Putin claims that the law does nothing to infringe on the lives and rights of homosexuals (“They’re people, just like everyone else”); he insisted that the Russian people supported the legislation and, thus, must have it; he also says he is concerned that homosexuality is contributing to the country’s low birth rate.
Activists find this disingenuous at best. The law insures discrimination and provides a xenophobic regime with an Other to rally against. The activists also contend that the legislation is part of a larger ideological and legislative effort in Russia that seeks to stigmatize nongovernmental organizations as “foreign agents” and the West, in general, as a threat. The leadership invokes an anti-gay rhetoric reminiscent of the way Soviet leaders used to denounce Jews as “internal enemies,” the agents of foreign capital and spy services. Human-rights groups and L.G.B.T. organizations in Russia say that the law has opened the door to real misery: this year alone, they have documented hundreds of acts of violence, including murders, against gay men and women; workplace discrimination; and hateful (and sanctioned) rhetoric in the official media.
When I lived in Moscow, as a correspondent for the Washington Post, in the late nineteen-eighties and early nineties, an extended period of general, even euphoric liberalization was in full swing. Most of it centered on the easing of strictures on the press and on cultural and political life; it only slowly extended to sexual issues. Gays and lesbians still lived in the shadows. The Great Soviet Encyclopedia referred to homosexuality as “a manifestation of Western decadence.” Boris Malenkov, the chief sexual pathologist of the hospitals in Leningrad, told a local paper that homosexuals should be registered by the state so that “they can be treated.”
I remember talking with gay men, who cruised the park in front of the Bolshoi Theatre and hung out in a grim restaurant called the Sadko Café; they said they were still terrified of harassment from police and street thugs. They spoke with intense longing of the new freedoms that gays were experiencing in the West. Igor Kon, a pioneering sociologist specializing in sexuality, told me then, “People here think gays are depraved and want nothing more than rough sex or to seduce children. To change such attitudes would take a lot of time. Just to begin the discussion is dangerous.”
And yet there were signs, in those days, of bravery and better things to come. An activist named Roman Kalinin put out a gay-oriented newspaper called Tema. Later came tiny publications, such as Gay Pravda, The Partner, and Queer, and, much later, such online presences as Radio Indigo and Gay Rainbow. An especially audacious activist named Yevgenia Debranskaya would get arrested quite often at pro-democracy rallies and, in jail, shout through the bars, “I am a lesbian!”
In 1991, people came from all over the country to a gay-film festival that played in both Moscow and St. Petersburg. In 1993, with Boris Yeltsin in power, the Russian government very quietly got rid of Article 121, the anti-sodomy laws, which had also, at times, been used to prosecute dissidents. The move hardly reflected a disappearance of homophobia in Russia; no small part of the motivation was to win acceptance for Russia abroad.
But, for a decade or so thereafter, life seemed relatively more relaxed for gays and lesbians. Gay bars and discos appeared. Various small L.G.B.T. groups formed, more as community-building organizations than as overtly political groups. In those years, Gessen told me, “people were living in what they thought was a normal country—not Western Europe, but not the Soviet Union, either.” Their lives were getting better; now, having come out, they are exposed and deeply vulnerable. “Their friends knew, their neighbors knew, their pediatrician knew. Now we have nowhere to go, not even the closet.”
Putin, who came to power in 2000, had worked in the secret services and was far less inclined toward tolerance. A couple of years ago, I was talking about human-rights issues with Dmitri Peskov, Putin’s close aide and spokesman, and he broke out in a wide smile.
“Actually, coming here in the car I was listening to the radio,” he said. “Do you know what was the first item on the news? The State Department of the United States expressed its gravest concern about the policy in Russia toward gays!” Peskov was referring to a version of the gay-propaganda law, which was then before the legislature in St. Petersburg. “I thought, What is the State Department of the United States doing? With their national debt! With their collapsing economy! With a leak of industry in the country because everything is in a financial bubble! With a nightmare in Afghanistan, with a nightmare in Iraq, with a nightmare in the global economy! And they have a deep concern about gays in Russia. Ha-ha! So I was really in a very good mood because of this!”
The Russian officials I meet always seem surprised that so many Westerners care at all about the rights of gay men and women. A few days ago, a senior official told me that such concerns were the inventions of the Western press. The reaction to questions about gay rights is usually either dismissive laughter or anger at what they view as self-righteous foreigners determined to embarrass Russia. When Putin went to Amsterdam in April, the city flew the rainbow flag, and he was confronted with questions about the propaganda law; he fumbled through his answers.
Even as anti-gay legislation began moving through the provinces and the prospects for gay life were dimming, a younger generation raised in post-Soviet circumstances seized what liberties were available. The Putin regime directs nearly all of its propagandist attentions to television, leaving some liberal outlets, like the radio station Ekho Moskvi (Echo of Moscow) and the Web television station Dozhd’ (Rain), more or less to their own devices. (Putin’s system of targeted censorship is far less expensive than the totalist Soviet version.) Two Moscow city magazines,Afisha and Bolshoi Gorod (Big City), recently published astonishingly good special issues devoted to gay life, with stories and analyses as varied, deep, and liberated as those you would hope to find anywhere in the world.
But the general picture presented to the vast majority of the public through state television is miserable and threatening. Last month, on Rossiya 1, a well-known host named Arkady Mamontov devoted an episode of his show “Special Correspondent” to the topic of homosexuality. He and his reporters portrayed gay activists as Western-funded agents out to corrupt the moral foundation of the country. Mamontov said, “Western sodomites are trying to sneak into Russia and mobilize a protest movement among our own perverts.” The meteorite that had crashed down on the city of Chelyabinsk was a warning from God, he said; if the indulgence of homosexuals continued, Russia would, like Sodom and Gomorrah, be destroyed for its moral turpitude.
Mamontov is hardly unusual. Leaders of the Russian Orthodox Church regularly declare on television that homosexuality is a harbinger of apocalypse. This is important, because of the way Putin has promoted and elevated the Orthodox Church as a symbol of Russianness.
Lest anyone think that Putin is not controlling the expressions of homophobia in the official Russian media, he just appointed Dmitri Kiselyov, a former television anchor, head of the new state news agency. In April, 2012, Kiselyov went on Rossiya 1 andsaid to a rapt studio audience:
I think that to fine gays for propagandizing homosexuality among teen-agers is not enough. They should be prohibited from donating blood or sperm. And their hearts, in the case of a car accident, should be buried, or burned, as unfit for extending anyone’s life.
The applause that followed was as startling as the statement itself. (One gay activist called Kiselyov “the new Minister of Truth.”)
Pavel Astakhov, an official in the children’s-rights bureaucracy, said, according to the A.P., that promoters of families with same-sex parents should be rendered “outcasts—damned for centuries as destroyers of the family and of human kind.” Masha Gessen, who has both Russian and U.S. citizenship, told me that she and her partner fear the state might take legal action and seize their children. Next week, they are moving from Russia to the United States. She feels this is the safest course. “I am now a person with a pink triangle,” she said.
All of this recent activity—the unpunished cases of harassment and violence, the ominous tone of the official press, the statements from the government and the Church—comes in the months and weeks leading up to the Winter Olympics in Sochi. (I’m planning to cover the games for The New Yorker and NBC.)
A couple of days ago, I met with a group of L.G.B.T. activists from various cities in Russia. Anastasia Smirnova, a young woman from St. Petersburg, is the coördinator of the umbrella rights group the Russian L.G.B.T. Network, representing fifty-five regions and seventeen offices. When I said to Smirnova that the West could hardly congratulate itself for having erased homophobia and that the repeal of sodomy laws and the rise of gay marriage were, in historical terms, recent victories, she said, “The major difference between Russia and the U.S. is the political climate. In Russia at the moment, there is no political will—even on behalf of the tiniest parties, for example, or decision-makers at the lower levels—to support the equality agenda.”
Beyond that, “homophobic policy, homophobic attitudes, and violence are openly encouraged by the highest officials in the country,” she said. “Recently, there was a forum called the Holiness of Motherhood held in Moscow—a very high-level event, with representatives of the government, the Russian Orthodox Church, reporters, educators, psychologists. The commissioner for children’s rights gave an opening speech, and he said that the protection of traditional family values is now a national-security issue for Russia. And everyone who is engaged against these values has to be proclaimed a pariah … and prosecuted…. This is obviously a very threatening sign that we are criminals against the nation.”
Maria Kozlovskaya, a lawyer for the group Coming Out, said that in the Stonewall era American gay-rights activists could hope to rely on institutions like the press and the courts. Before the anti-gay-propaganda legislation passed, there were gay sports contests in Russia, small festivals and forums—signs of vitality. Now homophobic groups, some of them with nationalistic or Fascist ideas, feel free to harass gay men and lesbians, the activists said. In some cities, organized groups with names like Homophobic Wolf have posted pictures of gay men and lesbians online, the better for them to be identified and pursued on the street. Some have found placards plastered on the doorways of their buildings saying that a gay person lives within. Humiliation has become the stuff of everyday life. When Smirnova was eating dinner at a restaurant with her girlfriend recently, the proprietor came over and asked them to leave. “And there was no public display of affection,” she said. “They just knew we were a couple.”
Activists have met with leaders of the International Olympic Committee hoping to increase awareness of the situation, but so far they have found that they have not fully captured the sympathies of the I.O.C. or the Games’ corporate sponsors, much less those of the Russian government. The activists argue that Russia, by discriminating so clearly and aggressively against gay men and women, is in violation of the Olympic Charter and ought to be pressured to change. South Africa, South Korea, and Afghanistan are among the countries that have been sanctioned in one way or another because of their human-rights violations against women or minorities. The activists are concerned that national Olympic committees around the world are warning their athletes not to make any show of protest at the Games, lest they offend their Russian hosts.
Smirnova told me that they were not calling for a boycott—they know that would be futile—but there is likely to be at least an attempt to stage protests in cities beyond Sochi in the days before the Games. “We can’t allow ourselves to be seen as people who are something less than human,” she said.
Above: Police officers detain a protester after clashes with gay-rights activists during a gay-pride rally, in St. Petersburg, on October 12th. Photograph: Anatoly Maltsev/EPA.
