« Cruising Budapest 2 - Ben Andrews: Michael Lucas & Marcel | Main | Cruising Budapest 2: Ben Andrews & Ludovic Canot »

June 08, 2007

NY Blade column: Why I Never Went Back

http://nyblade.com/2007/6-8/viewpoint/opinion/lucasfiles.cfm

By MICHAEL LUCAS
June 8, 2007

I am disgusted yet hardly surprised by recent developments in Russia, the putrid country of my birth. For the past two years, attempts by gay people in Russia to hold Pride rallies in Moscow have not only been squelched, but also met by shocking public expressions of bigotry along with calls for anti-gay violence by elected officials and religious leaders.

In May of both 2006 and 2007, concerned political figures from European Union countries traveled to Moscow to show human rights solidarity with the gay organizers there. Their pleas for tolerance were met with barbaric contempt.

In 2006, the Mayor of Moscow, Yuri Luzhkov, banned a Pride event being planned by gay leader Nikolai Alekseyev. In response to the ban, gay activists thought to honor the country’s war against the Nazis by laying wreaths at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. They had planned to then hold a protest near City Hall against Mayor Luzhkov’s ban of their Pride event. When they got to the tomb, they found it blocked by police. Additionally, a vomitous crowd of Russian Orthodox, skinheads and Cossacks awaited them. As they tried to lay flowers by the fence, they were violently attacked. Some made their way to the site of the planned City Hall demonstration, and again were attacked.

The German parliamentarian Volker Beck, who had come in a show of support for enlightenment, was struck by a rock and then punched in the face by a young neo-Nazi. How is that for irony? The Russians in WWII fought off the least humane society ever, one that severely persecuted gay people, only to become infinitely less tolerant than today’s Germany. The Russian who hit Beck was later quoted in The Moscow Times as saying he attacked violently because he was “a normal Russian guy.”

He said it, I didn’t. But let me tell you, “normal” Russians have a mentality that is the absolute pits. They are incredibly cruel and intolerant. Trust me, I lived the nightmare, I know what I am talking about. I left Russia because I understood what I would be in for if I stayed there. One of the reasons I brought my whole family here was that I did not want to have to set foot in that rotten country in order to see them.

THE REACTIONS IN RUSSIA TO A planned Pride event last month was, if anything, even worse than in 2006. That was the case despite expressions of support for Pride from heterosexual and homosexual elected officials all over Western Europe. Mind you, we are not talking about a Fifth Avenue parade. We are just talking about a few hundred gay people wanting to erode the monstrous prejudice against them by showing they exist. Yet Mayor Luzhkov calls such a demonstration “satanic.” His police do not protect gay people, and the religious leaders in his society might as well be foaming at the mouth. By the way, if you think the Russian people have acknowledged that gays were among the soldiers who fought on their side in WWII, forget about it.

A shared hatred of gay people has united the Christian Russians with the Muslim Russians. Moscow carpet-bombed the Chechen Republic because of those two groups’ usual enmities, but when a few hundred gay Russians wanted to show they exist, the Christians and the Muslims couldn’t find enough ways to express their agreement.

I regret having to report to you that the top Muslim leader in Russia, the Mufti Talgat Tajuddin, has made statements that ought to have landed him in an asylum for the criminally insane. For instance, he claimed that “if gays come out onto the streets, they should be bashed.”

I maintain that all religious texts containing anti-gay bigotry should be modified.

You could ask why so powerful, omnipresent a guy as God needs human policemen to take care of those who have supposedly committed a crime against him. The Mufti also said that the Russian Orthodox Church would join in anti-gay protests. Several news agencies attempted to interview the church about his statements, but the church had no comment. Chief Rabbi Berl Lazar got in on the act, too, saying that “sexual perversions have no right to exist.” He did not, however, call for anti-gay violence. While both these men are to be denounced, I imagine the importance of the distinction between them would be apparent to a gay person getting beaten bloody on the Mufti’s orders.

ALL OF THIS WAS HARDLY covered by mainstream American media. This is the face of homophobia. Bush recently chided Putin for backpedaling on democratic reforms, but of course expressed no outrage over Russian violations of gay people’s human rights. Let a single Christian convert in Afghanistan be sentenced to death for apostasy, and Bush mounts an aggressive international campaign to protect that person. On gay rights, he is silent.

I’ve been thinking about pressure that could be put on Russia to grant gays their rights—sanctions, travel limitations on the Russians who come here to buy their Gucci, et cetera. Yet I also think we American gays should be more demanding of presidential candidates if they want our support. Asking Sen. Hillary Clinton to speak up for oppressed gays internationally, for example, would not be too much to request. I’m not holding my breath.

Still, we will have our Pride March down Fifth Avenue the last Sunday of June. Despite Gen. Peter Pace and his comment about “immoral” homosexuality, and despite President Bush, the United States is a far, far better place for a gay person than Russia. That’s why I’m here, and that’s why when the subject of going to Russia arises, I say nyet.

Posted by Michael at June 8, 2007 05:20 PM

Comments

Posted by: Tight Hole at June 8, 2007 06:48 PM