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| Dima |
Dispatches, Britain’s Channel 4's investigative journalism program, has just aired a documentary titled Hunted.
I don’t like recommending things to watch that are likely to
leave you sobbing at the end, but I trust if you can get some distance between
yourself and this depiction of LGBT bullying to the point of torture in Russia,
you can handle it.
Steel yourself to be objective. Ask yourself questions like, “How the hell
did the camera crew get in there to film that?”
Ask even more cynical questions like, “Can anything like this ever be
seen objectively? How am I to know this
isn’t being done to cater to the lowest denominator, the kind of people who
stop to gawk at accidents?” But find a
way to get yourself to watch it. It’s
just short of an hour long.
You’ll find yourself glad you don’t live in Moscow. Don’t have to deal with the slush of winter
in the grey streets and the endless rows of concrete block houses. Don’t have to live in cramped kitchens and with
the ugliest furniture in creation.
Besides being a film about beating up gays and terrifying lesbians, it’s
also a depiction of how the middle (and lower) classes live in Moscow and St. Petersburg. And it makes you wonder what it’s like for
the rural poor.
Mostly it’s a full in the face look at Russia’s neo-fascism
and what happens when the state sanctions violence.
We sit here in the West and celebrate one victory over
homophobia after another, almost everywhere you turn. Five of the six New England states approve
same-sex marriage, and then Rhode Island makes it unanimous. Mexico and Argentina and then Uruguay bring
these rights home to Latin America.
England and Wales will start marrying gay couples in March and Scotland
joins in, leaving everybody asking, “Well, Northern Ireland, what the hell are
you waiting for?” The mood is up, up,
up, and straight people now way outnumber gay people in supporting gay
rights. Google puts a rainbow pattern of
Olympic skiiers on its search engine. The
German team wears rainbow uniforms. The
U.S. President sends openly gay people to represent the American team. The homophobic authoritarian churches have
less clout by the day and some of my friends tell me to stop beating a dead
horse. Homophobia is all but dead, they
say.
Think again. What’s
going on in Russia is absolutely terrifying.
Because the anti-gay law forbids anything that might be construed as
pro-gay messaging, even protesting against the anti-gay law can get you into
trouble. Cultural attitudes
in Russia are like what they were here in the 1950s and 1960s, when people declared openly that homosexuality and pedophilia were synonymous. Just ask Metropolitan Kirill, the head of the Russian Orthodox Church. He'll tell you that's the case in Russia today. In those exact words.
You can find people here who still think gays should be stoned to death, that blacks should not be allowed to go to college because they don't have the mental capacity, that doing business with a Jew means you will get cheated. But they live on the perifery of society, with those who believe Obama was born in Kenya and you can get pregnant from a toilet seat. People you just laugh at, or at least don't take seriously. People who have not kept up with the advance of knowledge. For some reason, Russia has yet to get the word that their attitudes on sexuality are of that ilk, that research and experience in the world outside
of Russia has revealed homophobia to be of a piece with racism, anti-Semitism
and sexism. They consider themselves
Europeans, but despite their racial makeup, they might as well be from
Mars. They have more in common with
Uganda, and other places in Africa where homophobia is being whipped up by
American evangelicals, than they do with London, Paris, Berlin, Madrid or Rome. Just consider that two of those cities, Paris
and Berlin even had a gay mayor (Berlin still has). And contrast that with Moscow, where saying
that’s a good thing in front of a neighbor might result in a call to the cops.
What to do? How to do
it?
Hard questions.
The answers will come.
And ultimately attitudes will change from within. Russia is not a nation of thugs. It's also important to remember in looking at this video that we're focusing on a particularly vile section of the populace, and not on the larger Russian community, which has developed a moral consciousness as any good as any other modern nations. Consider, when looking at the Russian Orthodox leader, at the kind of messages you're likely to get from some Catholic bishops in America. Greatly toned down, because they have to function in the larger American context and such blatant hateful ugliness no longer flies here. But cut, most assuredly, from the same cloth.
Russia, from all I've seen, seems to have a hard time with free expression or any serious embrace
of diversity. And it is currently under the thumb of Vladimir Putin, who appears to be channeling police state leaders from the czars to Stalin and others before him to deflect attention from economic problems. Machiavelli would be proud.
We in the United States are not doing all that well with democracy, either, these days, so we are not in a good position to lecture Russia on how to straighten up and fly right as it makes its way in that direction.
But as people with high expectations for democracy and equality and human rights,
we can still speak up as individuals.
It is my profound hope that the maximum number of people of good will will let their voices be heard.
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