Homophobia for good

On August 21, American journalist James Kirchik staged a live demarche on Russia Today: instead of answering questions about Bradley Manning's sentencing, he suddenly pulled on rainbow-colored suspenders and made a fiery speech in defense of gays in Russia.

The Russian authorities seem to want to hush up the international hype around the homophobic law: neither Elena Mizulina nor Vitaly Milonov has been heard for a long time, even the Olympic champion Elena Isinbayeva, who told the world that “boys should live with women, and women with boys”, apologized referring to bad English. Still: who needs scandals around the upcoming Olympics? But it is impossible to put out the fire that has started, tongues of fire that is by no means the Olympic flame erupt in the most unexpected places. That film actor Wentworth Miller refused to go to the St. Petersburg Film Festival, explaining this by concern with the situation of LGBT people in Russia. Then James Kirchik slandered the Kremlin channel: “RT talks about Manning and Snowden 24/7, I haven’t seen anything about the anti-gay law,” he said.

James, however, was wrong. RT released a story about the gay law, explaining to the world that there is nothing to worry about: they say that it only protects children, and no one will be put in jail - only fines are provided. RT journalists even interviewed their own correspondent, openly gay Martin Andrews, who said that he lives freely in Moscow, gay clubs work without interruption, and he also just visited Sochi and found gay life there in full bloom. It is not clear whether RT employees have a contract that they must shamelessly lie at the first demand of management, or an astronomical salary will blind their eyes, but Martin Andrews, who has lived in Russia for many years, could have remained silent, probably in order not to cross that line beyond who become scoundrels.

One thing is good: the problem has entered the plane of general discussion, students and schoolchildren, grandmothers on the bench and a large Internet audience are talking about LGBT. And now, teenagers on the Arbat suddenly come to the defense of an LGBT group with gay flags, saving activists from gopniks who are going to bathe them in the Turandot fountain. Orthodox activist Dmitry Tsorionov (Enteo) annoys Alexei Navalny during a meeting with voters with a question about gay parades, and some sedate Muscovite suddenly starts arguing with Enteo: “They don’t bother me personally. Here is my wife, we are not against them.” And the important thing here is not that Enteo is not satisfied with Navalny’s answer that everyone has the right to demonstrate, and frightens that he will turn the “city of the capital” into sodom, but that our neighbors, ordinary residents, who used to talk about this problem did not think at all, now formed their opinion. They see that Enteo, Mizulina, Milonov, Kiselev and others like them are against the LGBT, and the whole civilized world is for it. They want to live not in the capital city of the times of Ivan the Terrible, but in a modern European capital, which is made European not by bicycles and parking, but by values.

But RT, in spite of everything, is trying to fight common sense. “Russia Today TV channel is preparing another story about the life of the gay community in Russia. Against the backdrop of the active development in the Western media of the topic that gay rights are being oppressed in Russia, and calls to boycott the 2014 Olympics, some cases of cultural figures refusing to visit Moscow in protest, we want to show the real situation and ask you to comment,” posted the request of the TV channel on his Facebook page, Russian journalist Anton Krasovsky, who, of course, is not going to act in any story. Again RT is going to put out the fire with pies and pancakes and dried mushrooms. Not sure it's going to happen. It's just that it's not disgusting to put out?