LGBTQ Russians Were Putin’s First Target in His War on the West

Russia’s 2021 National Security Strategy makes multiple references to traditional, spiritual, and moral values. “It explicitly says that preserving the family, preserving gender, are matters of national security,” Edenborg said. “That those who do not conform to heterosexual, cisgender norms or family norms are not only perverse—they are a threat to national security.”

The gay propaganda law in 2013 carved a path that Russian tanks wish they had in Ukraine. Russia has seen a surge in attacks in the years after the law was passed. In St. Petersburg, once considered Russia’s most liberal city, self-described “hunters” took it as open season on the city’s LGBTQ community. The media coverage that followed the passage of the gay propaganda law in 2013 set the tone for the rise in hate crimes that was to follow. “It definitely helped some people to make up their mind about killing other people,” said Alexander Kondakov, an assistant professor at University College Dublin, who has studied violence against LGBTQ people in Russia.

In 2016, Dmitry Tsilikin, a prominent art and culture critic who was gay, was stabbed more than 30 times by a man he met on an online dating site. As the killer left, he took Tsilikin’s phone and locked the door behind him, leaving the journalist to bleed to death in his own home with no way out. In police custody, his killer asked to be referred to as “the cleaner,” according to local media reports. Tsilikin’s death was not recorded as a hate crime.

“In Russia in general at the moment, there is such a high concentration of hatred. You can turn on the TV at any given moment and watch the news. It’s Orwellian, the five-minute hate, where people are told that they need to hate their neighbors,” Tsilikin’s editor, Dmitry Grozny, told FP shortly after the murder. “Over the past two to three years, this hatred has grown in all directions, including, unfortunately, towards gay people.”

Russia’s assault on LGBTQ rights has found sympathetic ears among Christian conservative groups beyond the borders of the former Soviet Union through organizations such as the U.S.-based World Congress of Families, which promotes an anti-LGBTQ agenda around the world, and has long-standing ties to Russia. In 2019, the organization hosted a regional conference in Accra, Ghana, which has taken a sharp turn against LGBTQ rights in recent years.

In 2021, Hungary’s conservative government passed a gay propaganda law very similar to Russia’s while Romania is weighing its own. In Poland, which is both deeply suspicious of Russia but also strongly Catholic, the lower house of the country’s Parliament passed a bill this year outlawing teaching about LGBTQ rights issues in schools.

Russia’s weaponization of gay rights transformed the issue into a new geopolitical fault line, Kondakov said. “It turned out to be an easy way to signal your affiliation with either Western values or anti-Western values.”

Author: Amy Mackinnon

Original Address: https://foreignpolicy.com/2022/10/07/lgbtq-russia-ukraine-war-west/