Why The End of Communism Didn't End Antigay Hate in Russia [View all]

[William769]

Russia may have adapted a few modern trappings, but this in depth look examines how LGBT lives there have only gotten worse in the last several decades.



In May of 1977, The Advocate published an interview with Gennady Smakov, a gay intellectual who fled Soviet persecution just two years prior, seeking asylum in the United States. Having fled a country where free speech did not exist and where homosexuality was harshly criminalized, the Soviet author risked his life to escape the widespread oppression that shaped Soviet society in the 1970s.

But that was nearly four decades ago, when communism was perceived as America’s great threat and homosexuality was still classified by the American Psychological Association as a mental disorder. In the four decades since Smakov’s dramatic escape, the world has itself changed dramatically, especially for LGBT people around the globe, both in the United States, and within the boundaries of its once-bitter enemy.

Fourteen years after Smakov’s own immigration, the Berlin Wall fell with a ring of democracy that quickly echoed across the Eastern Bloc, in the same vein that marriage equality now ripples across America. When the U.S. Supreme Court overturned a key section of the so-called Defense of Marriage Act last summer, the ruling ushered in a wave of progress already long reflected in the attitude of an evolving American public, the vast majority of which overwhelmingly support equal rights for LGBT people throughout the nation.

But the passage of time doesn’t always align itself with progress. The American evolution isn't always mirrored by free societies developing around it. The same summer that U.S. courts ruled it unconstitutional to deny federal recognition to same-sex couples, the Kremlin began to tighten its grip on LGBT citizens, invoking a nationwide ban on "gay propaganda" last June.

http://www.advocate.com/world/2014/02/07/why-end-communism-didnt-end-antigay-hate-russia