Maclean’s columnist Colby Cosh wants everyone to calm down about LGBT rights in Russia, where you can still “suck another dude off” with no problem, so what’s the big deal?
On Wednesday, Cosh published a post on the Maclean’s site titled “Boycott Russia and boycott the world” in which he suggested a strict requirement of moral purity would make it impossible to host big international events pretty much anywhere, since most nations either currently oppress some group or have previously vanquished a group of people. I don’t think anyone could quibble with that, but it doesn’t mean we should be silent in the face of human rights abuses like the ones currently being carried out in Russia.
Ah, but there’s the rub. If I’m reading Cosh’s column accurately, he thinks the oppression of the LGBT community under Vladimir Putin is way overblown. Here’s the relevant chunk of his column:
Much of the controversy over the location of these Olympic Winter Games has orbited around the Russian government’s treatment of gays and lesbians. As a Cold War kid, I find this delightful. Nobody said much about these matters when Russia was Communist, homosexuality was formally illegal and the Russian psychiatric profession was a torture apparatus. In school, we were lectured about Western disarmament for what must have been a hundred hours, if you add it all up. I do not recall spending a second on Russia’s sexual minorities.
If you are cynical, you will regard this as demonstrating how fashion-driven the issues of international concern are. If you believe in progress, it shows how much our species has pulled its act together. Gays and lesbians, unquestionably, have it far better in Russia now than at any previous moment in its recorded history. Homosexual activity is legal; gays can donate blood, join the army and adopt children. Transsexuals can change their legal gender.
I’m not sure if Cosh is joking or if he’s being wilfully obtuse. Of course he didn’t learn about gay rights in Russia when he was growing up, because gay rights barely existed in North America! Focusing on Russia’s oppression of LGBT people now isn’t “fashion-driven” but rather a reflection of our moral progression on the issue. But good policy is good policy, just as oppression is oppression, no matter where it’s being practised. So why not speak out against Putin’s draconian anti-gay laws?
It’s also dubious whether Russian gays and lesbians are living in a golden age of gay rights. Historically speaking, sure, things were much worse under Stalin, but how is that an argument for anything? The point is that gay rights — indeed, everyone’s rights — have been eroded under Putin, in only the last several years.
As Jeff Sharlet details in his heartbreaking GQ feature on being gay in Russia, as recently as 2010 widespread acceptance of gays and lesbians was seen as an inevitability, with “a new club or café opening every other weekend. New LGBT groups were forming all over,” activists told Sharlet. “It was like a party.”
But with the price of oil fluctuating, the Putin bargain of less freedom in return for economic prosperity has increasingly seemed out of grasp. And so he got in bed with the Orthodox Church and made himself the champion of “traditional values,” trying his best to undo much of the liberalization that occurred after the fall of the Soviet Union. And collateral damage in that march toward a neo-Soviet empire has been the LGBT community.
This is all very recent history, and apart from being the right thing to do, speaking out against Putin’s repression is also timely. It is in today’s Russia that LGBT people are being harassed, beaten, fired and denied housing for simply being gay, not in some distant Tsarist past. The law banning “homosexual propaganda” outlaws even kissing and hand-holding in public under the perverse logic that it protects children from some vague pedophilic threat.
It’s also widely expected that after the glare of the Olympics fades, the Duma will pass a law to forcibly remove the children of same-sex couples from their families.
But hey, at least “homosexual activity is legal.”
Come up and see me about it sometime, cheeky. RT @iD4RO: What exactly constitutes "homosexual activity," @ColbyCosh? http://t.co/UZGtTsLHOS
— Colby Cosh (@colbycosh) February 20, 2014
“Homosexual activity” is a clumsy phrase. The worse disadvantages of “homosexual sexual activities” should be obvious.
— Colby Cosh (@colbycosh) February 20, 2014
So is “You can no longer be put in jail just for sucking another dude off.”
— Colby Cosh (@colbycosh) February 20, 2014
Cosh is usually quite an incisive writer and doesn’t seem like a hard-boiled homophobe, but he can do better than this. At the very least he should view gay rights as encompassing something more than just sex acts.
Like it or not, Canada’s involvement in the Olympics and other international events means we have a stake in how host countries comport themselves. And if that gets in the way of enjoying the Games, then fucking cancel them.
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[photo of LGBT activists attacked during a "Day of Kisses" via Flickr]