On January 25, Kremlin-friendly journalist Anton Krasovsky invited a bunch
of drag queens on his show on KontrTV, a Kremlin-owned channel. It was his
personal protest against a proposed law in the
Russian parliament, the Duma, which would ban distributing “gay propaganda” to
minors. The law’s broad definition of “propaganda” would prohibit publicly
discussing gay relationships, comparing them to heterosexual ones, or calling
them “normal.” That is, it would effectively criminalize the process of coming
out—so often the driving force for wider social acceptance of gays. Violations
would be punishable by hefty fines and, for foreigners, potential imprisonment.
Krasovsky had long been a Kremlin shill, but this seemed to break his avid
appetite for serving the state. “I’m gay,” he said on the air. “And I’m as much of a person as you, my dear viewers, as
President Putin, Prime Minister Medvedev, and the deputies of the Duma.”
The transmission was cut instantaneously. That night, everything Krasovsky
had done for the channel was purged from its site. Later that night, he was fired—via text
message.
Krasovsky and I had often clashed, but this summer, he wrote to me asking
for advice, as life in Russia “had become unsafe and unproductive.” His mother
now wanted to sell her house and move, because, Krasovsky says, “now all the
neighbors know that I’m not a TV star but a fucking fag.”
When I contacted him for this article, I asked if anything had surprised
him about coming out in Russia. He responded: “It wasn’t that I was surprised
as much as I was gladdened to discover how amazing our people is. I get
thousands of letters of support. Thousands. But only a few contain threats.”
In Moscow, one of my closest friends is Mike, a gay American journalist. In
2010, he met Fedya, a Russian seven years his junior. Mike called the next day
to tell me he had met “the one,” and soon they were living together—nesting
really. They made a conscious decision not to hide their sexuality. They held
hands in the streets, they kissed in public, and, amazingly, no one seemed to
mind.
One day, Mike and Fedya went to a party for Fedya’s older brother, a soccer
fanatic. “We pull up to the house, and there is heavy-metal music playing, a
bunch of dudes swilling cognac and vodka out of plastic cups. And we walk in
and all heads snap in our direction,” Mike recounts. One of the friends, who
had clearly spent most of the afternoon drinking, was watching with a wary,
slanting look. Later that evening, he approached Mike: “I was sure he was going
to try to pick a fight. Instead, he thrust a cup of cognac in my hand, raised
his glass, and said, ‘It doesn’t matter what kind of love it is, as long as
it’s true love.'"
This story of the party comes from an essay Mike wrote about Fedya’s family
learning, grudgingly, to accept their son. It was never published, because
Fedya’s mom worried about her friends’ reaction. Mike is Mike’s real name, but
Fedya is not Fedya’s name.
Maria Kozlovskaya is a lawyer and she was asked to resign from her previous
job at the Russian branch of a Western tobacco distributor. “My boss said we
don’t align on certain core principles,” Kozlovskaya says. “She thought that
gays are all pedophiles who corrupt children.” Kozlovskaya came out to her mom
about seven times, and, each time, her mom pretended it was news.
Kozlovskaya works in gay advocacy in St. Petersburg, where there has been a
spike in anti-gay violence. (There are no official statistics, but
Kozlovskaya’s group, the LGBT Network, estimates that 15 percent of LGBT people
were assaulted last year.) “People are changing their behavior to protect
themselves,” Kozlovskaya says. “They don’t wear rainbow pins anymore, they
don’t hold hands outside.”
Recently, when Kozlovskaya and a client—an assault victim—arrived at the courthouse,
they were met by a group of skinheads. “They egged me and beat up the victim,”
Kozlovskaya says. “We called the police, but they didn’t come.”
There is a group in Russia called Occupy Pedophilia run by a neo-Nazi named
Maksim “the Hatchet” Martsinkevich. The group uses young men to lure older men
into sexual encounters, at which point Maksim, usually shirtless, interrogates
them on camera before pouring a bottle of urine on their heads.
Dozens of these videos can be found on YouTube.
“Hello, my dear young lovers of extremism,” says Maksim in one. “As usual, I am
without a shirt. Why? Because I am very poor. All my money goes to growth
hormones, to anabolics ... to look good.” In his interrogations, he asks, in
exhaustive detail, who is a top, and who is a bottom, and who likes to suck
whose “pee-pee.”
One young man in the city of Pskov was targeted by the Hatchet and
complained to officials. In return, the Hatchet and his goons posted a 15,000
ruble ($450) bounty on his head. Terrified, the young man came out to his
mother and asked for her help. His mother said she didn’t care about his sexual
orientation and dragged him off to file a police report.
The same thing happened to a young man in Perm, in the Ural Mountains. He
told his mother; she promptly disowned him.
In May, a group of young men in Volgograd was sitting around drinking beer.
“In the course of the conversation, it became clear that their 23-year-old
friend was a homosexual, which enraged the rest of the group,” according to a
news report. At first, they started to beat him. Then they stripped him and
began shoving beer bottles into his anus. Two bottles fit, whole, and a third
made it part of the way in. By this point, he was unconscious, so his friends
put some cardboard under him and tried to set it alight. They
failed, and left, but it dawned on them that he might turn them in. “One of the
young men took a boulder weighing about 20 kilos and threw it eight times onto
the head of the victim.”
The man’s mourning friends posted testimonials online. One
wrote, “He had no signs of homosexuality.”
This winter, my friend Andrey, who is gay, was diagnosed with HIV. By then,
he was 105 pounds and his vision was going. Andrey was stuck in the hospital
for five months, surrounded by heroin addicts and convicts, who make up most of
Russia’s HIV cases. His Moscow friends—a hip, progressive bunch—started a
private Facebook group to help fund his treatment and schedule visits so he was
never alone. “I was afraid that they’d judge me,” he says. “I am still in total
shock at how incredible my friends are.”
Andrey is out of the hospital and on meds that have restored his health but
are hell on his joints. “I don’t know whether to tell people,” he says,
referring to his diagnosis. Russia has one of the fastest-growing HIV rates in the
world, but, Andrey says: “There is no information on it anywhere. Everyone
speaks in whispers about it here. Even the doctors.”
In February, as the gay-propaganda law made its way through the Duma, a
popular Moscow magazine called Afisha ran a
rainbow flag on its cover. Inside were the stories and portraits of 30 gay men
and women of Moscow. They were lawyers, entrepreneurs, nurses, and I.T. specialists; there
was even a welder named “Sergei Ivanov,” the
Russian equivalent of John Smith. They told the stories of their “kaming aut”,
which has become Moscow slang for any moment of honesty.
One subject was Alexander
Smirnov, a press attaché in the Moscow mayor’s office. “I hide the fact that I’m
gay,” he told Afisha. “If someone at work starts joking about fags, I
smile like an idiot.” He broke his silence after hearing Putin and Medvedev
boasting that there was no anti-gay discrimination in Russia. Smirnov predicted
to Afisha that, after the article appeared, “they’ll quietly ask me to
turn in my resignation.” A few days after publication, that’s exactly what
happened.
Sasha, an acquaintance of mine, was 40, single, and childless. Shortly before
I left Moscow last fall, she had approached our mutual friend Boris, a raucous
young gay man who co-owns several of the restaurants and bars we loved to
linger in. She and Boris both belonged to the cozy cocoon of the city’s old
intelligentsia, so she asked Boris if he’d father a child with her, and he
agreed. This was not kept secret, nor did people seem to judge their unorthodox
non-coupling.
On June 18, their daughter, Elena, was born. “I am incredibly, incredibly
grateful to and happy for our daddy Boris,” Sasha wrote on Facebook. The
accompanying picture gathered more than 1,000 likes and hundreds of ebullient
notes. I’d never seen this circle await a child so eagerly.
And yet, although Elena was born the day the Duma passed a law banning
foreign adoptions by gay couples, and a week before Putin signed the
gay-propaganda bill into law, no one drew a connection between her birth and a
legislative push that prohibits anyone calling Sasha and Boris’s relationship
“normal.” People welcomed Elena because everyone adored Sasha, and everyone
adored Boris, and everyone in Moscow loves babies.
When I asked Boris’s permission to tell this story, he balked, and agreed
only after I promised that I wouldn’t use their real names. I pointed out that
he and his boyfriend had been photographed in Afisha’s kaming aut
issue and used their full names. That was four months before the law passed, he
explained. Since then, “everyone’s gone savage here.”
Julia Ioffe is a senior editor at The New Republic.
Source URL: http://www.newrepublic.com//article/114299/gay-life-russia-eight-horrific-stories
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