“There’s more aggression and it’s becoming more dangerous on the streets,” Andrei tells me. “Many gay people have changed how they dress, they’ve removed earrings, changed their hairstyles, to avoid having problems. Even back in the USSR, where homosexuality was a criminal offence, gays were treated better than they are now in Russia. Ordinary people see us as criminals. They hate us.”
There is evidence of that attitude in a series of shocking videos posted online by a Russian vigilante group. In one, a man is being forced to drink urine to “cure him” of being a homosexual. Then a metal bucket is placed over the man’s head and hit with what looks like a baseball bat and a police truncheon. Attacks like this, filmed and posted online, are being carried out across Russia by an ultra-nationalist group. It claims its objective is to name, shame and punish suspected paedophiles. But from the tone of the videos the encounters come across as homophobic attacks. In another online clip, a woman armed with a gun and dressed in camouflage jokes that she’s “out on safari” hunting for paedophiles and gays. She starts shooting towards an imaginary “rainbow target.” The woman’s name is Yekaterina. We track her down in St Petersburg, where she heads the local branch of the vigilante group “Occupy Paedophilia.”
“Our priority is uncovering cases of paedophilia,” Yekaterina explains to me. “But we’re also against the promotion of homosexuality. And if along the way we encounter people of non-traditional sexual orientation, we can kill two birds with one stone.”
In Russia gay-rights activists believe such aggression is a direct result of the controversial new law signed by President Vladimir Putin. The legislation bans the spread of information about “untraditional sexual relations” to anyone under 18. It portrays homosexuality as a danger to children and the family. “The law itself is not a danger in terms of its application. But it’s a great danger in terms of what kind of opinions it shapes,” believes Anastasiya Smirnova of the human rights group Russian LGBT Network. “It entitles people to mob rule, to organised violence against those they perceive to be dangerous to society, to families and to children. People take over the role of the authorities to react against what they think is a violation.”
The Guardian reports that various, independent anti-gay vigilante groups are coalescing into a national movement. Most of the people being kidnapped and assaulted—and outed—are teenagers.
Says one of the authors of Russia’s anti-gay laws:
“Why should we respect all your traditions and you not respect ours?” asks St Petersburg MP Vitaly Milonov, one of the architects of the legislation. “Aggressive pushiness to accept your values is unfair. We don’t tell the Queen of England not to sign a law on same-sex marriages in your country. We have no right to do that, because we respect your independence. Why do you not accept ours?”
This is the exact same argument made by the apartheid-era government of South Africa: How we treat “our” blacks is our own business, we don’t tell you how to treat your minorities, we respect your independence and you should respect ours, these are our traditions. The world rejected those arguments and fought back against the South African government with boycotts, protests, sanctions, and divestment campaigns. And it worked.
What a fucking waste. Russia, under Lenin, was one of the most sexually progressive countries of the 20th Century. It’s horrible to think what it was reduced to under Stalin’s conservative views, and now there’s this.
It was the first modern country to legalize homosexuality, to maintain relations with Hirschfeld and the Institute for Sexual Science; to decriminalize prostitution (while at the same time viciously prosecuting pimps and others that would exploit a working woman); the first modern state to make abortion safe and legal, to normalize divorce and birth control, and to produce Kollontai, who wrote
“The “crude individualism” that adorns our era is perhaps nowhere as blatant as in the organisation of sexual relationships. A person wants to escape from his loneliness and naively imagines that being “in love” gives him the right to the soul of the other person – the right to warm himself in the rays of that rare blessing of emotional closeness and understanding. We individualists have had our emotions spoiled in the persistent cult of the “ego”. We imagine that we can reach the happiness of being in a state of “great love” with those near to us, without having to “give” up anything of ourselves.
The claims we make on our “contracted partner” are absolute and undivided. We are unable to follow the simplest rule of love – that another person should be treated with great consideration. New concepts of the relationships between the sexes are already being outlined. They will teach us to achieve relationships based on the unfamiliar ideas of complete freedom, equality and genuine friendship. But in the meantime mankind has to sit in the cold with its spiritual loneliness and can only dream about the “better age” when all relationships between people will be warmed by the rays of “the sun god”, will experience a sense of togetherness, and will be educated in the new conditions of living. The sexual crisis cannot be solved unless there is a radical reform of the human psyche, and unless man’s potential for loving is increased. And a basic transformation of the socio-economic relationships along communist lines is, essential if the psyche is to be re-formed. This is an “old truth” but there is no other way out. The sexual crisis will in no way be reduced, ‘whatever kind of marriage or personal relationships people care to try.
History has never seen such a variety of personal relationships – indissoluble marriage with its “stable family”, “free unions”, secret adultery; a girl living quite openly with her lover in so-called “wild marriage”; pair marriage, marriage in threes and even the complicated marriage of four people – not to talk of the various forms of commercial prostitution. You get the same two moral codes existing side by side in the peasantry as well – a mixture of the old tribal way of life and the developing bourgeois family. Thus you get the permissiveness of the girls’ house>*, side by side with the attitude that fornication, or men sleeping with their daughters-in-law, is a disgrace. It’s surprising that. in the face of the contradictory and tangled forms of present-day personal relationships, people are able to preserve a faith in moral authority, and are able to make sense of these contradictions and thread their way through these mutually destructive and incompatible moral codes. Even the usual justification – “I live by the new morality” – doesn’t help anyone, since the new morality is still only in the process of being formed. Our task is to draw out from the chaos of present-day contradictory sexual norms the shape, and make clear the principles, of a morality that answers the spirit of the progressive and revolutionary class.”
A country that a hundred years ago was endorsing such things should not have been allowed to fall so far back.