Moscow News: No more rainbows: anti-gay sentiment rises in Russia

Kremlin and St. Basil's

(Moscow News – themoscownews.com – Kristen Blyth – May 20, 2013) “Homosexuality is not a perversion. Perversion is hockey on grass and ballet on ice!” reads one picket sign, held aloft by a middle-aged man. “Against all forms of discrimination,” proclaims another, held by a young woman. “My gender is my choice,” says a third.

The scene was Moscow Pride. The year was 2007. This parade for recognition and celebration of gay rights was later violently attacked by anti-gay activists – a scene which has repeated itself basically every year since the event was first organized in Moscow in 2006.

The 2007 Pride rally, like every other year’s gay rights event, was unauthorized. Moscow city officials have consistently refused to approve annual gay pride parades, and 2013 is no exception.

Authorities announced last Wednesday that they will not approve gay rights activists’ request to hold a parade in the capital on May 25, saying the event would undermine morality and patriotic values. Applications to hold gay rights events in the designated free speech zones in Sokolniki Park and Gorky Park were also turned down.

The government’s refusal to allow gay pride events is just one symptom of a broad movement against homosexual rights underway in Russia. Anti-gay sentiment has grown increasingly hostile in recent years, to a point which some critics label it a violation of human rights.

Rainbows, rape, and murder

Instances of aggressive homophobia are rife in the Russian news, and some of it borders on absurdity.

An anti-gay group based in St. Petersburg, The People’s Council, complained to officials last September about the packaging used by milk company Vesyoly Molochnik. The milk’s label pictures cartoon cows frolicking beneath a rainbow.

“The rainbow is a world-renowned symbol of the gay movement,” Anatoly Artukh – a spokesman for the group – wrote in a letter to the Prosecutor General of the Russian Federation. “That immediately put me on the alert.”

The People’s Council expressed concern that the rainbow would promote homosexuality to children, and asked authorities to investigate.

Other attacks on the gay community are far from humorous.

Moscow gay nightclub 7FreeDays was stormed by 20 masked gunmen shouting anti-gay slurs last October. Several people were injured, and three were hospitalized.

Vladislav Tornovoi, a 23-year-old man, was murdered in Volgograd on May 9 – allegedly because he said he was gay. While reportedly drinking in a park to celebrate Victory Day, Tornovoi was attacked by his three companions. They brutally raped him with beer bottles, set his body on fire, and smashed his skull with a concrete slab.

Tornovoi’s murder sparked a wave of shock and horror. Anton Krasovsky, the former editor-in-chief of Kremlin-backed Kontr TV channel who was fired in January after coming out on the air, wrote an emotional reaction to the attack in The Guardian.

“The news appeared in several online publications,” Krasovsky wrote, “and each article was followed by comments such as the following: ‘Putin did warn us that if the homos raise their heads, the Russian people will take up arms. One head has rolled… These homos, they swagger about, they’ve got no shame or conscience.'”

“How did it come about that today in Russia a good gay person is a dead gay person?” Krasovsky wrote.

A propaganda gray zone

The State Duma is meanwhile in the process of passing a bill that would further restrict homosexuals’ freedom of expression.

The proposal, which would ban the distribution of “homosexual propaganda to minors,” passed its first reading in January. It would fine violating individuals a sum of 4-5,000 rubles, officials 40-50,000 rubles, and legal entities 400-500,000 rubles.

A deadline to add amendments clarifying the meaning of the words “homosexual” and “propaganda,” as well as details regarding enforcement, expires on May 25. As it is written now, the bill is so vague that concrete interpretation of what constitutes a violation is impossible. Would a TV channel airing a movie featuring a gay couple be fined under the law? Does a book in which same-sex characters kiss once count as homosexual propaganda? The law, so far, is unclear.

Yelena Mizulina, a Duma deputy from the Just Russia party and head of the Committee on Families, Women, and Children, told RIA Novosti that the bill will be revised this week – with the assistance of a working group containing LGBT activists and members of the public – in preparation for its second reading.

“As long as there are no fears and obstacles, we can fully pass the legislation in the spring session,” Mizulina said.

Similar legislation is already actively operating in St. Petersburg and other regions like Arkhangelsk, Ryazan, Kostroma, Novosibirsk, and Kaliningrad.

Though the “gay propaganda law” – as it has come to be known – has yet to be finalized, it has already drawn condemnation from both home and abroad.

“This law is an attack on the right to freedom of expression,” wrote David Diaz-Jogeix, the Europe and Central Asia Program Deputy Director at Amnesty International, in a statement on the organization’s website. “The law could be interpreted very loosely… It further stigmatizes and alienates LGBT people, including children, and will deprive them of information that could be crucial to their health.”

Critics have also expressed fears that gay teenagers in particular will find themselves cut off from support networks as the result of the bill, since teachers and counselors will risk breaking the law when discussing their orientation with them.

Former TV journalist Anton Krasovsky believes that the bill would create a societal divide, with straight people labeled as human and homosexuals as subhuman.

“According to this law, love happens only between a man and a woman,” Krasovsky told The Moscow News. “The law basically says that there are people, and then there are [gays, who are labeled] primates.”

Murder connection ‘silly’

Some gay activists say the anti-gay legislation is encouraging negative attitudes and violent acts against homosexuals.

“The idea that the open declaration of LGBT’s very existence offends the ‘religious’ and ‘patriotic’ feelings of Russians and doesn’t fit into their ‘traditional values’ has already been long and persistently voiced at the highest political level,” Igor Kochetkov, chairman of the Russian LGBT network, wrote in a blog post published on Ekho Moskvy’s website.

“To accompany these conversations, laws are being passed about a ‘ban on homosexual propaganda’ and people are already being killed.”

Lawmakers, however, deny that the law encourages homophobia and characterize the proposal merely as a reflection of current public opinion. When asked if the legislation may have been a factor in motivating Tornovoi’s murderers, Duma deputy Yelena Mizulina told RIA Novosti that making a connection between the law and the murder is “silly.”

The Russian government maintains the position that its policies are not discriminatory. President Vladimir Putin, in an April visit to Amsterdam, told reporters that “there is no infringement on the rights of sexual minorities” in Russia. He added that any official resistance towards gay marriage was motivated only by the fact that same-sex marriages do not produce children.

Evidence suggests, though, that the general public is not opposed to gay rights simply out of concern for demographics.

A February Levada Center poll found that 34 percent of 1,600 respondents view homosexuality as an illness which needs to be treated. When asked how gays should be “treated,” 16 percent supported isolation from society and 5 percent said that homosexuals should be “physically destroyed.”

The majority of respondents also appeared to support the “gay propaganda” legislation, with 61 percent saying that they were scared their children would become victims of gay propaganda.

A silver lining

Muscovites express differing views on the future of gay rights in Russia.

Some believe that local religious tradition will always ensure that the deck is stacked against the gay community. “Frankly speaking, Russia is a very traditionalist country and will stay like that forever,” Anastasia Russa, an artist in her late 20s, told The Moscow News. “Gays will never have their freedom here… [Because] this is the country of Orthodoxy.”

Anna Mitrofanova, a 25-year-old human resources manager, was more hopeful for the prospects for homosexual freedom. “It will take some time for Russia to realize that different doesn’t mean bad or wrong,” she said. “Soviet times have passed long ago and people don’t have to be alike and live cookie-cutter lives.”

According to Ryan, an American who volunteered with several LGBT organizations last year, the controversial law is still a positive force for driving international dialogue about the issue of gay rights.

Ryan, who asked that his last name not be used, believes the controversy means the issue can no longer be swept under the rug.

“I think the proposed law on gay propaganda has helped to shed a lot of light on the issue,” Ryan told The Moscow News. “What’s important is that it created a dialogue. People are finally talking about the issue and it cannot be ignored any longer.”

Additional reporting by Simon Speakman Cordall

Comment