When the law banning “propaganda of non-traditional relationships” in Russia was passed in the summer of 2013, the news came with a steady stream of images of Russian LGBT people being attacked, beaten, tortured and humiliated by police and Neo-Nazi gangs alike. Along with others in the gay community in the West, I felt outrage – this was a country that was shortly to host the greatest of sporting events, the Olympics! – but at the same time a sense of powerlessness. The situation was horrendous, but what could any of us really do about it?
That question was solved by talking to the King’s Head Theatre in Islington who commissioned a rapid-response piece on the spot. If Russian gay people were denied a voice in their own country, we would give them a voice onstage here. The idea was to interview gay Russians about their everyday experiences, form a verbatim theatre piece, and perform a weekend of scratch performances. All profits from the shows would go to help LGBT support groups in Russia.
Finding gay Russians was a task in itself, but once I finally got talking to some of them, the stories came alive. Young men who had been lured on Internet dates, beaten and then arrested, gay activists who had escaped Russia under threats of rape and murder, lesbians who were ostracised and beaten by their families. One question kept raising its head: why, in the 21st century, was Russian society so homophobic?
“While you guys were having the sexual revolution, us guys were having the Soviet Union,” the lesbian journalist Masha Gessen told me. “We haven’t had feminism, or the civil rights movement, or any of the things that go to make up gay acceptance,” said another. “Without equality in other areas, gays don’t stand a chance.”
The original scratch performances were so successful that the King’s Head commissioned an extended piece to run at its newly-opened Hope Theatre in Islington during the Winter Olympics. With music, dancing and singing, the piece explores the background of homophobia in Russia – bizarrely, in the Middle Ages, Russia had been quite a tolerant place to be – and profiles their stories, discussing what we can do to help gay Russians in ways that won’t end up ostracising them.
For out of everyone that I talked to, their fear is the same: what will happen to them when the Olympics are over?
