An “extremist” in my home country (part 1 of 2)
Read Part 2 here
“…With the stroke of a pen, for the sake of cheap political gain, the Kremlin has taken several million [Russian] people outside of the law and declared them criminals. Horrific.”
- Tikhon Dzyadko, Editor-in-Chief of the Russian dissident media TV Rain
On 30th November 2023, Russia’s Supreme Court ruled that the “International LGBT Movement” is now extremist, in the latest blow to the rights of the marginalised communities in the country.
The phrase “International LGBT Movement” is in inverted commas because in reality there is no such thing. There are LGBTQ+ people and there are many organisations and movements that champion their rights, but a unified “movement” simply does not exist. From the point of view of the Russian authorities, then, this is merely an excuse to prosecute any LGBTQ+ person or sympathiser for any reason whatsoever.
This is personal
“It [the “LGBT movement”] has signs of extremism, because the logical conclusion of its activities is the destruction of the traditional idea of marriage and family.”
- Vakhtang Kipshidze, Deputy Chairman of the Synodal Department of the Moscow Patriarchate for Church Relations with Society and the Media
In this journal, I write about subjects that are personal to me. And this subject is perhaps the most personal of all.
Growing up in the late USSR, being queer (1) was like not being at all. In my fifteen hundred-strong state school, I did not know a single person who was one. In hindsight, many years later, I was left with an inkling — a classmate, a teacher. Kid jokes about ‘педик’ and ‘голубой’ (2) hanging in the air around me, as if queerness was something to be disgusted by.
Some estimates place LGBTQ+ people at around 5% of the population. There might have been seventy or more people at my school — at least one per class — who did not live as themselves because they didn’t know how to, and because no-one else around them knew how to, either. Or, if they did so, it was entirely in secret.
Back in the USSR, it became illegal to be gay in 1933, as part of Stalin’s crackdown on “Western degeneracy”. Gay men were sent to prison and lesbians to mental institutions. After Stalin’s death and especially under Gorbachev, the situation temporarily improved. The Soviet collapse and the separation of the Russian state led to the removal of Stalin’s law in 1993 and the removal of homosexuality from the mental illness register in 1999. By then, I had already left the country.
In the UK, it was easy for me to come out; a joy and a relief to be able to exist as me and to witness a slow but steady progress towards the social and political acceptance of my identity. In 2000, the repeal of Section 28 saw me out in the streets, waving a homemade placard of Baroness Young’s face crossed out with red paint. In 2013, I was outside №10, rallying alongside Stephen Fry for the legalisation of same sex marriage. “We’re here, we’re queer, get used to it,” the crowd chanted.
(1) To those unfamiliar, the term “queer”, once derogatory, has been reclaimed by the LGBTQ+ community and is frequently used by LGBTQ+ people to describe themselves.
(2) Russian derogatory terms to describe a homosexual. Today, the Russian LGBTQ+ community rejects these terms and instead uses Western terms such as ‘гей’ (gay) and ‘квир’ (queer).
The descent
“We kept getting attacked and arrested. Orthodox activists brought urine and rotten eggs, they threw shit at us. They brought their children so they would beat us, too. You can’t fight back against children — they’re small, you could hurt them. The State Duma passed the law.”
- Elena Kostiychenko on protesting against the “gay propaganda law” in 2013 (from her book “I Love Russia”).
In the meantime in Russia, a reversal of human rights was taking place. In 2013, the Russian equivalent of Section 28 — otherwise known as the “gay propaganda law” — came into force, banning “LGBT propaganda” to minors. In tune with the powers that be, the head of the Russian Orthorox Church, Patriarch Kirill declared same-sex marriage “a very dangerous sign of the apocalypse.” As well as an effective way to stifle LGBTQ+ activism in the country, this “gay propaganda law” also became a means by which the authorities would threaten to remove children from LGBTQ+ parents.
Protests erupted across Europe and the US in support of the Russian queer community. Activists were busy writing petitions, bars banned Russian vodka, there were calls for boycotting the pro-Putinist musicians Valery Gergiev and Anna Netrebko, the Scottish company Brewdog released a beer with Putin’s face covered in rainbows. I took part in the happenings, expressing solidarity with my Russian peers.
I recall that at the time, I was vaguely friends with a former classmate turned Putin supporter. In response to one of my well-meaning outraged comments, he quipped, menacingly: “You’re going to get arrested.”
I laughed at him. After that moment, he and I never spoke again. Little did I know…
Since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the laws started coming thick and fast. In October 2022, the “gay propaganda law” was expanded from just minors to include all ages. In early 2023, the Russian State Duma unanimously passed a law that prohibited medical and legal transitioning, banned trans people from adopting children, and automatically annulled their marriages. At around the same time, an announcement was made that Russian clinics would run programmes for conversion therapy (which, according to the United Nations, “could be tantamount to acts of torture or cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment”). And finally, this November, the jewel in the crown, the newest “LGBT extremist law”.
Unlike the “gay propaganda law” of ten years ago, this news came quietly. Russian dissidents — most of them now in exile — protested for a bit. Russian independent media — also in exile — lit up in rainbow colours for a few days. A handful of Russians dared take to the streets — but open political protest in Russia had effectively been crushed. Western media outlets published articles on page 10 and left it at that. The world was already tired from this never ending war. One’s capacity for empathy is limited, and it is too true that much worse things are happening elsewhere. Perhaps even a thought crossed one’s mind that “those Russians deserve it”.
Using us as a political scapegoat
“What’s new, in my opinion, is that it [the new anti-LGBTQ+ law] was passed on the basis of an utterly cynical calculation. Some political strategists sat down and did the math: Putin needs to go to the so-called “elections” with something […]. This will fit perfectly into a campaign around “family values.” And all of these foreign agents and liberals — they, of course, will fit in too, shouting about the violation of some rights — brilliant, the enemy will expose themselves! Our heterosexual Putin versus these evil, LGBT, foreign agents!”
- Leonid Volkov, Russian dissident
Why hunt down this small group of people when Russia is buckling under the human and economic costs of the war in Ukraine, the poverty, the depression epidemic, the sanctions? Why now?
It is my belief — backed by solid research — that being queer is a normal part of the human experience. Depending on where you are in the world, it forms a part of the cultural experience, too. It is true that Western countries have gone further than many others in supporting the LGBTQ+ community; today, there appears a sort of tandem between the Western democracies and LGBTQ+ rights. But this relationship is not self-evident and was certainly not formed overnight, but as a result of decades of protest and struggle.
Nonetheless, the relationship is often taken for granted, as if the Western culture has somehow spontaneously produced the concept of LGBTQ+ by the nature of its very existence. So, some of the world’s regimes tend to use the terms LGBTQ+ and “liberal Western values” interchangeably and pick on LGBTQ+ as a scapegoat, a focal point for their efforts to control and alienate their populations from the “Western liberal ideas’’, which the regimes view as a direct threat to themselves. This is why the LGBTQ+ folk are often some of the first to be targeted when a country’s political barometer swings further to the proverbial right.
In 1933, Stalin was “fighting Western degeneracy” by persecuting gay people in the USSR. Almost a century later, another dictator is parroting the same narrative in Russia.
It is precisely because of the problems in the country right now, that this narrative has gained so much urgency for Putin’s regime. The logical steps are as follows:
- Push the narrative to the Russian people that the war with Ukraine is actually an ideological war with NATO and the West.
- Hide the facts that the war is not going well, that the economy is not so great, and that the GDP spending on the war is being pumped up further than ever before.
- Realise that elections are looming. And even though the elections are invariably rigged, give the population a bone to gnaw on, to divert their attention from the country’s real problems.
- Equate the “LGBT movement” with “Western degeneracy”. Package the message up as a part of the overall “ideological war” narrative.
- Et voilà! Introducing three major pieces of anti-LGBTQ+ legislation in Russia since the war began!
Please consider donating to Equal PostOst, a LGBTQ+ organisation that helps queer Russian people escape persecution by helping them leave the country.
