Russia’s Best-Known Gay Activist, More Than a Tough Job
Nikolai Alexeyev, a Russian gay-rights activist,
in central Moscow at a cafe.
By MICHAEL SCHWIRTZ
AT first glance, it seemed like a breakthrough for homosexual equality in Russia. After years of battling the authorities, here was Nikolai Alekseyev, Russia’s most visible gay-rights campaigner, on a popular prime-time debate show called “Duel” recently talking about plans to hold a gay pride rally in Moscow.
But the discussion quickly deteriorated, with hostile and bigoted remarks coming not just from Mr. Alekseyev’s opponents but also from the host, who at one point equated homosexuality with pedophilia. When a woman in a Kentucky Derby-style hat started into a screed about “homosexual extremism,” he had had enough.
Calling the woman a lying “hag in a hat,” Mr. Alekseyev charged offstage, stamping a hole through the set as he left.
Any conversation about gay rights in Russia today is bound to be tense. But with Mr. Alekseyev, it can be explosive.
For six years, he has flouted a government ban and held an annual gay-rights event that he calls Moscow Pride. He has weathered arrests and attacks by neo-Nazi thugs, and once got into a shoving match with the press secretary of Yuri M. Luzhkov, the former Moscow mayor who has referred to Mr. Alekseyev’s protests as “satanic.”
With short blond hair and a round, youthful face, Mr. Alekseyev, 33, has the air of a maligned schoolboy out for retribution. He decided to become an activist after Moscow State University, where he was enrolled, refused to accept his graduate thesis, “Legal Regulation of the Status of Sexual Minorities.”
He is brash and provocative, even among would-be supporters. He has berated journalists for coverage he disagrees with.
“He is a complicated person and does not have a mild personality,” said Anna Komarova, a transgender activist allied with Mr. Alekseyev. “But laid-back people choose other occupations.”
BEING a gay-rights activist in Russia is not for the timid. At this year’s Moscow Pride, held outside the Kremlin last month, the two dozen or so participants stood little chance against the phalanx of police officers deployed to stop them. Most were arrested seconds after unfurling a rainbow flag or a placard denouncing homophobia. Gangs of muscular men wearing surgical masks and yelling antigay slurs chased away the rest.
Participants suffered only minor cuts and bruises, and all were released the same day. Mr. Alekseyev, who spent this year’s protest coordinating from an apartment — his father was recently found to have cancer, he said, and he could not risk being jailed as a repeat offender — said previous years were bloodier.
Few others in Russia have risked being as publicly outspoken — or just as out — as Mr. Alekseyev. He calls news conferences at fancy Moscow hotels, gives interviews to newspapers and has appeared on television with increasing regularity. He has, for better or for worse, become the face of a budding campaign for gay rights in Russia.
His efforts have attracted news media attention and forced politicians to discuss the issue. But it is a steep uphill battle; asked to weigh in, Vladimir V. Putin, Russia’s prime minister, said homosexuals deepen Russia’s demographic crisis. And Russia joined many African and Muslim-majority countries on Friday in voting against a United Nations resolution condemning discrimination against homosexuals that, nevertheless, passed.
Mr. Alekseyev, who founded the group Gay Russia in 2005, believes that there can be no advance in rights until gay people are allowed to protest publicly.
But in a country where the authorities view any sort of public protest with trepidation, his position has provoked hostility.
“This is a very dangerous thing,” said Aleksandr Khinshtein, a member of Parliament, and Mr. Alekseyev’s principal opponent on the recent debate show. “Homosexuality can never be allowed to be considered normal. It’s a question of survival.”
Even other gay-rights campaigners have criticized Moscow Pride, saying the rallies and the violence that typically accompanies them distort perceptions of the issue in Russia, where there is still significant confusion about what homosexuality is and what exactly gay people want.
“He focuses only on these protests,” said Igor Yasin, another Moscow-based gay-rights campaigner. “And when he has the opportunity to explain what he is fighting for, what we are fighting for, it seems as if he’s not able to provide an answer.”
Many Russian gays, however, seem uninterested in the fight. Russia has become a far more open place in the nearly two decades since the authorities repealed a law against male homosexual sex. Gay clubs and bars have opened in many large cities, and the Internet has helped others in small towns to connect. In Moscow, there is a gay bookstore, a gay beach and even a gay taxi service.
Just hours after Mr. Alekseyev’s latest Moscow Pride protest, the line outside a gay club, Central Station, had spilled onto the street and stretched around a block of downtown Moscow. Squeezed into muscle shirts and tight Prada jeans, the young men joked and flirted, while cabbies, looking a little bored, waited to ferry them to late-night parties.
SUCH freedoms are limited to what Mr. Yasin described as a “golden cage.” Do what you want, gay-rights opponents say, but do it out of sight.
People who are openly gay can be fired from work with impunity. Discussion of same-sex marriage and gay adoption is largely taboo. (Mr. Alekseyev is married to his Swiss partner in Switzerland, where same-sex marriage is legal.)
Violence against homosexuals is common, rights advocates say, particularly in small towns and in the mostly Muslim North Caucasus region, rights groups say.
Despite his rising public profile, Mr. Alekseyev says he usually takes the subway and, unlike other prominent activists here, has not felt the need to hire a bodyguard. Still, only a handful of people have been bold enough to push the limits.
“What society wants is bread and spectacle, that’s it,” he said. “I don’t see any problem with people standing in lines outside gay clubs, but tell these people that they have to fight for their rights and they say, ‘No way.’ ”
His efforts have brought notable successes. In 2008, the Ministry of Health eliminated a provision banning homosexuals from donating blood. Last year, the European Court of Human Rights ruled that Russia had violated Mr. Alekseyev’s right to protest and fined the government about $40,000.
Most major Russian newspapers covered the recent Moscow Pride, as did many foreign news outlets. The United States and the European Union issued condemnations of the crackdown.
But it is unclear whether Mr. Alekseyev’s efforts, or those of anyone else, have done much to change Russian attitudes.
Amid a group of men chanting “Beat the homos” at this year’s Moscow Pride, a 21-year-old musician named Vladimir was one of the few onlookers to express any support for the event.
“There are many tolerant people,” he said, adding that he was not gay, but supported gay rights. “But they are probably not tolerant enough to come out here and face this.”
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