It’s a mechanism of thought control, its target not so much gays as anybody the state declares gay a virtual resurrection of Article 70 from the old Soviet system, forbidding "anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda." Then, as now, nobody knew exactly what "propaganda" was. The first law banned gay "propaganda," but it was written so as to leave the definition vague. The Russian closet has always been deep, but since last June, when the Duma began passing laws designed to shove Russia’s tiny out population back into it, the closet has been getting darker. The difference in Russia now is who’s standing behind them. There are babushkas who throw stones, and priests who bless the stones, and police who arrest their victims.īut such people exist everywhere, said Alex. There are countless smaller, bristling movements, with names presumptuous (God’s Will) or absurd (Homophobic Wolf). There’s a national network called Occupy Pedophilia, whose members torture gay men and post hugely popular videos of their "interrogations" online.
In May, a 23-year-old man in Volgograd allegedly came out to a group of friends, who raped him with beer bottles and smashed his skull in with a stone and in June a group of friends in Kamchatka kicked and stabbed to death a 39-year-old gay man, then burned the body. "Not so loud." It’s not Germany in the ’30s, he said it’s Russia now. His boyfriend wasn’t as glib: "It’s Germany in the ’30s," he declared. "I was just lucky it wasn’t _my _computer," Alex said one night at a café on Arbat Street, Moscow’s main thoroughfare of consumer hipsterism. He wasn’t always so principled: One of Alex’s early assignments on the force was snooping through a fellow officer’s computer for evidence of homosexuality. One of the first men I met was Alex, a gay police officer who’d recently quit his job rather than enforce Russia’s new anti-gay law. In Russia, that means silence and violence, censorship, and in its shadow, much worse. The medicine is that of "traditional values," a phrase, ironically, imported from the West, grafted onto a deeply conformist strain of nationalism. I wanted to see what ordinary LGBT life was like in a nation whose leaders have decided that "homosexualism" is a threat to its "sexual sovereignty," that "genderless tolerance," in Putin’s words, is a disease of the West that Russia will cure. _The blues, which in Russia is another word for queer-any way of being other than "Russian," which, under President Vladimir Putin, has become a kind of sexual orientation. I wanted to visit the bottom of the heap. Civil society isn’t just coming undone it’s imploding. Books are being banned-Burroughs and Baudelaire and Huxley’s Brave New World-immigrants hunted, journalists killed, a riot-grrrl band, Pussy Riot, imprisoned for almost two years for playing a "Punk Prayer" in a Moscow cathedral blasphemy is now illegal. Petersburg for two weeks in November because the Olympics were coming to Russia, and for a brief moment it seemed possible that the outside world was interested in the unraveling of civil society in one of the most powerful countries on the globe.
Dmitry and Anna, who’d been shot in the back, inspected their wounds. And then the faggots in the other room charged the men with the gun and the bat and the masks, and the men ran away. "Faggot, faggot, faggot." The bat came down. One of them had a bat, "a baseball bat, yes," says Dmitry. He says he remembers the sound of the bullet hitting his eye.ĭmitry went down, and Rose ran, and Dmitry crawled. The first, the very first." Rose: "I had a thought in my head-maybe I should do something, maybe I should scream." Chizhevsky: "I can remember more closely what was audio." _Pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, _he recalls hearing. "Then," she says, "they started shooting." Chizhevsky: "The first bullet came into my eye. Rose glanced toward the door: two men wearing ski masks. Behind him was a girl I’ll call Rose, a few weeks shy of her eighteenth birthday. In the hall, a man named Dmitry Chizhevsky was looking for his jacket.
"We’re looking for our friend!" replied one of the strangers. They crossed the lot toward a stand of scrub trees and weeds and took a left down a narrow path, then down an even darker set of uneven stairs to an unmarked steel door. Here they may have stopped to put on their masks. They went through the arch and down a dark alley before they arrived at an unlit empty parking lot, blacktop crumbling. They walked down a long street between a busy road and a canal until they came to an arch in a building. One evening in November-the city center like a bowl of pastel candies, Orthodox onion-domes rising above it like spun sugar-two strangers found their way to LaSky.