From Salon: http://www.salon.com/2013/09/03/move_the_olympics_now/
An activist’s bizarre Twitter meltdown shows the Russian LGBT community needs international support more than ever
By Eric Sasson
Tuesday, Sep 3, 2013
For years, Nikolai Alexeyev was one of the most prominent figures in Russian LGBT activism. The chief organizer of Moscow Pride, Alexeyev has boasted of being arrested many times and beaten in front of cameras. He has, to his credit, successfully sued the Russian government several times in international courts.
In a series of events over the past two weeks that can only be described as bizarre, Alexeyev has done so much damage to his reputation and credibility as an activist that one wonders what the future holds for him — and for homegrown LGBT activism in Russia.
Early last week, Alexeyev, in a rambling, nearly incoherent piece in the Russian Times, dismissed the calls for a boycott of the Sochi Olympics and all the outcries against Russia’s ban on “gay propaganda” as efforts led by expatriate Russians with no ties to the Russian LGBT movement. He went so far as to accuse several expats of using the ban to falsely obtain visa asylum from the U.S. and Canadian governments.
One of those mentioned in the article is Alexander Kargaltsev, a photographer and artist currently living in the U.S. In response to Alexeyev’s accusations, Kargaltsev told me: “Mr Alexeyev is [someone] I have admired for many years for his principled stand against discrimination at the highest levels against the LGBT community in Russia today. It is all the more disappointing then to read in Russia Today his attack on me and others who have sought asylum in United States.”
He added, “There is a long, long history in totalitarian states of the victims being encouraged to [say] that things just are not [that] bad.”
Then, on Wednesday, Alexeyev announced via Facebook and Twitter that he was quitting LGBT politics altogether, due to “American insults and slanders,” in particular a damning piece by Michael Lucas in Out magazine that traces Alexeyev’s sudden transformation from a vociferous opponent of the Putin government’s anti-LGBT policies to someone who sees “no single hint of gay oppression” in Moscow and “hates the West not less than Putin.”
Continue reading at: http://www.salon.com/2013/09/03/move_the_olympics_now/
