Gay in Putin's Moscow: Why the City Is Pinker Than You Think

Russian men kiss in Moscow 2012, a year before the 2013
law banning 'gay propaganda'.

THE GUARDIAN: LGBT nights are easy to find and Grindr reaches into the heart of the Kremlin itself. But two years after the law banning ‘homosexual propaganda’, can being gay in the Russian capital really be much fun?

“Moscow is like a small European city in the mid-90s,” says Anton Krasovsky. “Everybody knows everybody. Everybody knows who’s gay, even if nobody’s out.”

Well, not nobody. In 2013, when the Duma was debating a new law outlawing “gay propaganda”, Krasovsky was a beloved Russian TV personality, working for a news channel he’d co-founded called Kontr TV. At the end of a wide-ranging discussion on the proposed legislation, Krasovsky said, on air: “I’m gay. And I’m just as much a human being as President Putin, or Prime Minister Medvedev, or the members of the Duma.” Less than a week later, Krasovsky was no longer working for Kontr TV, the clip was removed from the archives and his face had been scrubbed from the website.

And yet ask him and his friends what it’s like to be gay in Moscow and they shrug. “Moscow attracts gay men from all the villages, so there are more gay people in Moscow than anywhere else in Russia. And they all just want what everyone else wants: somebody to love.” » | Chris Michael, Judith Soal and Maeve Shearlaw in Moscow | Saturday, June 13, 2015