(German MP Volker Beck is attacked by homophobic protestors during Moscow's Gay Pride 2006)By Jerome Taylor
Published: Attitude Magazine, September 2006.
Throught the democratic world - in the new EU states of Central and Eastern Europe, in Russia and the US - right-wing politicians and Christian fundamentalists are joining forces to attack and stigmatise a generation of gay people.
On a sombre grey afternoon in late May, a group of Russian men and women dared to do something that had never been done in their country before. Under a steady drizzle of rain they approached Alexander Gardens, a small park in the north-east corner of the Kremlin, each holding a solitary flower.
The idea was as simple as it was poignant: To hold Russia’s first ever gay pride march by laying flowers at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier - Russia’s most famous monument to the country’s Second World War fight against fascism and a tribute to the millions who died protecting Mother Russia from Nazi Germany. The choice of venue was chosen to symbolically associate the Russian gay community’s fight for equality with the country’s battle against fascism over sixty years ago.
The march had, of course, been banned by the city authorities who had long made clear their contempt for gay rights. Even so, campaigners thought, in a democratic country they should be able to hold their demonstration with or without the authority’s approval.
But it was not to be. As the group approached the park gates, an incongruous alliance of radical Orthodox and ultra-nationalist protestors chanting “death to sodomites!” attacked the procession, hurling eggs and rocks as they went. The police stood by and did little except arrest Nikolai Alexseyev, the demonstration’s chief organiser, and a number of other non-violent protestors.
Half an hour later, a smaller group of activists arrived outside Moscow’s City Hall and proudly unfurled their rainbow flags. Once again they were attacked as truncheon wielding police simply looked on. Scores were injured including [pictured above] the gay veteran German politician Volker Beck, who was punched in the face and hit by projectiles.
The graphic image of blood pouring down a European politician’s face woke the world up to the depressing state of gay rights across much of Eastern Europe and the worrying resurgence in right-wing, religiously inspired homophobia across much of the Western democratic world.
For gay rights campaigners, Eastern Europe and the Baltics has become the new frontline in the battle for equal rights. But even in supposedly liberal bastions of Western democracy such as the United States and Australia, the furious debate over gay marriage and civil unions has resulted in what many say is a new backlash against the gay community.
“In the US and in Poland, Russia and Latvia we are experiencing an almighty homophobic backlash,” says leading gay rights activist Peter Tatchell. And mainstream politicians, often influenced by their Christian beliefs, are increasingly leading this new offensive against the gay community.
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Nine days before the violence in Moscow, Russia’s foreign minister Sergey Lavrov travelled to Strasbourg and delivered a message to Europe on the eve of his country’s chairmanship of the continent’s top human rights watchdog, the Council of Europe. The message was clear. Russia’s leadership of the council, Lavrov said, would be “devoted to openness.”
Yet the same day, Yuri Luzhkov, the conservative mayor of Russia’s capital, was delivering a different message to the outside world. After months of speculation his office announced what it had been threatening to do ever since the idea was first mooted: Russia’s first gay pride event would not be allowed to proceed and anyone who held an unauthorised demonstration faced being arrested. His assurances, we now know, came true.
Evidence obtained by New York based Human Rights Watch shows just how instrumental the Moscow authorities were in damaging popular support for the country’s first pride attempt. A memorandum sent by Mayor Luzhkov in March told a number of his colleagues to begin a disinformation campaign against supporters of the pride march. “It is necessary to take concrete measures to prevent holding public and mass gay events in the capital,” the memorandum read. “Organise an active campaign in the mass media…using appeals from citizens and religious and public organisations.”
Luzhkov’s deputy, Liudmila Shvetsova, was even more unforgiving in her views towards homosexuals. In a note sent to her boss on March 17 she wrote that a pride event would be, “direct propaganda for immorality, insulting the honour and dignity of the overwhelming majority of Muscovites…undermining the moral principles of the society.”
In recent years Russia has seen a spike in the number of homophobic attacks coupled with increasingly anti-gay rhetoric from its politicians and key religious leaders, particularly from the country’s Orthodox Church.
Nikolai Baev, a prominent Russian gay rights activist, is angered by the way such politicians are now exacerbating an already dire situation. “Gay and lesbians cannot be open,” he said. “It seems that the Russian authorities use homophobic hysteria and anti-western campaigns to mobilise nationalist sentiment. And those authorities prefer to satisfy the demands of the church than let gays and lesbians live in peace.”
The Russian authorities’ support for the Orthodox Church, whose more radical elements swell the ranks of anti-gay protests, was made clear last month when Patriarch Alexei II, the church’s head and an avid supporter of a pride ban, was given a state award by President Vladimir Putin in June for his “outstanding achievements in humanitarian activities.”
According to Nikolai Alexeyev, the pride organiser who was arrested along with many others that day, most of the anti-gay rhetoric in Russia is couched in religious terms.“The Church has played a very big role,” he told Attitude from his office in Moscow. “Even some priests from the Orthodox Church were at the protest and were blessing all these neo-fascists attacking homosexual rights! The church didn’t say a single word about why their priests and officials took part in all these events.”
The difficulties faced by Russia’s gay and lesbian citizens and the banning of gay pride marches has been repeated across much of Eastern Europe. Even in some EU countries, which are expected to guarantee the rights of all citizens as part of their membership status, LGBT communities are finding themselves increasingly on the defensive and homophobic attacks are on the increase.
When Amnesty International decided to hold a conference in June on tackling prejudice across the region, it is significant that the venue they chose was not Moscow, Warsaw or Riga but London. Amnesty International’s Brian Thomas McDonnell, who helped organise the conference has been monitoring a steady increase in homophobia across the region: “LGBT communities in Eastern Europe and Russia have only recently become more visible and while they are bravely ‘breaking the silence’ in their societies, they are facing a very hostile climate at all levels”He added: “Politicians must not be allowed to think that they can stir up hatred towards LGBT communities with impunity and other European countries have an obligation to hold such politicians to account.”
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Seven hundred miles west of Moscow, two politicians especially stand accused of stirring up such hatred. Known in Poland’s gay community as the “Terrible Twins”, Lech and Jaroslaw Kaczynski now run the country as President and Prime Minister respectively.
Both deeply Catholic, the identical twins (who can only be told apart by their facial moles) have long made their disdain for homosexuality apparent. As mayor of Warsaw, Lech repeatedly banned gay pride marches, famously telling protestors, “I respect your right to demonstrate as citizens. But not as homosexuals.” Meanwhile Jaroslaw, who lives alone with his aging mother and their many cats, is head of the ruling Law and Justice party which favours, among other things, banning homosexuals from the teaching profession.
The twins’ anti-gay rhetoric helped win them crucial votes last year from the nation’s deeply conservative, Catholic countryside at the expense of Poland’s gay community which has found itself surrounded by hostility, both politically and physically.
Lisette Kampus, sighs wearily and takes a deep breath as she’s asked to explain what it’s like being gay in a country where, according to recent polls, 89% of the population think homosexuality is abnormal. “It’s terrible. Just terrible,” she says from the Warsaw offices of Kampania, an NGO trying to tackle homophobia in Poland. “Some mornings I wake up and I can’t believe that such a country really exists. Or that such a country is a member state of the European Union. What would be considered a hate speech in the rest of Europe is regularly practised freely and acceptably in Poland every single day.”
Things reached a new low in June when Poland’s state prosecutor announced a government investigation of all Polish gay groups for illegal financing, criminal connections and paedophilia.
For Lisette, who moved to Poland from her native Estonia to become a foot soldier in the latest battle for equal rights, much of her anger is directed at the Catholic Church and politicians such as the Kaczynski brothers who she believes came to power using their religious credentials and anti-gay platform.
“These politicians in our government know how to use religion against us,” she says. “You know they march against us thinking, ‘Under the holy cross we go to the streets, we throw stones at gay people and then later we go to the church for confession and everything is ok again’. It’s such hypocrisy.”
To recognise just how influential Catholicism can be in stirring up homophobia in Poland, one only has to turn on the radio and listen to Radio Maryja, a staunchly conservative station run by Father Tadeusz Rydzyk from the northern city of Torun, the birthplace of the great mediaeval astronomer Copernicus. Ostensibly a radio station for Poland’s faithful, Radio Maryja began broadcasting hymns, prayers and rosaries in 1991 after the Soviet Union’s collapse finally allowed Poland’s persecuted Catholics to celebrate their religion rather than hide it.
But in recent times the station has become increasingly politicised and up to 1.2million listeners tune in every day to a heavily one-sided right-wing agenda. Radio Maryja supported Jaroslaw Kaczynski’s Law and Justice party during elections last year, has given numerous interviews to their political allies including the ultra-conservative and rabidly homophobic League of Polish Families and has aired a number of less than sympathetic broadcasts on Germany, the EU, freemasonry, Jews and of course homosexuals.
To their credit, the Vatican has recently tried to distance itself from the radical views of Radio Maryja by asking the Polish church to crack down on the station and temper its broadcasts. Instead Father Rydzyk was given little more than a slap on the wrists and the sermons of hate continue.
According to the renowned Vatican commentator John Allen, Pope Benedict XVI is walking a tightrope with the more radical elements of the Polish Catholic Church. “Certainly the Vatican would support the position that the conservatives have taken against acknowledging gay marriage and so on but that doesn’t mean that the Vatican has aligned itself with the hardest right.”
In fact for many in Rome, he explains, the rabid Euroscepticism of Poland’s conservative parties is in fact at odds with the Vatican’s vision of former Soviet states bringing their Catholic values into the construction of a new Europe.
Thanks to the increasing radicalisation of the Christian right both in Poland and Russia, gay rights across Eastern Europe and the Baltic are now at threat like never before as populists aim to mimic the success of those politicians who have jumped on the anti-gay bandwagon to win votes and create a cause celebre for homophobes and sympathetic voters to rally round.
On July 22, Latvia - another EU member - became the latest nation to ban gay pride, on the somewhat spurious grounds that the police would not be able to protect marchers from anti-gay violence. If so, campaigners joked, Latvia’s ability to provide security at Nato’s summit in Riga this November must surely be in doubt.
Undeterred, a number of LGBT activists, supported by foreign demonstrators such as Nikolai Alexeyev and Peter Tatchell, held an alternative conference in the Reval Hotel Latvija. And, like two months earlier in Russia, they were besieged by a motley collection of cross-wielding religious protestors and hardline nationalists willing to attack anyone looking mildly sympathetic of the gay rights movement.
In one particularly nasty incident, bags of liquid faeces were thrown at Maris Sants, one of the only priests in Latvia brave enough to admit his homosexuality. Speaking after the event, Lars Grava, a founding member of the LGBT group Mozaika, said yet again the police failed to protect gay activists. “They did the minimum possible,” he said.
Even in Estonia, regarded as the most liberal of the Baltic States, the Dutch ambassador to Tallinn, Hans Glaubitz, quit his job earlier this year because of the homophobia he faced when walking the streets with his Cuban boyfriend. "It is not very nice to be regularly abused by drunken skinheads as a 'nigger' and to be continuously gawped at as if you have just stepped out of a UFO," he told Dutch newspapers at the time.
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That the Christian right in Eastern Europe and the Baltic are fighting their fellow LGBT countrymen is perhaps no surprise. Though each country differs immensely culturally, linguistically and historically, all are post-Soviet states, where religion and patriarchy play a large role and where society is only slowly coming to grips with the idea of having an out-and-about queer as a next door neighbour.
Yet even Stateside, the so-called “Land of the Free”, gay campaigners are once again finding themselves on the back foot thanks to the furious debate over gay marriage – a debate that has been cynically manipulated by opportunistic politicians to score political points and increase voter turn out in their constituencies.
When the state of Massachusetts took the unprecedented step of allowing gays marital rights in May 2004, the conservative religious lobbies were not only incensed by what they saw as an attack on the sanctity of marriage but also found a new flag to rally their beleaguered troops around after a string of Republican political failures, both abroad in Iraq and Afghanistan and at home.
The 2004 Presidential elections were dominated by the issue of gay marriage which worked in favour of George Bush and the Republican Party by increasing voter turn out among socially conservative and religious voters. (The only noticeable dissenting member of George Bush’s entourage is, remarkably, gun-toting Vice President Dick Cheney whose daughter is a lesbian)
This year, in preparation for Congressional elections in November, a similar strategy has been launched – largely but not exclusively by Republicans - to pass the Federal Marriage Amendment (FMA) – a proposal to have marriage defined in the American constitution as a solely heterosexual institution.Although a majority of politicians both in Congress and the Senate approve of the amendment, to actually change the American constitution requires a two-thirds majority which supporters have so far been unable to obtain.
But according to Doug Ireland, an openly gay journalist for New York’s Gay City News, there’s nothing like anti-gay rhetoric to increase support for the Republican Party in the run up to elections“The Bush-Rove strategy has been to revive the issue again as a "hot button" for the 2006 Congressional elections,” he said. He sees the FMA as an insidious attempt by Republicans to drive a wedge between Democrats and force conservative voters out to the polling booths despite the plummeting popularity of their Republican President.
A number of right-wing lobby groups are hopeful that the polarising effect of the gay marriage debate will be a useful way of encouraging Republicans to ignore their disappointments over issues such as Iraq, illegal immigration, Supreme Court nominations (to name a few conservative bug bears) and concentrate on increasing Republican domination of Congress to push through the FMA next time round. What Bill Greene, the director of conservative activist organisation RigthMarch.com, calls “one prong of a multifaceted attempt at re-energizing the base."
Yet for commentators like Ireland, the use of anti-gay rhetoric by populist politicians has particularly nasty consequences: “When political and religious leaders begin banging their anti-gay drums, there is always a noticeable increase in physical gay-bashing and anti-gay violence, as the homo-haters, especially the young, hear their bigotry justified by the larger culture. Violence against gay people has spiked after every one of these national debates over gays.”
Paul Cate, from the American Civil Liberties Union, says that while he is disappointed some politicians are still happy to deny gay people their rights, he doubts the FMA will succeed. “We’ve only amended our constitution a small number of times and we’ve never done it to strip people of their constitutional rights. And I certainly hope that we will never do that.”
Such news is little comfort for people like Mark Wolf, a gay father from the mountains of southern Colorado, deep in the heart of a Republican dominated state. Mark has been with his partner Matthew for thirteen and has a little boy through a lesbian couple. To many he is the perfect example of a loving and safe family but instead feels increasingly threatened by the resurgence in homophobia across America.“The religious right-wing extremists are doing their best to push their aggressive Christian-only agenda into our schools as well as into our bedrooms”, he says looking at a picture of his little boy.
For Mark, the most depressing aspect of the gay marriage debate that the Christian message of love and tolerance has been lost amid the hysteria of populist anti-gay rhetoric. “It’s ironic,” he says. “The Church used to condemn us for being promiscuous. Then when we asked the Church to recognize and bless our committed, monogamous unions, they refused.”
The overriding fear among most of the people interviewed for this piece is that as the pride season draws to a close, the gay communities currently most at threat from opportunist politicians living off a resurgent religiously-inspired right will be forgotten until the violence flares up again. For Peter Tatchell, the most important thing is to continue taking the fight to the homophobes. “It is precisely because the gay rights movement has made so many advances that the homophobic right is now fighting back with a newly ferocious fervour. It’s their last desperate stand.”“Keeping your head down often results in getting your head kicked in. Silence and invisibility is not a strategy for queer emancipation”
ends.
(Photo: Roy Matthew)
