AUDASE

Moscow’s Gay-Bashing Ritual

By MASHA GESSEN NY TIMES

MOSCOW — I arrived at the edge of Gorky Park as one arrives on a red carpet: A score of photographers surrounded me and started clicking away. I was the first person to show up for an L.G.B.T. rally scheduled for 5 p.m. Saturday, one of three pride events held in the city that day.

For the last couple of years, gay activists have been using an old dissident tactic: scheduling several events in different locations on the same day and making sure information about them travels through different channels. In the Soviet era, this was a hedge against secret-police informants, though it was rarely effective. In the age of social networks, the police usually know where to expect the protesters, but on a couple of occasions the tactic of dispersed protests has served to protect participants from gay-bashers who frequent all L.G.B.T. events.

A concerted effort by Moscow activists to secure a legal permit for an L.G.B.T. pride parade resulted, after several years, in a 2010 European Court on Human Rights ruling that directed the city authorities to allow the event to be held. Though Russia usually complies with E.C.H.R. decisions, this time the Moscow City Court responded by banning gay pride events for the next 100 years. That, and the pending legislation against so-called propaganda of homosexuality — passed in a number of Russian municipalities and likely to face a final vote in the national Parliament as soon as this week — have pushed L.G.B.T. issues to the foreground of Russian politics and L.G.B.T. organizing deep underground.

With the ban on gay pride parades in effect, organizers of Saturday’s events planned modest actions that were strictly legal: one-person pickets and a rally in a cordoned-off corner of Gorky Park that is dubbed “Hyde Park” because it’s specifically set aside for free speech. (This is a recent invention of the Moscow authorities, who are apparently unaware that it serves to underscore the fact that the rest of the city doesn’t condone free speech.)

Earlier in the day, a young woman stood up in front of Parliament with a poster and was attacked by a self-identified Orthodox believer before she had a chance to turn the poster to face the onlookers; she was then detained by the police. Then another woman unfurled a poster with the words “Love Is Stronger Than Hate” and had barely had time to say, “This is a legal one-person picket to protest the homophobic laws” before two policemen grabbed her and dragged her away. In all, at least 25 people were detained by the police in the early afternoon. Because what they had been doing was legal, they were eventually released without charge — but not before the 5 p.m. rally was over.

The organizers had secured permission to hold the rally in “Hyde Park,” but two days before the scheduled event that small square of sidewalk on the Moscow River embankment was closed for reconstruction. Some pipes were laid on the sidewalk, apparently to justify this claim, and a chicken-wire construction fence was erected. Unaware of all this and thinking I had simply taken the wrong route to get to “Hyde Park,” I climbed the fence with my bike before landing in front of the throng of reporters.

Then about 20 activists appeared seemingly out of nowhere and unfurled banners that said things like “Children Need Day Care, Not Laws Against ‘Homosexual Propaganda,’ ” and within a few minutes were attacked by men with shaved heads, who knocked men and women over and proceeded to kick them and shoot pepper spray into their eyes at point-blank range. The police swooped in, pushing the attackers aside to get to the protesters, whom they then hauled into prisoner transport vehicles. Some of the attackers were detained too — but only if they continued to try to beat the activists even as they were being led away by the police. One of the gay-bashers objected to being transported in the same vehicles as gays and lesbians, and the two groups were separated, with about half a dozen people in each van.

“That’s probably a good thing,” said a young woman activist. “Last time we spent two hours driving around Moscow in the same vehicle as the gay-bashers, and that was really unpleasant.”

A reporter asked me when efforts to legalize gay pride in Russia might succeed. The woman with whom I had been chatting could not contain herself and burst out laughing at this question. “Probably no sooner than efforts to topple the regime succeed,” I responded.

About a dozen of us stood around for another quarter-hour and dispersed. It is a ritual: We show up, they beat some of us up, and the next year we show up again — just to prove that we will keep showing up.