative work and the clarity of my mission.
That said, I don’t rule out the possibility that I can write more books at some point. I have drafts for two memoirs where I share tough lessons from my traumatic childhood in Russia and my creative journey in America. Also, I know full well that I wrote Souls of Silence not because I had some phenomenal writing talent, but because this brilliant, amazing creative idea came to my mind, at a completely unexpected moment, so I chose to roll up my sleeves and collaborate with it. It was so beautiful I couldn’t but love it and commit to it, and then this book baby was born. Just like Liz Gilbert, I do believe creative ideas have their own consciousness, and they know who they want to be with. I don't know why this phenomenal idea chose me, a poverty-stricken guy from a third-world country, not some middle-class, well-fed, well-buffed, and well-groomed American blogger. But the fact is, it did choose me. So maybe, just maybe, another idea of a book will one day come into my mind in the same transcedent, magic way. Storytelling is the nature of my heart. Most of the time, I do it through music, but if the idea demands to be brought into life as a book, I will listen. Despite the fears and the impostor bullshit I harbored before setting down to work on my book, writing is indeed figureoutable. Yes, even when you write fiction. And yes, even when your inspiration gets stolen by trauma or loss.
3. Do you believe that #EverythingIsFigureoutable?
Sure as hell, I do. I am the frickin’ living proof. Like Marie’s Mom, I grew up in poverty with unreliable adults, so at a very early age, I had to learn how to do different things, in the absence of resources for tuition and other educational opportunities. I learned how to save money and do budgeting. I learned a few foreign languages and a few programming languages on my own. I learned how to cook, how to swim, how to drive, and how to make Websites from scratch. Most importantly, I learned to play, arrange, write music and sing professionally all on my own. My huge privilege as a millennial was access to the Internet – I do believe it greatly leveled the playing field in terms of educational opportunity. Did I struggle being an autodidact in those things? Yes. Did I feel less than/worse than kids who had access to tuition? Yes. Was my learning longer/harder than it was for people who had coaches/classes/courses? For sure. But that didn’t stop me from mastering those things and eventually doing them better than people who had lots of educational opportunity. When I sing, people suppose I studied for years in a music school (it's still kinda embarrassing to say it out loud that I haven’t had one music class in my entire life). At the pool, people think I’m a competitive swimmer. When people taste my cheesecakes (made from scratch, including homemade Graham crackers and cream cheese), people think I must have been trained as a chef or, at least, should launch my own bakery. For lack of accent, I passed for a Spaniard during my trips to Catalonia, even though my Spanish is 100% self-taught. Am I bragging? Rather, I’m showing y'all the evidence of how curiosity, agency, and sustained effort over the years inform what many people see as “talent” – completely blind to the necessity and trauma that it was crafted amidst.
4. What is your educational/occupational background?
I’m a doctor specializing in general urology, genitourinary cancers, and male fertility care, with almost ten years of clinical experience behind my belt. Although I had been pushed into this profession by traumatic circumstances (a separate story) and never wanted it per se, since day one of my clinical practice I couldn’t help seeing the responsibility effort I had to put forward serving my patients. I pissed off the majority of my Russian colleagues and seniors by following evidence-based guidelines from American and European sources in my practice, instead of obsolete techniques from Soviet-era textbooks. I rocked the boat and quickly became a scapegoat for putting the interests of my patients’ health above “institutional traditions”. I got frowned upon as I wasn’t okay with flagrant nepotism, favoritism, corruption, and under-the-table cash flows. I got ridiculed for practicing empathy with my patients and treating them as my fellow human beings. Just like many other young doctors, I was systemically forced to do unpaid extra work for those up the totem pole, including inadequate physical labor. Most tragically, I never got access to even the basics of surgical practice – although it was included in the official curriculum. Here's the thing: in the realities of the Russian healthcare system, surgical practice, especially in cancer patients, is the activity that allows doctors to extort bribes (huge involuntary payments) from patients manipulating their existential needs, even though the healthcare system in the country is officially free of charge. Those doctors functioned much like mafia, getting away with piles of under-the-table cash, cuts of which were paid to police and courts who covered for them. This level of systemic and normalized corruption (and malpractice inherent in it) is barely believable to Western people. As a result, only doctors who had familial connections with, who bribed, or who slept with the existing mafia members could get access to surgical practice (and its illegal monetary benefits). The majority of doctors, like me, worked in the conditions of semi-slavery 80 hours a week, subsisting on risible legal salaries topped by tips (small voluntary cash payments) given by patients on discharge. In the first two years, I thought the situation could improve – but my university mates working in other institutions, from academic clinics to city hospitals, reported the same: no amount of talent, qualifications, degrees, intelligence, and diligence could break the very low glass ceiling that existed in the industry for people without connections. It was a lifetime of poverty. That’s why many chose to emigrate and pursue medical careers in the West – of course, backed by the financial support of their families.
I didn’t have such privilege. With an average $500 of monthly income, I led a no-frills existence and still somehow managed to make savings – that’s the skill you learn very well growing up with unreliable adults. But there was no middle-class life in sight for me in Russia – only in the West could it be a reality. With my education, the only financially better options existed outside the clinical field, in the pharma industry – there my monthly income could be about $800, up to $1,200 in the long run. But there would be no way I could be making more than $15,000 a year anyway – and that was still poverty.
It took me quite a while to understand that even if I had the opportunity to make a successful medical career (and, by consequence, get a secure, predictable, upper-middle-class life) in the West, it wouldn’t be the best for me, because my heart and my passion and my most precious gifts that could make the biggest difference in the world belonged elsewhere – in my creativity. My medical background, though, yielded three big benefits for my subsequent career shift. First, working in Russian healthcare taught me a lot about empathy and social justice – not because they were modeled or valued in the system, but because I saw what horrible things happen in their absence. Second, the systemic malpractice and corruption I bore witness to over the years prompted me to develop critical awareness about them as globally relevant issues and eventually formed an important part of my book. And third, through years of reading Western medical literature, I got substantial training in evidence-based science and research methodology – which then enabled me to systematically explore social issues that I address with my creative storytelling, and thus to make my work far more impactful.
5. Why do you identify as Spanish?
It’s difficult to answer that question, as this comes from a very deep place within me. In short, I no longer believe that our homeland is necessarily where we were born and grew up – it’s rather where, for the first time in our lives, we felt true belonging. And what is true belonging? It is when the environment, the culture, and the people around you don’t make you change who you are so you could fit in and survive, but demand that you be who you are so you could grow and thrive (yes, I’m quoting Brené Brown here directly). Many people experience true belonging where they were born and spent their early years. However, it’s never been the case for me. Russia has always felt like a foreign, hostile, and oppressive place to me, even before I was emotionally literate enough to put how I felt into words. The values of this country’s culture in the 1990s – power over, vanity, conformity, violence, lust, corruption – clashed against the truth of who I was, and I felt it the more acutely the older I got.
My connection to and my identification with Spain and the larger Hispanic culture, I guess, was born out of music – the love of my life. In my teenage years, when I was a teenage boy bullied in his public school for lagging behind in his physical growth, for being the poorest and at the same the smartest kid in the class, and also the kid who saw no genuine care, love, or belonging in his dysfunctional family – in those years I found my home, my refuge, and my identity reflection in Hispanic music. Internet was the window that allowed me, almost for free, into that cultural space – where real feelings, real courage, real love, real vulnerability, and real dreams existed and were celebrated, unlike in the physical reality around me. As I was hell-bent on studying singing professionally, I started learning Spanish (on my own, of course), and I couldn’t help seeing how this language, unlike others, came to my mind with surprising ease and fluency – as if I was remembering something old -forgotten rather than learning something new. My passion for music and language encouraged me to explore the larger Hispanic culture, and I spent my late teens reading Wikipedia pages and daydreaming about Spain and Latin American countries – the cultures I felt I was native to.
Unlike my more privileged classmates and university mates, I never actually had the money to travel there. Only at the age of 25, a lucky coincidence of events gave me a sponsored opportunity to visit Spain – and that trip changed my life into before and after. Yes, from the first breath I made on the Spanish land, I realized it was my true home although technically I still was a foreigner. And this feeling grew exponentially over my numbered days in Barcelona, as I saw evidence of striking social contrasts between Spain and Russia, never mind the economic opportunity present there. This life-altering journey, where I found my true home and real identity, became one of the sources of inspiration for my book.
Over the years, I got a shitton of shaming and cynicism around my chosen Spanish identity – pretty similar to what transgender people experience in the culture around their chosen gender. The most hurtful was the trivialization from my American networking partners who were Latinos – they spoke perfect Spanish because they got it as a mother tongue, unlike me who had to master it for years with no other teacher than myself – and, as immigrants to the U.S., they probably harbored internalized shame about their Hispanic identity, while for me this identity was precious. The lesson from those experiences is that my identity – just like my worth, my story, and my lived experiences – is not something that I’m willing to externally negotiate, especially with people who got it by birth, not through years of effort exerted amidst disadvantage. I’m Spanish. That’s part of who I am. That the way I talk swinging my hands around me, and the way I walk through life with soft front, strong back, and wild heart. That’s the language of my inner child – my most authentic, most vulnerable self. That’s the flag waving over my bruised and scarred lionheart. Just like a trans person, I earned this identity in my quest for true belonging, and I’m proud of it. I’m not gonna hide it to make anybody comfortable.
6. What difference does your book (or your future work) bring to the table?
The approach I use in my creative storytelling is called intersectional empathy. It may sound fancy, but it’s very transparent: in my stories, I build empathic bridges between my protagonists and the audience by keeping the focus on universally relatable emotional experiences – like belonging, vulnerability, connection, joy, faith, heartbreak, loneliness, shame, betrayal, powerlessness – instead of focusing on the identities of characters and their circumstances that may not be relatable to the reader. To put it shorter, I describe the experiences of my characters in a way that connects to everybody, regardless of their age, race, gender, orientation, class, religion and other identity markers. I write my stories in a way that enables a white man to feel himself in the shoes of a black woman and a straight Christian to feel themselves in the shoes of a gay Muslim. It it these intersectional bridges of empathy that bring about meaningful, impactful conversations with everybody at the table and then inform lasting sociocultural change. Honestly, what better than art can bring you painfully close to the people you believe you hate, and then show you their humanity in such a frustrating way that your hate gets defeated at its core? What better than art can call bullshit on everything that’s happening in the world that’s untrue and unkind? What better than art can remind us of our inextricable connection to one another through a power bigger than us, and the fact that this connection is grounded in kindness and love and compassion, and the fact that, although out of comfort we can go to great lengths to forget about this connection, we can never actually sever it?
Unfortunately, in the field of global LGBT advocacy in the media today, we see very few stories employing intersectional empathy. “Gay novels”, “gay movies”, and “gay shows” are designed (purposefully or not) as a culturally segregated content – in a way that attracts exclusively LGBT audiences or, at the best, the minority of straight (predominantly Western and upper-middle-class) people who are well-familiar and comfortable with the gay culture. But these stories do little to create critical awareness about homophobia and heterosexism in the majority of the culture. They do little to help everybody contextualize those things as systemic forms of oppression which, just like its other forms, create measurable and observable economic damage that we all in the end pay for. But what else do you expect? If you start a movie with a scene of two men passionately engaging in anal sex after doing drugs, how can you expect that story to connect to the hearts of straight viewers? How do you expect to build empathic bridges over our differences, if instead of focusing on what we have in common as human beings you portray LGBT people in the most stereotyped and caricatured ways, that not only don’t reflect their real identities but in fact reinforce ignorance and hate?
Coming into the arena of American creative industry, I first didn’t realize how big of an outlier my book was. But over the years it became clear. By design, Souls of Silence tells a love story of two men through a straight person’s perspective, and it’s primarily addressed to the straight audience – people holding privilege and overt or hidden discriminatory beliefs. I wrote this book with a clear social mission in mind – and that was not only to give voice to millions of LGBT people who don’t find themselves reflected in the fun, fast, and easy veneer of the gay culture prevalent in the Western media, but also to help straight people all over the world start and lead tough, honest conversations about privilege as an inevitable, and much underdiscussed, corollary of oppression. With their truthful stories, the characters of Souls of Silence challenge three main myths that inform the cultural core of homophobia and also reveal how homophobia can intersect with other aspects of identity – such as social class, occupational status, and immigration status – thus giving the reader a tangible idea of intersectionality.
In a way, my storytelling employs the Trojan horse concept – it first engages a straight reader by colorfully portraying vulnerability, love, belonging, spirituality, emotional intimacy, and then revealing how these beautiful parts of the human condition are ruthlessly crushed by the system of oppression. I bullshit you not – this approach works. With the synopsis and the epilogue of my book available on its Website, and my Instagram poetry page constantly growing following and attracting traffic, over the last five years I regularly had people email me about the book. They got intrigued by my poetry, most of which had to do with spirituality and motivation. Most of them were straight, and they loved the tag line of my book on the Website, but they didn’t expect it to be a same-sex love story. Now, what was their reaction? Since I put focus properly in my writing, choosing the detailing of feelings over homoerotic scenes, they got engaged and carried away by the story – and then heartbroken and inspired at the exact same time by its final. “It was brutal, and it was beautiful, Jorge,” a woman from Florida once DMed me. “I was shaken to my heart’s core, and I couldn’t help crying all night long thinking about my kids and how much I’m grateful for them. Now I know something important I have to teach them when they grow up – something different from how I was raised.” I then looked through her Instagram page – she was a straight working woman in her late thirties, divorced and raising three beautiful children. Now, when a straight Catholic woman tells you she got shaken reading a love story of two men, and that this story allowed her to start unlearning hate – that’s a big deal. When tens of people of different age, gender, class, religion respond like that time and again over the years, that’s a yet bigger deal. And that’s exactly the result I aimed for – except that now I have to scale it gaining access to bigger audiences.
In fact, I learned intersectional empathy as a creative tool from my background in music. Songs of Hispanic artists hit deepest places in my heart even though I couldn’t relate with their protagonists circumstantially. For example, Ricky Martin’s song Asignatura Pendiente, the one that made me break into tears the first time I heard it in 2012, featured Martin himself as a celebrity protagonist, talking about his giant house and piles of money. How relatable could it be to me, a guy from a third-world country who had known nothing but poverty his entire life? Well, because in its essence Asignatura Pendiente wasn’t a song about a giant house or millions of dollars made by a pop star. It was the song about belonging and being homesick – the things almost everyone can relate to. As fate would have it, I discovered that song during my numbered days in Barcelona – the days when for the first time in my life I found my true home, so different from the place where I was born.
Having seen how effective intersectional empathy gets in connecting to people’s hearts, today I envision it at the core of my storytelling in music as well. That is the difference my work brings to the table – I’m going to promote intersectional social justice through art, building soul connections across identities, embracing and welcoming everybody as a character and an audience member.
7. Do you plan to run a business now or at some point?
Not now, for sure. I do have a few side hustles related to Web engineering that bring food to my table today and can potentially evolve into profitable businesses someday, but emigration and starting a creative career remain in my focus. As Steve Jobs said, focus is about saying no to thousands of good things and opportunities coming your way and choosing the one good thing that most resonates with the truth of who you are. I am my own brand these days, and my creativity is my product.
8. Do you have a dream of emigrating to the U.S.?
Not actually. I think it will be great to come study and work in America for a certain period, given the huge opportunity this country offers, but I wouldn't like to end up there permanently. The career I’m trying to build will allow me to travel a lot and stay connected with my American audience anyway, but my home and my place of true belonging is in Spain. That’s the hard thing about truth – once you’ve seen it, you cannot un-see it. For all the advantages of America as a country and a culture, I don’t identify with it as deeply as I do with Spain.
9. What’s been your experience of networking with American creatives/social justice activists so far?
Honestly, it’s been pretty dismal. Given my place of residence and my social class, I had no people in my immediate social circles who could help with a project that big. So I had no other options than to go through social networks like Twitter and Instagram and seek out, and then reach out to, people in America or Europe who 1) apparently shared my values related to social justice, and 2) had necessary connections and privilege to help me get a project like that off the ground. I wasn’t shallow about these relationships – I believed what people said about their values and intentions in the public eye. I never tried to manipulate people or use them as tools to achieve my goals – I was sincerely interested to make friends with like-hearted and like-spirited folks who by virtue of randomness had more privilege (and more opportunity) than me and could support my efforts in our common cause. So I approached these relationships in a natural, gradual, boundaried way. It always started nice. I got beautiful words told me about my talent and the value of my work. I got celebrity follows to my Instagram page and big promises of collaboration being made. However, as soon as they learned that I was from Russia and about my socioeconomic status, all hell broke loose. Suddenly, my talent no longer mattered. The evidence backing up the relevance of my work got dismissed. My personal story got trivialized and rationalized. Doors got slammed in my face as soon as the truth about my life confronted Americans about their privilege (even though I never had the intention to shame them but one to build a real, meaningful connection and get to know each other’s story). With many people, my vulnerability then resulted in me being emotionally abused or gaslighted for months (imagine how easy and entertaining that is from the position of privilege). I got a lot of sympathy around my story, but zero empathy. A few times, I had unambiguous sexual advances made towards me. But never, ever did I get any real help. Their true colors spilled out like venom in front of me – it turned out that in real life those people carefully avoided practicing the values they made and publicity from professing. Over the years, such experiences heavily corroded my faith in America – it started to strike me as a culture of bleached smiles and epic hypocrisy. When you get such an experience once or twice or a dozen times, you can assume those people were just assholes. But when it repeats with more than a hundred people over five years, it clearly points to a systemic issue in the culture.
And what is it? It’s classism and nativism. American creative industry, as I’ve seen so far, favors privilege over talent. Of course, my sample size has been too small to make any reliable conclusions (never mind that this sample mostly consisted of white, upper-middle-class gay men, who I naively believed would be interested to fight homophobia – in fact, they’re among the few who benefit from it). Writing my book in English, I had believed in a brave, honest, generous America, full of integrity and wisdom, and that’s not the America I then came to know. After the 2016 elections, it's been getting increasingly harder for me to believe that such America exists, but I’m no stranger to doing things that are hard. I do trust there are people in this country who can be my allies and who have enough self-awareness and critical awareness to not allow their privilege to get in the way of their integrity. If I exist, someone like me must exist too.