Sometimes I think people read Ilya Rozanov as “oh he’s fine, he’s chill, he’s unbothered, he doesn’t care what anyone thinks” because on the surface he really does talk to Shane pretty casually about being bisexual.
Like it’s not this big dramatic identity crisis moment between them. It’s almost matter-of-fact, like “yeah, this is also true about me” and then life continues.
And that’s exactly why I think his whole “being the last one to say it publicly” thing hits so hard, because it’s such a clean example of how internalized homophobia can be invisible even to the person carrying it.
We get told the delay is about Shane wanting to wait until they retire, and sure, I do believe Shane mattered in that decision. I also think Ilya cared about Shane’s comfort more than he wanted to admit at the time, even if later he acts like he couldn’t care less. But I don’t buy that it was only that. Not when you look at how Ilya moves through the world. Not when you look at what he does and doesn’t allow himself to want.
Because therapy in The Long Game basically puts a flashlight on the stuff he has been calling “fine” for years. Like, he’s functioning. He’s living. He’s successful. He’s even happy, sometimes. But there’s still this invisible wall inside him that decides what is safe and what is not safe, what is allowed and what is not allowed.
And I think Troy coming out is one of the moments where Ilya can’t lie to himself anymore. He’s watching it unfold and yeah he’s happy for Troy, genuinely. But he’s also sitting there with this sharp little envy he doesn’t want to own. Not because Shane is holding him back. Not because he’s ashamed of Shane. Not even because he’s scared of the public in a simple way. It’s because there’s still a part of him that expects rejection like it’s gravity. Like it’s physics. Like if he steps too far into the light, something is going to slam into him and it will be his own fault for hoping.
That is internalized homophobia to me. Not “I hate gay people.” Not “I think it’s wrong.” But the belief living under your skin that if you are too seen, you will be punished. That being loved is conditional. That you need to keep the most tender part of yourself behind a locked door because you were trained to think love turns into violence the second you break the rules.
And I honestly think his father dying is a huge catalyst. Not in a cheesy “now I’m free” way. More like… a lock got opened, even if the key was grief.
Because his father’s presence was this looming thing. Even when his dad isn’t on the page, you can feel the shape of him in Ilya’s decisions. The man his father expected him to be. The way “family” in that context doesn’t feel like warmth, it feels like surveillance.
So when his father dies, it confronts Ilya with something brutal: his dad will never see him for who he really is. There will never be this moment where the father softens, where he understands, where he chooses his son over ideology. That possibility is gone.
And at the same time, that also means the threat changes. Like, the fantasy of “what if” dies, but so does the daily tension of “what if he finds out.” It’s grief and relief in the same breath, and that is such an ugly complicated human thing that Ilya is basically made of.
And I think that grief, plus cutting his brother out, plus deciding he’s never going back to Russia, is what pushes him into actively wanting to de-compartmentalize. Because compartmentalizing is how he survived. It’s how he kept Shane as “his” while still keeping the rest of the world at arm’s length. It’s how he kept his heart in one room and his public face in another.
But by The Long Game, he doesn’t want to live like that anymore. He really does want his immediate world to know. Not in a loud pride-parade way, but in a simple “this is my life and I’m not hiding it” way. Which is honestly such a big deal for someone like him. For someone who grew up with the kind of fear that isn’t abstract.
Because let’s be real. When you think who you are will prompt your father and brother (both police) to go after you no matter if they’re your family or not, that’s not “coming out is scary.” That is “coming out can be dangerous.” And once that gets wired into you young, it doesn’t just disappear because you moved to Canada and fell in love with a nice boy.
That fear becomes this internal judge. This internal guard dog. This part of you that keeps saying “don’t get comfortable.” Even when nothing is happening. Even when you’re safe. Even when you’re loved.
Also I’ve seen people say “if his mom was alive it would’ve been different” and honestly my theory is it still would’ve happened basically the same. If anything, it might have been even more complicated emotionally.
Because Ilya’s mom feels like the kind of love you don’t want to burden. I can see him wanting to come out to her as bisexual, I can also see him not doing it for a long time because he wouldn’t want to give her that heavy truth when it would make her worried sick about his father and brother finding out. That’s the kind of protective silence people do when they come from families where love exists, but safety doesn’t.
And I think that’s also why therapy matters so much for him. Because there are things he can’t even properly talk about with Shane. Partly because of language, yes. But also because Ilya doesn’t want to hand Shane a piece of pain that feels too big, too foreign, too tangled in a kind of cultural threat Shane has never had to live inside.
Like how do you explain “my family’s love has conditions that might include violence” to someone whose baseline for family, even with flaws, is still basically safe? How does Shane validate something that he might not have a reference point for? How does Ilya even admit out loud that this is real, when he’s spent his whole life being trained to treat it like a secret he has to manage?
Therapy is the first place he can say it without translating it into jokes, or rage, or sex, or avoidance. It’s the first place where that invisible wall stops being “just how I am” and becomes “oh. this is a wound.”
And once he can name it, he can start cracking it open. Slowly. Badly. Imperfectly. But for him, that’s still massive.
(And this is where I get personal for a second.)
I didn’t come out as bisexual until a year after my own father passed away. My dad was great. He loved me, I am sure he did and was so proud of me. But I knew, deep in my bones, that the daughter he was most proud of being bi would’ve altered his idea of reality in a way he wouldn’t cope with well. And it wasn’t even because I was ashamed of it. I wasn’t. It was just a part of me, that was it.
I just didn’t want to give him a sadness. And I’m honestly glad I didn’t, because I didn’t add to his hurt and I didn’t make his last years worse.
And my dad wasn’t homophobic, not like that. But he wouldn’t have coped with one of his children being gay, and that is the deep, engraved Mexican machismo thing. The iron-heavy cultural weight of gender roles. The stuff people carry even when they’re good people, even when they love you.
So when I look at Ilya, I don’t read him as “the last one to come out.” I read him as someone who is casually honest in private because he loves Shane and trusts him, but still had a whole internal fortress built from years of survival.
And it takes death, and distance, and the ache of envy watching someone else be free, and actual professional help, to finally make him choose himself out loud.
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