Saturday, April 9 — Razom for Ukraine rally in Times Square
Masha Gessen's Man Without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin is fairly short and essential reading for anyone who wants to better understand the threat Putin represents, not just to Russia and Ukraine, but to the world. I've read it three times, over the last few years, and most recently a couple weeks ago. Do yourselves a favor and read it. As Gessen writes in the afterward, when personalist dictators come to power, they usually first "go after the gays." Strongman regimes require an Other onto whom to project hate and fear. Why? Culturally conservative propaganda feeds the idea among followers that they are under attack, that this Other is out to annihilate them, and that only the overwhelming might of the state can save them.
The Nazis revised Germany's notorious Paragraph 175 of the legal code, outlawing homosexuality, in 1935. It had been largely ignored during the Weimar period, but state harassment of queer individuals substantially increased once Hitler came to power, in 1933. Hitler first defended his SA boss, the violent and psychopathic Ernst Röhm, whose homosexuality was an open secret, when leftist newspapers outed him circa 1931, but ordered his murder in the 1934 purges, as he consolidated the dictatorial power. The persecution of queers now became a state priority. Arrests shot up into the thousands. The link between the existential hate and fear of Jews and queers was now the order of the day. Arrests, torture, and deportations to concentration camps began. Over 150,000 people would wear the pink triangle and die in the camps.
Gessen published this devastating short essay in The New Yorker ( https://www.newyorker.com/.../the-year-russian-lgbt... ) in 2017. The afterward to Man Without a Face is from 2013-2014. Having returned to Russia from the US in 1993 — one year after I almost took a position at Commersant in Moscow (in addition to being nervous about my weak command of Russian, I asked myself, why on earth would I work for a business publication? Looking back on it, it would have been a fascinating experience.) — Gessen and their family returned to the States as Putin came to power and began a similar program of cultural realignment, beginning with banning the adoption of children by queer couples and threatening to take away their children. Things in Russia only got worse from there:
"Russia, at the start of the 21st century, at least in its larger cities, very much resembled the United States of the early 1990s: being gay was no longer criminal or shameful, but it was still not a topic for polite conversation or public discussion. Issues such as same-sex marriage or protection from discrimination were not on the table, but then again, Russia was rebuilding itself as a dictatorship, so the political table had been hijacked.
The Kremlin, meanwhile, was telling itself and the world a very different story about Russia. Very few of us realised just how different it was; I certainly did not. Russia was stumbling on its way to becoming the "family values" capital of the world. The country, it felt, was being besieged by enemies who aimed to destroy its traditions and social institutions. LGBT people were the country's biggest threat: the quintessential "foreign agent", the ultimate other. In 2006, legislation banning "homosexual propaganda" – enshrining in law second-class citizenship for non-heterosexuals, making it an offence to claim equality – started winding its way from the smallest Russian cities to the largest. In June of this year, it became federal law.
The Patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church has called the international trend toward legalising same-sex marriage "a sign of the coming apocalypse". A popular conservative pundit recorded a series of commentaries for state-owned Channel 1, portraying LGBT people as the antichrist. The Kremlin's Nashi youth movement spread the news that I personally was out to destroy the Orthodox family. An online community calling for my murder appeared."
In short, wearing a rainbow pin in today's Russia can land you in prison. Meanwhile, queer Ukrainians have felt protected by the state in their country as they have held Pride marches and organized their lives in an increasingly pluralistic society, according to MIT student and queer Ukrainian activist Sasha:
The Ukrainian military now has a Unicorn battalion, in the fight to defend Ukraine. If you look at the ILGA map of sexual orientation laws, mentioned in the Guardian article, you'll see that Ukraine has employment protections in place and is a relatively open society, if not as progressive as most of the rest of Europe. Russia is one of the most repressive states in the world. In this top photo, Arthur, from Razom for Ukraine, introduces Sasha, an openly queer Ukrainian who always speaks out at these rallies, and later closes them, leading hundreds in a beautiful rendition of the anthem. That, and the presence of everyone from dissident Russians to Kazakhs, Georgians, Mongolians, Belarusians, and more who come to these rallies speaks volumes about why the free world — such as it is, because authoritarians in the US are doing the same damn thing, passing anti-LGBTQ laws across the land — must defeat Putin.