Q&A with Jeff Sharlet: Russia's anti-gay legislation
A condensed version of this article was published in The Dartmouth on February 14, 2014. Below is the full interview.
What inspired you to look into this issue/drove you to the topic?
My editor, who called me up and said do you want to do this? The reason he called me was because I’ve written about related issues in the past, particularly Uganda where they passed a bill popularly known as the “Kill the Gays” bill. Very subtly named, and that’s what it does. Although now they’ve watered down, so now it’s life sentence without parole. So I’ve written a lot about this, and when my editor was looking at this strange thing happening in Russia he wanted someone who would come to it with some knowledge. So he asked me. There are other people who know Russia much better obviously, and that’s the choice you have to make. Do you go with someone who knows Russia or someone who’s been paying attention to these issues?
When did you start working on this article, and how long did it take to complete?
This was the fastest work I’ve ever done of this sort. I think it was probably in October when the videos coming from the group called Occupy Pedophilia started reaching the West. It [Occupy Pedophilia] is based on an American TV show called To Catch a Predator, but these gangs wanted to catch gays instead. They didn’t arrest them, they tortured them and then put the videos online. So these got to the West without much context, but it was obviously horrifying. So in October when I got asked to do it, I had a lot of stuff going on, but I said yes. I went November 8th, and I got to spend about 15 days there. Normally a piece of writing like this would take 2-3 months for me, but we had to get this in the February issue because now is the time that people are paying attention to this due to they Olympics. To get an article into the February issue means that it has to be done by the middle of December. So the process of three months was really accomplished with a lot of help from that editor in three sleepless weeks.
What was the most difficult thing about reporting this story?
The steady accumulation of suffering. When you do this, you talk to far more people than you can include in the story. I was there for 2 weeks and I slept maybe 4 hours a night. I spent my days talking to ordinary people and also activists, and at nights I would go out to the queer nightlife in Saint Petersburg and Moscow and talk to people there. In the day it would be one kind of story of horror and at night, another. And that was the most difficult part, that accumulation of such sorrow. The story ends with a really wonderful little boy, Peter, and his parents – he has two mothers – and that kid just sort of saved my soul. If I hadn’t found this wonderful family, I don’t know how I would have gotten through that intact. And all of this is to say, I only had two weeks there just listening to stories! Imagine what it’s like to live it. That’s why I included the story of Zhenya, my translator who is also a gay man and a very tough guy. At one point, when someone was telling us a story about anti gay activists who, instead of stones, decided to use their own kids that particular time – they sent their kids to attack – and Zhenya, who’s a very tough guy just broke down. He just looked away. What I didn’t put in the story was that I also cried. In twenty years, I’ve heard a lot of rough stories and I’ve never done that. It was just that accumulation of bleakness everywhere you turn.
When you were reporting this, was there a moment that scared you the most?
Yeah, when a Cossack pulls a gun on you, that’s pretty frightening. So there’s this Cossack, a Cossack like you’d see in Fiddler on the Roof. Now there are Cossacks in the world that are lovely people and then there are Cossacks who are just devoted to this idea of being a “holy warrior.” They are really being revived in Russia, and even deputized in some of the states. There’s this one region that has a force of 1000 Cossacks, which the governor explains by saying that the Cossacks can do what the police cannot. Not only can they be extralegal – this Cossack that I met at sort a club house, as it were – it’s sort of like a meeting of a league of evil super-friends. Now, there are students out there who will say that that’s not very objective, but all I can say is that you tell me how to describe many different factions that come together in order to come up with new and violent methods with which to punish homosexual people. The Cossacks were the most violent. I didn’t even include in this story much of what he called “Cossack humor.” He was friendly, but it was tense while we were talking. This is not included in the story, but I had a translator with me. A young woman, who happened to be straight but had gotten involved with this because her mother was a lesbian and lost her job because she was outed, she had been at a demonstration and Cossacks had chased her with whips, and she had been hit on the head with a stone. While we were talking to the Cossack, there was another individual at the end of the table and he’s so excited that he’s got a tablet with him and he’s showing us pictures of his greatest “hits.” He means this literally, you know, with his fist. He’s showing us pictures of the demonstration at which this woman was whipped and stoned as we’re sitting there. If they come upon this picture, we’re in really deep trouble. So the Cossack is talking, and I try to distract him by asking about his traditional costume. He shows me his whip, and it’s a real piece of work with a metal weight at the end. He shows me his knife, which is as long as my forearm. Then I ask, “what kind of gun is that?” In Russia, there’s very strict gun control, so this is an illegal gun. So he says “good one, that’s all you need to know.” While he didn’t point it at my head, he takes it out and shows me the loaded clip. So at this point we got out of there, and took ‘evasive maneuvers’ coming home – we switched trains a lot.
You mentioned that there are a lot of violent attacks against the LGBT community, and also killings. Are these attacks reported at all in the Russian Media?
Not much. The most violent are – I mentioned the killing of a young man in Volograd who came out to his friends. They celebrated by raping him with beer bottles, crashing his head in with a stone and then arranging his stripped body for display. That was so horrific that it became a national story and the police did try to address that. The kinds of ordinary beatings are not addressed. There’s part of the story where I mention Elena Kostyuchenko . She’s been beaten more times than I can count, but keeps asserting herself to fight for her radical demands. Her radical demands consist of marrying her girlfriend, getting a mortgage and having kids. At one point they were coming back from a kiss-in demonstrations, and her girlfriend Anya was surrounded by a gang of right-wing activists. They surrounded her, put her in a headlock and punched her five times very hard in the face. She counted the punches. Honestly, think of the presence of mind that some of these people have. What I couldn’t fit in the story is that that night, Elena who is a nationally recognized journalist, was invited to be on TV. The host decided it would be fun to invite a right wing activist as well. Elena doesn’t know this, and when she gets there, there is the man that supervised the beating of her girlfriend. And that’s not the news story, the news story is by what right can Elena call herself a Russian because she’s a lesbian? So no, the short answer to your question is no.
How prolific are these attacks?
That’s a good question. I don’t know. I spoke to a number of people, and only a small number had never been beaten in their lives. But it doesn’t happen every day, you’re able to live your life. And in Moscow and Saint Petersburg, there are areas where you can live an out-life, since they’re large metropolitan cities. The purpose of the whole law isn’t actually to enforce it – the purpose of the law is to terrify people. You’d meet people who were out, but are now back in the closet. Or you’d meet people who are just too scared to come out of the closet. What was so interesting was that in every conversation, it would just come up in passing. Zhenya and another guy named Igor both have these sort of lumpy noses. At one point, they were just laughing with each other about how many times their noses had been broken, because it’s the “badge of the gay” in Russia. But that’s not a social science answer. That paragraph where I talk about a couple of the killings used to be three or four paragraphs long. There are a couple of activist organizations who have managed to hold on under serious persecution. They do what they can to document these crimes. What you can do, and attempt to do – what epidemiologists do – is try to measure suicides. The measure is impossible to take, but it’s significant, and much more significant than here. You might hear people here say that you have to endure that at some point in your life, but it doesn’t get better there. It gets worse.
Can you clarify the Anti-Gay law?
It’s article 6.21, popularly known as the “Gay Propaganda Law.” It’s very reminiscent of something called article 70 in the old Soviet Union, which was also a propaganda law. However, “what’s propaganda?” You’ll know when you see it. You’ll know when we’re knocking on your door. The one specificity that it really does get at is the assertion that the same sex relation is equal to a heterosexual relationship. The law is build around “saving the children.” You can’t propagandize minors. In fact, the woman who passed the law actually really believes that if they enforce this law strictly enough then they will by attrition “cure” homosexuality in Russia. So if you have two dads and they tell their kid that their fathers love one another, that’s a crime. Asserting the love between parents is actually a crime. So that gives you a sense of the perversity of the law. The law was passed with a whole raft of laws cracking down on civil society. There’s an anti-blasphemy law; people heard about Pussy Riot, that’s what did them in. There are other laws about adoption and homosexuality. There’s a particularly nasty and insidious law that requires NGOs or Non-Profits that receive any kind of foreign funds to register as a foreign power. This is used to attack the few LGBT rights organizations. So one that was doing very innocuous work, not a radical group at all was raided by the police last spring. Six agents came in and tore the place apart for seven hours. There was one woman, and they spent the seven hours sexually harassing her to put it lightly. She only smiled at them -- she wasn’t going to give them anything. They were going to prosecute her. They didn’t get as far as they wanted because [the organization] had good lawyers, I mean, there’s still law here. But there’s no doubt that they’ll be coming back. I was there one night to sit in on a meeting for straight parents of LGBT people. There was a 17 year old boy there who wanted advice on dealing with his mom. He had come out to her, and she basically kicked him out of the house. The advice was not radical. The consensus among the straight parents there and LGBT people was that you must always respect your mother. This is the level of radicalism we’re talking about, and the police raided that. If there hadn’t been lawyers there on-hand to go through all the search warrants, they would have all been arrested, and I would have been deported. So you see these laws are about a kind of control. No one who was at that meeting will go to another one. There’s not going to be anything to raid next time because there just won’t be another meeting.
Has the government crackdown noticeably deterred the voice of Russia’s LGBT community, or do there continue to be parades and demonstrations?
Well in Moscow they passed a law banning pride parades for 100 years. So apparently there’s going to be a great sexual liberation in Russia in 2112. But the pride parades are not what we think of, they last maybe two minutes. You go there, take out your rainbow flags, get beaten and then get arrested for being beaten. One of the really devastating effects of this, and it’s something you’d think Russia would be aware of. When the Jews in the Soviet Union were persecuted they left to go to America when they had the chance, much to our benefit. Think of all the wonderful writers like Gary Shteyngart and Irina Reyn, or the comedian Eugene Mirmen – we would have none of these people if it weren’t for that, much to the loss of Russia. A similar kind of brain-drain is going on now. If people have the resources to leave they’re preparing to leave, especially if they have kids. I didn’t speak to one LGBT family that wasn’t making plans, or considering making plans to leave. One prominent journalist, Masha Gessen, has just fled into exile in America. A senior Russian church official and politician had already publicly volunteered to adopt her children after they took them from her. So she left, and that’s Russia’s loss. The people who I wrote about in the story, two doctors, a lawyer and a manager for an oil company who are two couples, a lesbian and a gay couple, who live to the world as if they’re two heterosexual couples. They’re going to flee, and Russia’s going to lose all of that. I spoke to a woman who was a teacher at a great ballet school. She’s going to leave, and Russia’s going to lose her. Everywhere, people are planning on leaving, and that’s going to be the long-term impact of this law. It’s going to make it even more painful and difficult for those without resources to leave. In the story, I focus more on people who don’t have these resources. There’s a guy, Nikolai, who says he’s not worried about homophobia because he carries a gun. He’s a strong guy, who works as a delivery man and who has never been out of the country. He carries a gun, and his father wants to kill him. He says he’ll kill his father if it comes to that. Those are the voices who are left. The voices who could be most effective are leaving, and what’s left is a guy who says “come and get me.”
In your story, you talked about how you explored the underground nightlife in Moscow and Saint Petersburg. How extensive is the underground LGBT scene?
It used to be quite extensive, and it wasn’t even underground. People differ as to when the “good years” were. One guy said 2007, and another said 2010 – every week there was a new club, event, film-festival or organization. It was just a vibrant place. And now in the two weeks that I was there, I managed to visit most of the nightlife there. There were places I didn’t go, there are straight clubs that are friendly, but most of those are really elite, and in elite circles you can get away with this. I managed to see most of it, and I never saw a place that was really too crowded. I spoke to managers who all said times were tough. The two biggest clubs are both called Central Station. There’s one in Moscow, and one in Saint Petersburg. In the month that I was there, both were attacked multiple times, one by gunmen, one by arson. The land-lords at the Moscow club put a big sign over it said that said something like “gay – bar here,” not because they wanted to advertise, but because they wanted to drive people out. But people will always try to have fun and a good time, no matter what. That will always be there. While I was going around collecting horrible stories, there were people dancing and drinking, and having fun. That will survive, although fewer and fewer people will have access to it. Another story I couldn’t get into was about a 17 year old guy named Harry. He was a youth activist, who started organizing queer youth. They had no place to go – if you’re a middle class person from anywhere but those cities, it’s hard to find anywhere to go. Zhenya, my translator, who was from Vladovostock came back from a club in his city with straight friends, and he was assaulted. The police came to watch. His straight friends who tried to protect him were beaten. So much for Vladovostock. While I was there, Zhenya was outed on national television. There are special reports on “the enemy within.”
From your experience, if a Russian individual is known are thought to be gay, how is he or she treated by coworkers, neighbors, etc.?
Well, you won’t have coworkers anymore, you’ll be fired. Timur, the right wing activist in the story, his specialty is getting teachers fired. In fact, I found him because I met a teacher who had been fired. She has posted on her VK page – which is like a Russian Facebook – a really simple message that said something like “yay for equality for all.” That was enough to make him suspicious, and he got his group together to report it. This happened over a period of time, and at first the school district just said to keep it quiet. And then after the Law passed, the same principal who had supported her pretended she had no idea about it [the teacher’s sexual orientation], and that she was completely outraged. The teacher was fired. There are people who are out in their work place, you’re in the elite circles. If you’re working for a fashion designer, or at the vegan café, you’re in certain media circles where it’s less of an issue. If you’re a teacher? Forget it. You will be fired. That is the law – you’ll be shunned, and fired. You would think that the doctors, lawyer, and oil manager would be part of those circles, but they aren’t. They would be fired in a second. Alex the cop [in the story] was interesting because before the law, he told other cops that he was gay, who all said that they didn’t care about his orientation. If he had told them as a group, they would have had to denounce him, but that was why he left. After the law, his job was to try to find himself, to track himself down and fire himself. When I talked to Alex for the story, we were at this hipster café. His boyfriend was getting upset and talking loudly, and Alex kept shushing him. In a hipster café, they were afraid of being understood as gay. Which is this other weird thing as well – if you walk along the streets, you see people who are obviously out, and Russians don’t see that. This is where we get things like the mayor of Sochi saying “there are no gay people in Sochi,” despite there being a prominent gay club in Sochi. It’s that level of ‘let’s close our eyes.’
You mentioned that the government created the law in order to “protect the children,” and the author of the bill, Yelena Mizulina, stated that Russia still has a chance to “raise a pure generation.” In addition to the law, do you think there’s a possibility that the government will enact other measures or programs to ensure that “pure generation?”
Yes. Everyone expects this law – I mean, already children could be taken away, but there was law proposed [to take children away from LGBT parents] in October. Everyone I spoke expected that law to come back after Sochi. That doesn’t mean it will – things could change. In fact, I think there’s been so much world attention that who knows? No one knows Putin’s mind but him, but certainly that’s a possibility. There’s any number of other possibilities as well. I spoke to one Russian Orthodox activist – there are obviously plenty of dissident members of the Orthodox people as well – but the Orthodox Church there is more in line with this campaign. The furthest right reaches of American religious right approximate this, where you have really public leaders saying really venomous things, and endorsing violence, and so on. You have priests blessing stones before they’re thrown, that kind of thing. This one guy said “look, we need to recriminalize homosexuality.” It’s not technically illegal [now] – as long as nobody knows, you’re fine. There’s a lot of energy for recriminalization of homosexuality. He then said, “you know what would be great, if we could have a death penalty bill.” Of course, we would never enforce this, he said. That would be inhumane. The whole point is not to enforce the laws, the whole point is to scare. And that’s a really important point, because you get these sort-of apologists. Not only homophobes, but people who say that well since these laws aren’t enforced, they’re not really a big deal. This is a really literal-minded understanding of how law works. Just think about in our own lives. A lot of laws don’t need to be enforced because we don’t want to run afoul of them, or we just don’t want to do them. Some people don’t use drugs because the just don’t want to, others don’t use drugs because they’re illegal and the users don’t want to go to jail. Here, if you compound that with the threat of violence, it gets much more frightening.
Moving on to the Sochi Olympics, do you think that any openly gay athletes are at any risk while there?
No. I don’t think International athletes are at risk. I mean, Putin said “ as long as they stay away from the children.” Even if you get this champion, and kids want to celebrate them, that’s not an option for them. There are plenty of queer Russian athletes and I really wanted to talk to them, but boy, if they were in the closet before they are deep underground now. There was this medal contender – her event has not yet happened - and I won’t even say what sport she’s in. There’s a famous moment in the middle of the 1968 Olympics, which was during the Civil Rights Movement. There was an African-American athlete named John Carlos who medaled, and while he was on the podium, he didn’t make a speech, but just put his fist in the air as a symbol of the Black Power movement. What I’m wondering now is why that hasn’t happened here. On a practical level, for the person who does that, you’re going to be a hero. It doesn’t matter how good you are at the sport, your career is made. Just get bronze, and whip out a rainbow flag. You might be deported, they won’t do anything to an athlete. Think of the hope you’d give to so many people. You’d give hope not only to queer Russians, but also so many Russians who don’t agree with this Law. No one wants to live with hate. The person who would do this would not only be a symbol of resistance to homophobia, but a symbol of resistance to the idea that Putin is casting a dark shadow over this country, that the way to be in the world is through fear. It would be a great symbol of hope, but I’m not exactly in the running for any medals, so it’s not up to me. I’m surprised it hasn’t happened, but maybe it will.
Thinking back to the Tibetan protests at the 2008 Beijing Olympics, could Sochi be a platform for protests against the Anti-Gay law?
It already has, but they were suppressed so quickly. Elena Kostyuchenko, who is the heart of the story, she was arrested on the day of the opening ceremonies. She was singing the national anthem in the Red Square, and the police came, scooped them up, and put them in jail. As I understood – I don’t have all the facts yet – they took Elena and another activist to a room and demanded sexual acts and spit on them. If you read the story, you’ll see how tough Elena is – tough enough that they backed off. Another activist, Anastasia, spoke to an American TV show called Democracy Now. She and three others unfurled a banner, radically proclaiming Olympic principle 6 - which is part of the Olympic charter, proclaiming equality. [Principle 6: Any form of discrimination with regard to a country or a person on grounds of race, religion, politics, gender or otherwise is incompatible with belonging to the Olympic Movement. Source: the September 2013 Olympic Charter. http://www.olympic.org/Documents/olympic_charter_en.pdf]. They did this in a place where no one could see them, but the police found out about this and arrested them. The real issue is where was NBC’s coverage of this? They’ve done a little bit, but I think they’ve been disgraceful and cowardly. It’s bad journalism. You don’t have to be left, right, pro-gay or homophobic. This is something that’s happening here. I tune into the TV and see these endless conversations about the economic corruption of the games. They’re willing to do that, and all they had to do was go a little step further. Instead, they went in the opposite direction. The head of the Olympic Committee, Thomas Bach, has not been gay-friendly. But, at the opening ceremony, he invoked principal 6. What did NBC do? I didn’t see this personally, but I’m told that they edited it out, allegedly for time constraints. Those are the most important words of the games. That IS the Olympic spirit. The whole idea of these international games is so we can all get together and rise above our petty differences. And they edited it out. So, there’s another protest coming on the 15th in Moscow, for not just LGBT opposition, but many different strains. My guess is that they’ll all be arrested before the protest even starts, and my guess is that NBC will not cover it.