Love In Putin's Russia

From 12 stories up I see the sign “Gay Bar Entrance” above the barbed-wire gates through which two gunmen have just fled. It’s a night like any other in gay Moscow: some violence, some tears, and a cold rain. Beyond the railway station, the vast concrete morass of Soviet housing blocks extends into the horizon from the outer rungs of the city to the far-flung suburbs. To find a gay bar in Moscow without a guide is nearly impossible. The gay scene is a network of back-alley stairwells and unmarked doors. Storefronts are disguised as flower shops, trap doors lead to secret passages. There are only about a half-dozen such bars in this city of over 11 million, but that seems to be plenty.

With the West preparing to descend on Russia, determined to plant rainbow flags and deliver a message of solidarity to the country’s troubled gay population, I have come on a hunch, unnerved by the media coverage that is either overly sentimental or sensationally victimizing. I’ve come for a glimpse into the ordinary lives of gay Russians, to understand what should be done to help — if anything at all. I didn’t expect to return with an answer.

Until this point I have not been frightened to be an openly gay man traveling through Moscow. Granted, I have two things working for me: I’m a foreigner and I’m in a cosmopolitan city. The fear only comes when I check the American newspapers and see headlines using words like “crackdown” to frame the violence here as a sort of government-driven bullet train to genocide, when I see my friends on Facebook raging about the tyrannous state of things in Russia. That’s when I question my safety, when I use more discreet language in my emails, when I become suspicious of people.

Winter always seems to come too early in Russia. I sleep through daylight’s afternoon cameo and drive an hour outside the city through a beaten landscape of shopping malls, scrap yards, gaunt birch forests, and a low sky to Ilya’s gay dacha compound for Sunday dinner. Inside a privacy wall that gives the property a fortress-like quality are three identical houses, a communal sauna, a fish pond, and a chicken coop. Eight other gay families live in the village nearby....

Much more at the link: http://www.out.com/news-opinion/2014/02/05/russia-gay-lgbt-love-putin-propaganda

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