Last edited: February 14, 2005


Russians Protest Plan to Criminalize Gays

PlanetOut, April 29, 2002

By Jon ben Asher, 365Gay.com

SUMMARY: Russian gays wearing concentration camp uniforms with pink triangles demonstrated in Moscow on Friday to protest against legislation that would make outlaw gay sex.

MOSCOW—Russian gays wearing concentration camp uniforms with pink triangles demonstrated in Moscow on Friday, to protest against legislation that would make gay sex punishable by jail terms.

The People’s Deputy Party on Tuesday introduced a bill in the Duma that would amend the criminal code by making sex between two men or two women a criminal offense punishable by up to five years in prison.

Homosexual sex was decriminalized after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Proposing the reinstatement of the law, the head of the Deputy Party’s parliamentary group, Gennady Raikov, said homosexuality was "an abnormality, and abnormality should be punishable by law."

The measure is reportedly backed by Dmitry Rogozin, head of the Duma’s international relations committee, but a wide range of politicians have angrily condemned it.

The concentration camp uniforms were aimed at making explicit the comparison with Nazi Germany, which forced Jews in countries under its control to wear yellow stars, and gays to wear pink triangles. More than six million Jews, gays, Gypsies, and Communists were executed by the Nazis.

"The penalization of homosexuality existed during the authoritarian regimes of the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany," said the head of the liberal Radical Party, Nikolai Kramov, one of the rally’s organizers.

"It’s only left now … to demand the re-establishment of the death penalty for homosexuals to be completely in line with Hitler’s ideas," he added.


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