I’m an LGBT activist from Russia and I have a story for you, guys.
You might’ve heard the situation is quite bad for Russian LGBT. Pretty much any kind of activity about gay rights can be classified as “homosexuality propaganda”. I believe I have found a workaround that could improve situation at least to some degree and I’m working on its implementation.
How did we get there? Christian fundamentalists definitely “helped”, anti-west sentiments were also part of it but all those things are secondary. The primary reason of all this nonsense is ignorance. Ignorance among general population, among LGBT population and even among LGBT activists. As a society we were ignorant about sexual orientation and it led to overall support of the laws discriminating against gays (many people sincerely believe they’re protecting their children this way).
Many pieces of information were completely absent in Russian language. So even relatively educated people did not have sources of information for their education. For a couple of years I’ve been working on it. Step by step I’ve been aggregating information in this field, giving speeches and uniting professionals around a wiki that is supposed to explain homophobic points based on logic, statistics and science.
My dream is to eventually organize a huge ad campaign about anti-scientific nature of homophobia. Technically it’s legal as officially Russian government is against homophobia (yeah, I know) and technically the ad would be not about gay rights but against homophobia. The keyword is “technically”: there’re no precedents. To create them I’m going to a huge motor rally through the whole Russia, including the most homophobic regions (i .e. Chechnya).
I’m gonna give speeches, communicate with local people. stage one-man protests “homophobia is an anti-scientific delusion” and unite activists around this whole idea. It’s quite a dangerous plan. As soon as I shared this idea, people called it a suicide (that’s where the title comes from). But I’m gonna prove the opposite. Though I have to admit it’s a little bit scary.
I have no idea how it will go and how it will end but I’m going to share my experience during this motor rally with you guys in this thread.
Man, you are most definitely brave. Braver than I myself would be. I consider myself as somewhat knowledgeable about the situation in Russia (my ex is Russian, we are in reasonably good terms and I go regularly there to see our daughter)… and I repeat, you are brave.
I tip my hat off to you. Good luck with your endeavour, and … BE SAFE.
Reported, based on the fact that the last version of this thread was closed for fundraising efforts. I haven’t clicked through the link and can’t compare it to the last link as it was removed.
I’m sure a mod will be along shortly and make the definitive determination, but FWIW I don’t see any fundraising intent in that post. If that’s the specific charge last time, I don’t think it applies now.
I’ve been planning this motor rally for a while. The original idea was beautiful: gather a team, buy a cheap car and go to a motor rally through the whole Russia giving speeches and organizing lgbt events in every big city on the way. But it was quite an expensive idea and I was not able to attract enough attention to our crowdfunding campaign (so it failed). So I decided to go on my own on a minimal budget.
Those ugly bars… I still remember that day. I was about 5 years old. My father’s friends came to visit us. They played with me, were very kind and the next day they came when nobody was at home, broke that window and stole all our stuff. Police caught them and returned pretty much everything was stolen (police used to keep some things for themselves). That’s when we put those bars 20 years ago (it looks like nobody painted them since then). But it actually did not help us a lot as we got robbed the second time through the door by our neighbors. They had strong alcohol and drugs problems so I guess they need our stuff more then we did. Those were rough times after the Soviet Union had collapsed.
After that I gave a speech. It was the first time I gave this speech publicly so I was a little bit nervous but it went surprisingly well. Though I definitely see how I can improve it: when you rehearse on your own, it seems your speech is perfect but the first appearance in front of real people highlights all the flaws.
I assume your speech is written, that you aren’t just speaking off the cuff. If so, why no post it here? I doubt many of us are going to be able to see you speak in person…
My speeches are available only in Russian. I think they’re of little interest to you. If I’m wrong, please let me know and I will share it. Even reading youtube comments to my anti-homophobic speech with the help of Google Translate could be quite entertaining I suppose.
Things’re a little different for the wiki that I’m uniting the best people in related fields (sociology, psychology, sexology, etc.) around. Basically the idea is to explain homophobic points with logic, statistics and modern science. And surprisingly there’s no project like that in English (at least of the quality we’re aiming to). I’ve been contacted by American LGBT-activists from New York (they got to know me through Russian immigrants) and they’re interested in creating the English version of it. What’s interesting the Russian and English version will serve opposite purposes. The Russian one provides information that’s mostly absent in Russian language. The amount of information in English is mind-blowing and sometimes it gets very confusing, so the wiki will just systematize this information and making it easier to understand for ordinary people.
