OP-ED: With Sochi as Long Beach’s Sister City, Lest Putin Forget

by Tom Boellstorff | With memories of the 2014 Winter Olympics still lingering, it behooves us to keep in mind the horrific anti-LGBT climate in Russia. Unfortunately, there will be no “closing ceremony” for this homophobia. Indeed, President Vladimir Putin has stoked this bigotry, saying as recently as January 17 that gay people would be safe if they “leave the children in peace.”

The irony is that LGBT Russians contributed to the pro-democracy movement that helped bring Putin to power (and that his authoritarianism has betrayed). What’s remarkable about this history is that it goes all the way back to the fall of the Soviet Union.

How do I know? Because I was there.

Given that I have made Long Beach my home for 17 years, and more broadly that Long Beach remains a sister city to Sochi, it seems appropriate to share this history here, as a reminder that LGBT Russians deserve full rights and respect.

In early 1991, I was finishing my final year of college at Stanford and eager as a young gay man to learn more about the lives of LGBT persons in the wider world. The International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission (IGLHRC), at that time a small group of volunteers based in San Francisco, had planned a conference in St. Petersburg and Moscow from July 23 until August 2. I found money to attend and stay afterwards to assist a gay group in Moscow, Tema. My job was to live in an apartment with Macintosh computers IGLHRC had procured and teach the activists how to use them, so they could publish without state interference.

Just 17 days after the conference, on August 19, I got an early-morning international call from IGLHRC saying Gorbachev was rumored to have fallen ill. When I told the gay activists they reacted with shock and immediately turned on the television. We found the same nature documentary playing on all the stations. I was perplexed but the activists immediately surmised that Gorbachev had been arrested, and the television stations, fearing reprisal, opted to show the blandest content they could. Activists across Moscow and beyond were soon exchanging news: some kind of coup was taking place, all non-government media were banned, tanks were on the streets. The coup plotters announced that “immoral elements” would be considered enemies of the new regime and forced staff at one AIDS clinic in Moscow to compile a list of HIV-positive persons.

But they had failed to arrest Russian President Boris Yeltsin, who had taken refuge in the Russian Parliament. Yeltsin wished to resist the coup, but had limited means to publicize it. This is when the gay activists realized that my apartment, with its state-of-the-art computer, laser printer, and small photocopy machine, represented a de facto independent press of which the Soviet authorities knew nothing.

We went downtown and obtained a precious typewritten copy of Yeltsin’s proclamation. Back in the apartment we typed it up and made hundreds of high-quality flyers using the laser printer and photocopier, which was so dangerously close to overheating that we took turns blowing on its transformer all night long. By August 21 we were climbing over barricades at the Parliament building to give the flyers to Yeltsin’s supporters. In the following days we saw our flyers posted around the city, with Tema’s logo visible on the flyer’s edge.

A couple months after these events I returned to the United States and a life that has included much travel, but only one other visit to Russia. Yet I will never forget those events of 23 years ago. Back in 1991, polls in Moscow revealed that thirty percent of respondents thought LGBT people should be killed and only ten percent supported equality. Yet LGBT activists took great risks to support freedom for all Russians—including Yeltsin, who launched Putin’s career.

In preparing to write this piece, for the first time I pulled up the Wikipedia entry on the coup attempt. It reads in part, “Yeltsin issued a declaration in which it was stated that a reactionary anti-constitutional coup had taken place… This declaration was distributed around Moscow in the form of flyers.”

Maybe I’ll edit that entry to include the role of LGBT activists in that piece of history. As the world’s attention turns to Sochi, I hope all of us (not least Putin himself) remember that without LGBT Russians, Putin might not be where he is today, to preside over a global athletic event that should be an occasion for celebrating our common human dignity.

Tom Boellstorff is Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Irvine.