Russia to Gays: Get Back into the Closet

In between protests, Alexeyev works with human-rights lawyers to defend gay rights within Russia's bureaucratic court system. Last week a lesbian couple in Moscow was refused the right to get married; Alexeyev plans to take the case to court. He has had some success with legislation. Last year his activism helped change a law that barred gays and lesbians from donating blood. Alexeyev speaks regularly to gay groups outside Moscow to promote his message of equal rights. "Moscow and St. Petersburg is one thing," he says. "There are clubs and communities [in the big cities,] but being gay in a Russian small town is scary."

The fear is pervasive. In Moscow, Viktor, 28, says, "My family does not know I am gay. I am open about it to anyone that asks, but I would never tell my parents. I don't know what my mother would do, but I know my father openly hates homosexuals." Like many gay men, Viktor didn't want to attend the parade on Saturday. "I just want to be treated like everyone else, and going around and screaming I am gay isn't going to help me." Says Sergei, who is married to a woman but advertises for liaisons with men on gay dating sites: "Being gay is just not considered normal like in the West. In Russia there are just no good [gay] role models. No normal people who happen to be gay." (See pictures of Moscow.)

If Alexeyev had hoped that the Eurovision finals would help his cause, he was wrong. The events were treated with an awkward silence from Eurovision organizers. The Dutch team had threatened to pull out of the competition if the parade was banned, but the team did not qualify for the finals. And the Norwegian winner, Alexander Rybak, patronizingly told a press conference, "I think it's a little bit sad that they chose to have the protest today. They spent all their energy on that parade, while the biggest gay parade in the world [an allusion to the campy performances of the contest] was tonight." (See a recap of Eurovision through the years.)

Nevertheless, Alexeyev tries to find a silver lining to the suppression of his march. "We changed the location of the march at the last minute so that we wouldn't be attacked by anti-gay groups like previous years," he says. "This is the first year that no one was seriously injured in the parade." In gay Russia, that counts for an achievement.