CHRISTINA MALITOVSKAYA lives with Katya, her girlfriend of three years, in a typically drab Soviet-era apartment block in a north-western suburb of Moscow called Zelenograd. Malitovskaya is stoutly built, her face is boldly framed by a bob haircut and a dyed blonde fringe, and she wears no makeup. The ring finger of her right hand is decorated with a simple golden band. Malitovskaya and her girlfriend consider themselves to be married, but the Russian state does not legally recognise their union. Unlike heterosexual married couples, they cannot take on a joint mortgage, make decisions for each other should either get seriously ill, or be each other’s legal heirs.
Malitovskaya, now 34 years old, heads the Moscow branch of LGBT-Set (“LGBT-Network”), the country’s biggest LGBT rights organisation. Founded in 2006, LGBT-Set currently has divisions in 17 Russian subyekti (“subjects”, or constituent political regions), where it conducts research for international institutions such as the United Nations, trains activists, and provides free counselling. Malitovskaya currently coordinates 28 volunteers who help run a telephone helpline for the Moscow area that handles calls from LGBT people seeking both moral and legal support. The service is busier now than it has ever been. In a country where the community has only recently started openly asserting itself, LGBT people face deep prejudice and even hatred, making it difficult to find someone to talk to. Now, a new law banning the spread of “propaganda of non-traditional sexual relations among minors”, broadly interpreted to include the dissemination of any information on LGBT rights, is threatening LGBT-Set’s work. The law, Malitovskaya told me, has had far-reaching social effects, since the government had “shown who the second-class people here are”.
Violations of this new law—passed by the Russian parliament on 11 June 2013 with 436 votes in favour and only one of the 437 members abstaining—are punishable by fines of up to 5,000 roubles (approximately $152) for individuals, 50,000 roubles ($1,518) for government officials, and 1 million roubles ($30,350) or a suspension of up to 90 days for organisations, with fines for individuals and officials rising steeply if the offending material is published or broadcast via news media or on the internet. Under these provisions, authorities have already charged one newspaper and at least three individuals, including two activists arrested for demonstrating outside a children’s library in the city of Arkhangelsk with posters reading “People do not become gay, people are born gay”. The new law also makes it harder to protest a string of other anti-homosexual legislative initiatives. In September, the parliament considered a bill to strip homosexual couples of parental rights. The proposal was sent back for revision in a move widely seen as a stalling tactic meant to minimise international criticism before Russia hosts the 2014 Winter Olympics this February. Malitovskaya does not doubt that the bill will eventually be passed. The parliament has also discussed a ban on homosexuals donating blood.
Russia has long treated homosexuals as abnormal. Homosexuality was considered a mental illness at least as early as the initial years of Soviet rule, and was only removed from the country’s official list of mental illnesses in 1999. From 1934 until 1993, shortly after the fall of the Soviet Union, same-sex relations between men were a criminal offence, punishable by up to five years of detention. In Moscow, activists’ attempts to organise a gay pride parade in the city every year since 2006 have been obstructed by the courts. Unsanctioned marches have taken place, but have been violently suppressed by the police on many occasions. In May 2012, Moscow’s top court officially banned all such events for the next 100 years, citing the high probability of violent reactions and stating that the majority of Russians opposed pro-LGBT demonstrations.
That decision did not spark popular outcry since many Russians remain homophobic: in a survey conducted in the early summer of 2013 by the state-owned All-Russian Centre for the Study of Public Opinion, encompassing 42 of the Russian Federation’s 83 subyekti, 42 percent of the 1,600 people polled believed that “non-traditional” sexual orientations should be criminalised once again, while 25 percent thought that homosexuality should be an object of public reproach. Only 15 percent of those surveyed saw sexual orientation as a private issue that should be free of interference by either the government or society.
In addition to such attitudes, homosexual Russians regularly face harassment. LGBT-Set’s latest survey, conducted in August–September 2013 and involving more than 2,000 homosexuals from all eight of Russia’s federal districts, found that 53 percent of them had faced psychological violence in the past year, 15 percent had experienced physical violence, and 38 percent had dealt with problems at work because of their sexual orientation or identity.
According to Malitovskaya, those left most vulnerable by such discrimination are adolescents—the very group the anti-propaganda bill claims to protect—who are at “a very critical age”. “The good thing is today’s gay teens have the internet,” she said, “but offline they have no one to go to with their anxieties. Now, school psychologists won’t tell them they are normal, parents will try to cure them, society won’t accept them. It’s terrible.”
One of those teens is 14-year-old Iuliania from the small northern town of Naryan-Mar. Iuliania recounted that every time a discussion about gay rights appeared on television—the number of such discussions has increased noticeably in the last year—her mother would refer to homosexuals as “blasphemers” who “go against nature”. Last summer, when she was visiting her estranged father in another town and feeling homesick, in a phone call to her mother Iuliania expressed an anxiety about being different from everyone else. Her mother asked: do you like girls? In response, Iuliania started to cry. Mother and daughter did not speak for three days afterwards. When Iuliania came home, her mother tried to avoid her company. That lasted for a week, and gradually things settled into a strained peace.
Iuliania had been less lucky at school, where a talkative classmate whom she told about her homosexuality two years ago quickly spread the news. “Everyone at school has sort of distanced themselves from me since then,” she said. Iuliania has to use a lavatory to change for physical education lessons because her classmates no longer let her use the locker room with them. She told me that at least one teacher had graded her lower than she deserved, saying, “Why should we give A’s to people like you?” Trying to explain the roots of such virulent homophobia, Iuliania said that “this all [comes] from upbringing, from parents”.
When they want advice, or just a word of sympathy, many teenagers like Iuliania turn to an online collective called Deti-404 (“Children-404”), started in 2013 by a concerned journalist, Elena Klimova, on Facebook and its Russian analogue, Vkontakte. The group’s name refers to the online error code displayed when a requested webpage cannot be found, used in this case as a clever metaphor for the LGBT community’s social invisibility. A 2013 survey by the Levada Center, a Moscow-based sociological research organisation, found that 80 percent of Russians believe they do not know any homosexuals at all.
Today, the Deti-404 groups are run by a handful of volunteers from across Russia. Ivan Simochkin, who is one of them, explained how the project now works on two levels. Publicly, the group posts letters and photographs from LGBT youth on its pages in the hope of sensitising the public and showing young LGBT people that they are not alone or abnormal. Privately, all teenaged members of Deti-404 are invited to a restricted group on Vkontakte, where they can contact psychologists, sympathetic parents of LGBT children, and others who can help them deal with problems that they increasingly fear to speak about in public.
The public group on Vkontakte now has more than 14,000 followers. Seventeen-year-old Maxim is one of its promoters. Maxim had to come out when he was 13, after a schoolmate spread the word about his homosexuality. For two years, Maxim’s fellows teased and beat him at school, while his teachers chose not to intervene. In 2010, he shut himself in a school lavatory and, in an unsuccessful attempt at suicide, swallowed a handful of pills. Maxim said that since then he had stopped feeling ashamed of who he is. As we talked in a cheap Moscow café, people at neighbouring tables cast disapproving glances towards us when they overheard Maxim say that he is now proud to be gay. “After I reach legal age, I will become a full-fledged activist,” he said. “I want to help people like me to come out of the closet. If I can make that happen, I will be 100 percent happy.”
Maxim believes today’s persecution of gays is the government’s way of drawing attention away from other problems. This view, with slight variations, is echoed by many Russian LGBT-rights activists. Simochkin, for example, said that Russia’s deteriorating political and economic development over the last few years had cost the government its earlier popularity, and that it had responded by openly courting homophobes and nationalists.
But despite increasing persecution, Simochkin is optimistic. “It is obvious that today’s generation … is much more liberal, more composed than ours, it is not infected with the [same] dogmata,” he said. Maxim also believes that Russian attitudes can be changed for the better. “If people appreciate your personality and your deeds, learning that you are gay will make them change their minds about homosexuality,” he said. “I think it will be the start of a new epoch when today’s gay teens step forward.”