By RUSS O’SHEA
MOSCOW– Following the Russian Supreme Court’s criminalization of the global LGBTQIA+ rights movement, police descended on at least three gay bars and one men’s sauna late last Friday evening (Dec. 8). Club-goers say the police took pictures of their IDs and passports.
On Friday, Nov. 24, the Russian Ministry of Justice filed a lawsuit to recognize the international movement for LGBTQ+ rights as an extremist organization and ban it in the country. The following Thursday, the Russian Supreme Court “effectively outlawed LGBTQ+ activism,” according to the Associated Press. One St. Petersburg club known as Central Station announced plans to close in light of the decision, which is the latest attack in a years-long offensive on queer rights by Putin’s regime.
This most recent crackdown on civil liberties falls within the larger context of Russia’s imperialist invasion of Ukraine. Wartime is used consistently by the ruling class as an opportunity to attack civil liberties and impart austerity measures. They try to justify this by saying it is necessary to keep the war machine running. In this case, Russia needs more troops and has just increased the size of its military by an additional 170,000 troops.
As the war drags on, the Russian state is taking drastic measures through daily community raids on conscripted people by the police. The raids and arrests are essentially a type of kidnapping to help bolster the front lines. Lawyers describe the conscription methods as “lawless.” There is a growing opposition in the form of thousands of soldiers deserting from the military as well as protests by families of soldiers and in particular their wives who are demonstrating in the streets. Fearing the families of soldiers at the front, the state has attempted to pay off military wives who have been protesting while continuing to clamp down on antiwar sentiment through arrests and absurd jail sentences. So it comes as no surprise that Putin’s regime would next target the LGBTQIA+ community, a community that has historically played a leading role in social and economic struggles worldwide.
Putin frames the war effort in Ukraine as a necessary resistance to Western influence, which includes “attacks on traditional family values,” i.e. the ability of queer and trans people to exist. LGBTQIA+ people do represent a threat to Putin, not because they are Western agents as he claims, but because their liberation challenges the logic of Putin’s imperialist ideology, to say nothing of the gendered subordination necessary to justify cuts to the social wage. In the short term, closing alternative queer spaces can do much to limit free speech and curb opposition to the war.
The LGBTQIA+ community has been implicated in Putin’s geopolitical rhetoric for some time now. He equates their participation in Russian life with a poisoning of the country by the West. The 2021 National Security Strategy placed LGBTQIA+ people squarely in the crosshairs as it referenced traditional and moral values and categorized preserving the family and gender norms as a matter of national security.
Moscow’s first pride parade was held in 2006, 13 years after homosexuality was nationally decriminalized. The response by the state to this moment was incredible—riot police violently suppressed the march, and just a couple months later, a regional anti-gay law was passed in Ryazan that would have a domino effect. After gaining traction in regional legislatures across the country for the better part of a decade, the ban was enacted on a federal level in 2013.
Last year, “LGBT+ propaganda” was banned in the country, making queer representation in public (i.e., in film, books, and theater) and the media illegal. This July saw unprecedented attacks on trans Russians, as a single law outlawed gender-affirming care and legal gender recognition, annulled marriages involving a trans partner, and banned trans people from adopting or fostering children.
The effect of Putin’s anti-LGBTQ+ offensive has been devastating to public health. “Over the past 20 years, the Russian Federation has experienced a rapid increase in HIV-associated mortality in both male and female individuals,” according to a 2022 study. This is easily explainable as many of the organizations providing education and care for HIV/AIDs were run by LGBTQ+ people and have been made illegal.
After a sweeping ban on “gay propaganda” was enacted in 2013 “for the sake of protecting children,” the country saw the opposite effect: an unprecedented skyrocket of HIV/AIDs cases. In a 2015 interview, Andrey Beloglazov, project manager for LaSky, a Moscow-based center for HIV prevention, explained this phenomena: “When people are hiding, they move around from place to place and gravitate toward secret relationships. … They are afraid of seeking medical assistance.”
Russia’s attacks on the queer community are attacks on all workers, and the threat extends far beyond the country’s borders. The laws being passed in Russia attempt to recontextualize the global movement for queer rights as corruption from the West, yet the attacks on queer rights taking place there are chillingly familiar to the ones that are waged against queer people in the U.S. Hands off our community! From Stonewall to Moscow, solidarity!
Photo: Alexander Demianchuk / Reuters