THE NEW YORK TIMES: The laws, all but assured of enactment, would intensify a crackdown on L.G.B.T.Q. freedom in Russia, which Vladimir V. Putin has cast as a corrosive Western influence.
MOSCOW — In an industrial block in northeastern Moscow on a recent Friday night, organizers of an L.G.B.T.Q.-friendly art festival were assiduously checking IDs. No one under 18 allowed. They were trying to comply with a 2013 Russian law that bans exposing minors to anything that could be considered “gay propaganda.”
The organizers had good reason to be wary: Life has been challenging for gay Russians since the law passed, as the government has treated gay life as a Western import that is harmful to traditional Russian values and society.
Now Russia’s Parliament is set to pass a legislative package that would ban all “gay propaganda,” signaling an even more difficult period ahead for a stigmatized segment of society.
The laws would prohibit representation of L.G.B.T.Q. relationships in any media — streaming services, social platforms, books, music, posters, billboards and films — and, activists fear, in any public space as well. That’s a daunting prospect for queer people searching for community, validation or an audience. » | Valerie Hopkins and Valeriya Safronova | Photographs by Nanna Heitmann | Friday, November 4, 2022
Vlad and Patriarch Kirill of Moscow are cool with killing innocent people—fathers, mothers, the elderly and innocent children in the Ukraine, and sending off to war innocent Russians only to be used as cannon fodder, but two consenting adult males or females who have found love and who wish to spend the rest of their lives together in peace and love is a problem for them – a BIG PROBLEM, it seems. What a sick society Russia has become under Putin! It is a bastion of backwardness and benightedness. How sad! – © Mark Alexander
Verwandt auf Deutsch. Related in English.
