inside the iron closet

"Yes, there are killings. 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. There’s a national network called Occupy Pedophilia, whose members torture gay men and post hugely popular videos of their “interrogations” online. There are countless smaller, bristling movements, with names presumptuous (God’s Will) or absurd (Homophobic Wolf). There are babushkas who throw stones, and priests who bless the stones, and police who arrest their victims.

But such people exist everywhere, said Alex. The difference in Russia now is who’s standing behind them.

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 first law banned gay “propaganda,” but it was written so as to leave the definition vague. 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 new law explicitly forbids any suggestion that queer love is equal to that of heterosexuals, but what constitutes such a suggestion? One man was charged for holding up a sign that said being gay is ok. Pride parades are out of the question, a pink triangle enough to get you arrested, if not beaten. A couple holding hands could be accused of propaganda if they do so where a minor might see them; the law, as framed, is all about protecting the children. Yelena Mizulina, chair of the Duma Committee on Family, Women, and Children’s Affairs and the author of the bill, says that it’s too late to save adult “homosexualists,” as they’re called, but Russia still has a chance to raise a pure generation.

Mizulina’s dream isn’t old-fashioned; it is, as one fascist supporter told me, “utopian.” He meant that as praise. And the Russian dream is not alone. Liberal Americans imagine LGBT rights as slowly but surely marching forward. But queer rights don’t advance along a straight line. In Russia and throughout Eastern Europe—and in India and in Australia, in a belt across Central Africa—anti-gay crusaders are developing new laws and sharpening old ones. The ideas, meanwhile, are American: the rhetoric of “family values” churned out by right-wing American think tanks, bizarre statistics to prove that evil is a fact, its face a gay one. This hatred is old venom, but its weaponization by nations as a means with which to fight “globalization”—not the economic kind, the human-rights kind—is a new terror.

...And in October, the Duma started to take up a law to remove children from LGBT parents in Russia. It’s been put on hold, but it’s expected to return once the Olympics and international scrutiny have passed.

...

For Dmitry Kiselyov, the director of Russia’s massive new state media corporation—created in December to swallow up state media entities that show any hint of autonomy—laws are not enough. He’s concerned about organ donors, the possibility of a queer heart beating in a straight body.

When homosexuals die, he says, “their hearts should be burned.”

Something Is Coming"

In an upper-middle-class neighborhood close to Moscow’s city center, two apartments face each other. Two families, two daughters. They leave the doors open to allow easy access from one to the other.

Pavelmet Irina not long after he moved to Moscow twelve years ago, and almost immediately he knew that someday he’d start a family with her. Irina felt it, too. They agreed on it one night over vodka, after a night of clubbing. The party had moved back to an apartment, where they kept drinking, Irina teasing Pavel, Pavel marveling at Irina’s bold friends. She was a Muscovite; Pavel had come from one of those distant eastern cities, 4,000 miles from Moscow. Irina was six years younger, but she was his teacher, teaching him how to be silly and modern and free. They drank and danced, Pavel discovering his hips, until they both collapsed around a kitchen table and, over more vodka, Pavel tried to be funny and Irina thought he was, so she said, “Someday I would like to have a child with you.” Pavel said, “I feel the same.”

Suddenly they were sober, giddy but clear: They knew it was true. But they had to wait. To have children is a great responsibility, Pavel thought. You have to have a place to live. You have to earn. You have to have a partner you can rely on. In 2010, they were ready. Their best friends, Nik and Zoya, were having a baby, too, and they lived right next door. Their children would grow up together. Two little girls: Nik and Zoya’s Kristina, and then Pavel and Irina’s Emma.

Now they are one big happy family, inseparable. Pavel has always been great with kids. He likes to read the girls Russian fairy tales, and he buys DVDs of old Russian cartoons, the ones he was raised on. They watch them together. The girls toddle between the apartments through the open doors. Pavel thinks little blonde Kristina looks like an angel. Emma’s darker, serious like her father. Both girls call him Papa. The children share a nanny, too, who helps the parents with light cleaning, dishes, and dusting, making sure all the family pictures are in place.

"Nobody would suspect us," Pavel says. Not even the nanny.

Pavel’s secret isn’t that he’s gay. It’s that they all are, the adults: Pavel and Nik and Irina and Zoya. Both girls have two mothers, two fathers; they have beds in both apartments. Their life together was, until recently, the fulfillment of all that Pavel had wanted, an ambition that had come to him at almost the same moment he’d realized he was gay: to be “normal.” If he were normal, he thought, then he could be a father. “That,” he tells me, “has been my precious dream.”

+++

Pavel agrees to talk to me because soon, he fears, the laws that have passed and the laws to come may make it impossible to hide. I’m told to meet him at a metro station. When I arrive—with my translator, Zhenya, a gay activist—no one is there. A phone call from a mutual friend directs us through the empty station, around a corner, and down some stairs to a basement restaurant, Georgian cuisine, a man in a corner with a bottle of white wine. Is this—? Yes. He smiles. We sit down.

"Something is coming," says Pavel. What it will be, he’s not sure. He’s worried about "special departments" in local police stations, dedicated to removing children from gay homes. He’s worried about a co-worker discovering him. He is worried about blackmail. He is worried, and he does not know what else to do. He wishes he could fight, but he doesn’t know how. Sign a petition? March in a parade? Pavel would never do that now. "My children," he murmurs.

"This law," he says, referring to the ban on "propaganda." "If something happens, it touches only me. And I can protect myself." But the next law: "This is about my child. My baby." If the next law passes, they will leave. The two women are doctors and Nik works in higher education, careers that will require new certification. Which means that only Pavel, a manager for the state oil company, will be able to work right away. They will be poor, but they will leave. They might have to separate, Pavel and Irina and Emma to Israel, where Irina can become a citizen, Nik and Zoya and Kristina to any country that will take them. They might have to become the couples they pretend to be. For now, they are staying. "We’re going to teach them," he says of his two little girls, Emma and Kristina. "How to protect themselves. How to keep silence."

This is how the law really works: It’s the little things that break first. Like a child who wants to call her father Papa. “Father can be only one,” Pavel tells Kristina. She can never call him Papa again. If someone overheard her… No, not even at home. She must forget that was ever his name. “I can be anybody but Father,” he tells the girl he used to call daughter."


i watched the videos of violence against homosexuals in russia, and it was seriously one of the most horrific and sad things i've seen. is hate really the only fruit to come out of "traditional values" and religion when we explore the idea of homosexuality? i would honestly want to hear a thorough examination of what "traditional values" mean, and also various religious stance on homosexuality AND the kind of attitudes we should all cultivate in understanding and interacting with people we deem to love differently from us. its ridiculous how gay people i've met know verses in leviticus and deuteronomy like the back of their hands and little to nothing about everything else in the bible - speaks volumes doesn't it, of how we frame dialogue with them.


full article here