Russia: Not Uniquely Bad Shock

If Russia is not unique in its failings on gay rights, nor is Putin quite the singular villain he is so often presented as. Before the Sochi Winter Olympics he insisted that he was not homophobic, that he knew gay people and had gay individuals in his administration. In much of Europe that might sound tame, but for a Russian leader to say that in public was quite a departure. Outside the biggest cities, the Russian public, like the Russian Orthodox church, is deeply conservative.

It is also worth noting that the Russian law regularly cited as evidence of institutionalised homophobia is little different from the UK’s notorious section 28, which banned the “promotion” of homosexuality in schools. When was section 28 repealed? In Scotland in 2000, and three years later elsewhere. We then traversed the path from section 28 to civil partnership and now gay marriage in just 12 years.

So, if – and why not be optimistic and say when – Sir Elton John meets Vladimir Putin, their discussion could be longer and more serious than the singer expects. And John might also learn that it is not primarily Putin’s mind he needs to change, but that of the wider public – as in Ukraine, and many other countries besides. So let him take his music to Red Square, bring his family along, and appeal to the fans directly. Putin would probably not come and sing along – despite his apparent love of crooning – but he might just sneak a look from behind a Kremlin curtain.

Mary Dejevsky, The Guardian.

No, lady! Russia is uniquely evil and we must never stop going on about it coz Empire and brainwashing.

That is why they have banned Sir Elton John!

Oh, hang on, they haven't...

Opera: Queen

[Mariusz] Kwiecien is at Covent Garden to sing Krol Roger, a little-known opera composed by fellow Pole Karol Szymanowski in the 1920s. It tells the story of a Sicilian king and his queen and court who fall under the spell of a shapely young shepherd’s quasi-religious promises of sensuality and sexual abandon. The opera is one man’s struggle between duty and homoerotic hedonism but everyman’s struggle between intellect and impulse.

While Mozart’s Don Giovanni is Kwiecien’s calling card — he has sung it worldwide including at New York’s Metropolitan Opera and most recently at Covent Garden — Krol Roger is something of a personal manifesto. Kwiecien has championed the opera from Paris to Santa Fe, and not only for its shimmering music, which ranges from a byzantine choral opening to standout arias. The piece speaks directly to his Polish roots and a desire to see tolerance rattle Poland’s enduring homophobic social attitudes.

“Poland is such a conservative country dominated by the [Catholic] church,” says Kwiecien, who lives between New York and Krakow. “When I come back to my country I love to see the changes; Polish people are becoming more European. But in one aspect Poland is never changing: it is so traditional.”

Szymanowski privately wrestled with his sexuality at a time when homosexuality was widely disapproved of. Among his gay lovers was Boris Kochno, 22 years his junior, who later became the lover of Sergei Diaghilev and Cole Porter. Szymanowski wrote a gay novel, Efebos, some of which he gave to Kochno, and this expression of tolerance sowed the seeds of Krol Roger, completed a few years later.

“Our nation created this kind of musician, who created such a fantastic piece that celebrates the differences: being different as a man, different as a human being,” says Kwiecien, who won’t be drawn on his own private life. “But in Krol Roger, Polish people always see the Shepherd coming as Jesus Christ . . . and they still think that homosexuality is inappropriate. We have to change the mind of our nation.”

Krol Roger could be considered the world’s first gay opera; it was embraced by American gay culture in the 1990s and last year, before Russia’s Sochi Winter Olympics, gay rights campaigners proposed it as the ideal operatic rallying cry against Putin’s anti-gay legislation, calling on Russian super-maestro Valery Gergiev to conduct. “You cannot say that Krol Roger is an opera about straight people because it’s not,” says Kwiecien.

Kasper Holten’s production at Covent Garden presents the homoeroticism between King and Shepherd as a seduction tool for the impostor’s grander political machinations. “Thank God,” adds Kwiecien, who is glad of a new angle...

The Times.

PS And coming up at the Royal Opera House, Pleasure, set in the toilets of a gay club, by Mark Simpson (not that one).

Evgeny Lebedev: Coming Clean

It's hard to work out if Lebedev worries about whether people see him as a spoilt, rich dilettante. His watchfulness makes me think that maybe he does – but it could just be the default demeanour of any well known billionaire. It isn't hard to see why a lot of people think he is gay, but when I ask how he feels about that, he says: "I couldn't care, to be honest with you. I find those discussions quite funny. I actually find it flattering." Given current attitudes towards homosexuality in Russia, I'd imagine it would be quite difficult for Lebedev to come out if he were gay, but he says: "No, if I was, I'd come out."

Evgeny Lebedev, the Russian billionaire owner of the Independent and Evening Standard, and quite the colourful, flamboyant etc etc young international playboy, is profiled by The Guardian. 

A friend of Elton John, Ian McKellen and Peter Mandelson, but clearly not a friend of Dorothy.

His new TV station, London Live, launches March 31st.
Naturally, he will be appearing on it regularly.

Ev also gives us more views on Russia and The Gays...

"Russia is not a homophobic country. No. When the whole thing about Russia's gay laws blew up, and there was talk of boycotting the Sochi Olympics, I said that's absolutely the wrong thing to do, because isolating and ostracising a country is like isolating somebody who is going slightly mad. But you put them in a madness asylum they get madder and madder and completely lose their mind, whereas if you work with them, they get better."

NB Like his father and business partner, Alexander Lebedev - one of your actual Russian oligarchs - Evgeny is feather-spittingly anti-Putin.
The Independent probably held the record for running Putin-bashing stories about Sochi and The Gays [See Fagburn passim].

Cher: Moral Agent

Cher was not asked to play Sochi - -the Olympic committee have confirmed.
She was however asked to play at the apartheidtastic Sun City - and did.
A true moral agent, I'm sure you'll agree.

Lush Cosmetics: Special Sochi Winter Olympics Closing Ceremony (PR) Campaign

After Lush asked people to draw a Nazi pink triangle on themselves 'using pink lipstick', in support of gay rights, bafflingly, then take a picture and tweet it to their shitty #signoflove, Fagburn asked if they could end the games with a SIGN OF LOVE!

RT! OR DON'T YOU CARE!!???

Thanks to Esteemed Comrade Darren. x

Bummr: It's The Sexchi Olympics!!!

A new gay dating app, Bummr, has gone into meltdown at Sochi, according to a press release, Fagburn can exclusively reveal.
Yes, all those sexy winter athlete dudes are gagging for it!
Over a million horny sportsmen in Sochi have downloaded the brilliant, easy-to-use and very popular new Bummr app, who coincidentally are one of our our new advertisers.
Heinz Van Snagglepuff III, Bummr’s VP of Marketing told Fagburn; "It may be winter but things are clearly hotting up in Sochi! Bummr is quite literally melting the ice!"

This in-no-way made-up story shows President Putin that the gays are here, there and gullible - and always looking for cock, perhaps even with someone as downright fugly as you!

It's not like some gay media will slavishly reprint any old PR nonsense - sometimes they don't even need to be paid.

Sochi: Gaywatch

Figure-skating - the winter diving.
Let's face it, they're the only sports we can do.

Russia: It's The Arts!

Good afternoon. Today on It's The Arts we are talking to Ollie Piers Ding-A-Ling, an exciting young new artist who made this rather striking and powerful image of President Putin and... I think it's best if Ollie explains the symbolism here. Who is the other man?

"I don't know. I don't know much about politics, to be honest."

Well, it really is jolly good all the same. But what exactly are you trying to say here?

"Russia is like so bad right now, yah? And they look like two men kissing! Hur hur hur!"

And this challenges homophobia in what way?

"I put a rainbow flag behind them."

How imaginative.

Now some say the so-called Sochi Boo! movement is just some silly apolitical middle-class children trying to look like they care about something.

Maybe it's just a feel-good faux protest, like shopping at The Body Shop?

"I did it on PhotoShop."

Evidently... 

"It's for my Duke of Edinburgh Award."

Good for you. 

"Putin looks gay!"

Okay, thanks for coming along, Ollie Piers Ding-A-Ling, this surely is our Guernica.

'Do you think the image is problematic? Some feel the image uses trans expression to shame and mock Putin, thereby degrading the trans experience....' See the debate at transadvocate.com

Sochi Boo!: A Propaganda Model

In sum, a propaganda approach to media coverage suggests a systematic and highly political dichotomization in news coverage based on serviceability to important domestic power interests. This should be observable in dichotomized choices of story and in the volume and quality of coverage.

Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy Of The Mass Media, Edward S Herman & Noam Chomsky,

In sum, why do you think we are drowning under an avalanche of stupid stories about Russia right now, and what interests do you think it really serves?

Can you give me another explanation as to why every US and UK gay news media outlet is currently pushing out about five fucking stories a day - and why none of them are ever checked?

Is there nothing bad happening anywhere else?

Do you really think this is just objective, innocent journalism?

Even if the jerks who write this junk are too dumb to realise what's going on?

Bored now with arguing with braindrowned gayist goons.

Good day!
x

Sochi Rainbow Dildo: Sponsored Content

Love the gays?
Hate Putin?
What better way to show you really, really care about the poor Russian gays than buying something stupid?
Something like this special limited edition Sochi Rainbow Dildo?
It's a dildo and it's rainbow-coloured and we've mentioned the Sochi Winter Olympics in the press release!
Only £23.99 (exc p+p).*
Cause putting one of these up your bum is about as meaningful, sincere and effective a protest as anything else connected with the Sochi Boo! campaign.
Take that Putin!
Up yours Mr Russian Hitler!

* Order now! Can be still be delivered in time for Valentine's Day. £1 from each dildo sold goes to the Saint Peter Tatchell Retirement Fund.

Johnny Weir: Sponsored Content

Gotta love Johnny Weir.
Bashing bigots, and winding-up all those butt-hurting queer nation ny masc fascists, and making the otherwise frigid Winter Olympics all worthwhile.
Go Johnny go!
x

Russia: Crude Propaganda

The best thing about the West is you get told what you're allowed to get angry about.

Thanks to fellow comrade Huw Lemmey. x

"It's not really a seering political critique if you find an image that looks a bit Russki then put a rainbow flag on it."

No, wait, how about the age old evil Russian bear cliché?

30 Years On: Cause American big business really cares about your rights.

Russia: (Self) Promotion Masquerading As Protest

Right now, Russia’s gay community need all of our support, so I find it confusing when I get a weird feeling in my stomach looking at media brands plastering supportive rainbows over their logos. No one with any basic level of humanity would deny the validity of a support campaign for gay people in Russia. But this type of bland showmanship seems several steps behind even clicktivism in terms of practical action. It’s a very real humanitarian problem, boiled down to a symbol.

When Channel 4 started it, it seemed valid and inventive but now the internet is starting to look like the BBC in November, only instead of poppies, we’re drowning in rainbows. It began with media brands and it was followed by individuals who wish to be media brands themselves. I'm sure that, if you use the internet, you've come across companies or social media users who have joined in. But much like the flowers on Aschrott's Grave, I worry that these rainbow logos have become little more than self-serving monuments.

Ugh, picking a fight with this trend doesn't make me seem like a good person, does it? This whole thing reminds me of Kony 2012. When that film dropped, long before the guy who made it began jerking off in the street, it seemed like a well-intentioned piece of work from people disgusted at the plight of child soldiers in Uganda. And what could be unreasonable about that? Nothing, except the video was such a saccharine piece of propaganda that I was certain something had to be wrong with it. At least on some level, my suspicions were correct. There were questions about the campaign's financial transparency, the company's motive and what would really happen if Uganda were flooded with weapons. I feel the same way today. This is another good cause, but on some fundamental level it feels suspect to me because it is a gutless, tokenistic form of protest...

The Hypocrisy Of The Internet's Sochi Rainbow Protests - Alex Miller, Vice.

PS The Hypocrisy of Vice? The £1billion "edgy" media empire, the Murdochs and corporate "sponsored content".

Russia: Welcome To The Era Of Queer Imperialism

Have you tweeted, Facebooked, Instagrammed, YouTubed, blogged or in some other fashion publicly declared your love for gays and your loathing of Vladimir Putin? If not, why not? Everyone who’s anyone is at it. No sooner had the Winter Olympics in Sochi been declared open than Western newspapers and magazines were redesigning their mastheads to include the gay rainbow flag, Google was splashing the gay colours across its homepage, Channel 4 was running an archly camp skitfeaturing a fat man in hotpants dancing to Russian-style music, globally famous authors were penning angry letters about Putin, and virtually everyone with access to social media was making their profile pic super gay-friendly or was frantically sharing Buzzfeed’s ‘16 Most Homoerotic Photos of Vladimir Putin’. Forget curling or luge – the main event at this Winter Olympics is the mass wrestling match between gay-loving Westerners and redneck Russia...

The nodding-dog enthusiasm with which virtually every Western institution and publication has embraced Sochi as an opportunity to lambast backward Russians, and more importantly to demonstrate their own gay-friendly decency, has been extraordinary. Every day brings news of another corporation or outlet waving the gay flag, ostensibly to express fury with Putin’s recent passing of a deeply authoritarian law that forbids the promotion of homosexuality to under-18s, but really as a way of saying: ‘Look at me! I like gays! I am good!’ 

...

And now, through Sochi, the Culture Wars in general and the politicisation of gayness specifically have gone global. A West bereft of its old economic clout and lacking serious ideological beliefs now attempts to assert its moral authority in global affairs through tangential cultural issues, and most notably through being gay-friendly. So the UN is forever drawing up lists of non-gay-friendly countries, Washington has threatened to cut off aid to countries that are not gay-friendly, and Russia is today demonised not on the basis of its economic manoeuvring or ideological positioning but because of its attitude to gays. Where once the world was divided between the civilised and the savage, now it’s split between the gay-friendly and the homophobic. Welcome to the era of Queer Imperialism. How long before a Western nation goes so far as to bomb a country that is insufficiently gay-friendly?

Brendan O'Neill in Spiked gets it.

The good old days recalled at the Sochi Opening Ceremony

This''ll send the politically vacuous conformist gayists MAD!!!
Note Pink News readers predictably jump up and down, but not one actually engages with anything he wrote.
They just have lame sweary hissyfits, go for ye olde "He must be a closet case" idiotic retort, or - my favourite - "You can tell by that stare that he's a homophobe."

PS Adds obligatory; "Whilst I don't agree with everything he says..." rejoinder.

Oh Christ! The Daily Telegraph's god-bothering homophobe-in-chief Cristina Odone sums up the case for the opposition. You really could not make this up.
Bigots against Putin!

Letter Of The Day: The Guardian

Can we please see an end to the publication of hysterical, hypocritical and at times frankly racist protests about Russian treatment of LGBT people? Russia is not Nazi Germany and, given that an estimated 20 million Russian people died fighting nazism in the second world war, such comparisons are deeply offensive to the population of that country – whatever their sexuality. Gareth Edwards (Letters, 7 February) is the latest to draw comparison but, as far as I know, LGBT people in Russia are not barred from professional occupations, denied access to education, or expected to wear identifying stars on their clothing. Nor are they being detained in camps, whereas by 1936 the concentration camps were certainly in evidence – Sachsenhausen just outside Berlin was opened the same year.

No one condones anti-gay violence but it frequently happens here too, as last years Stonewall report clearly showed. Putin's law is clumsy and bigoted and, as has been pointed out, bears considerable similarity to the now defunct section 28 brought in by the Tory government of the 1980s. I do wonder how Messrs Fry et al would have reacted if the rest of the world had demanded boycotts of British cultural and sporting events through the 80s and 90s and likened our population to Nazis.

David Hodgetts
Burnley, Lancashire

The Guardian.

We cannot blame people for believing hyperbolic nonsense like this - it's basically all the straight and gay media has been telling them.

Thought For The Day: Anton Krasovsky

"It's a very difficult question," said Anton Krasovsky, a gay television presenter who lost his job after coming out live on air. In a column in the Guardian last May, he wrote that the time for gay people to become courageous and stand up for their rights had come. Now, though, he said it was hard to evaluate whether the huge international pressure had helped.

"I think any kind of hysteria is bad," he said. "Putin is not Hitler. Sochi is not Berlin 1936. When I read the calls for boycotting the Olympics I was absolutely disgusted."

Quoted in The Guardian who also visit Sochi's gay club Mayak.

Owner Andrei Tanichev,tells them; "It's a complex question, whether or not all the noise in the west about the issue has been good or bad. On the one hand, it is very good that it has forced people in Russia to think about gay rights properly. On the other hand, I think the level of noise has been greater than the size of the problem."

Still what would they know, they're only gay Russians?

PS The Independent On Sunday also sampled the gay scene in Sochi - which they claim is "Russia's gay capital."

PPS And the Daily Telegraph!! "It's Russia's Brighton."

PPS Today's Times also goes to Club Mayak! The place must be rammed right now.

PPPS As does USA Today!!! "It's a bit  fake, all this attention," a patron tells them, ironically. 

Sochi Protest: A Photo-Essay

This is an American gay man. He is clearly very angry. He is angry about Russia.
He is shouting. Perhaps because he is in LA and Sochi is 7,000 miles away.
And cause everything in the USA is just A-OK.
He is so angry he has a placard where Putin looks like Hitler.
In America this passes for sophisticated political discourse.

When shall we three meet again?
This is a mass movement. Take that Putin!

Some workers show their enthusiasm for some silly middle-class people shouting.

USA! USA! USA!!!!!!!!!!!!
Russia BOO!

Russia: Another Planet

Josie Long, The Guardian.
If you're short-sighted click on this. ^^^

PS Another posh gay, ida4, speaks out with some more terrible "street art" in Newcastle.

Take that Putin!

Upate: A protest against a branch of Donald's in Sunderland.

Russia: Mythbusting

The Winter Olympics in Sochi have given western journalists no end of fodder for outrage and absurdity – at the cost of accuracy. Despite the just concern about gay rights and entertaining tweets about Sochi’s half-built hotels, a number of persistent stories about Russia and its dissidents could use a little clearing up.

To that end, consider the following …

The Guardian - now read on...

Little parlour game; Ask why are the (gay) right, the (straight) wet liberals and the otherwise apolitical getting so agitated about Sochi?

Daily Mail: "Gay lobby"?

Russia: None More Gay

Odd that at the Opening Ceremony Cher said she'd refused to perform at, it was all people from the host country - as usually happens at these Olympic ceremony things, like in London 2012.
Not that I'm calling the mad cow a liar for saying she was asked to play.