Russia’s New Queer Purge
August 6, 2024
Foreign Policy, August 6, 2024 In March, a little-known volunteer organization dedicated to “reviving the religious and secular unity of the Russian people” escorted agents from the Internal Affairs Ministry and the Russian National Guard on a raid in the remote city of Orenburg, a city of 500,000 near the Kazakh border. Their target was […]
Read MorePutin Is Showing Us What Homophobia Looks Like as a Weapon of War
March 15, 2024
The New York Times, March 15, 2024. Oleksii Polukhin’s 64 days in detention began when Russian soldiers stopped him at a checkpoint. They found that he’d been gathering information about Russian military positions to share with Ukrainian forces; they also discovered he was gay. Mr. Polukhin gave a detailed account of his detention to Projector, an […]
Read MoreHow Russia’s War Against Ukraine Is Advancing LGBTQ Rights
March 7, 2023
Originially published in Politico Magazine, March 7, 2022. KYIV — Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has galvanized Ukrainian society in many unexpected ways, but perhaps one of the most remarkable is how it has advanced the rights of LGBTQ people. On Tuesday, in a move that would have been nearly unthinkable a year ago, a Ukrainian […]
Read MoreGay Couple Struggles to Stay Together as War in Ukraine Rages On
June 22, 2022
Originally published by Rolling Stone, June 22, 2022. Russian bombs brought Stepan and Maxim together. Now Russian bombs have driven them apart. The men, now both in their early thirties, were living almost 20 miles apart in the eastern Ukrainian region called the Donbas, where Russian-backed separatists went to war in 2014. They likely would […]
Read MoreWhy Iran’s Mullahs Bless Sex Reassignment
December 26, 2016
Iran has the death penalty for homosexuality but subsidizes sex reassignment surgery. BuzzFeed News looks at how Iran became a center of sex reassignment in the Middle East, and why many trans Iranians still find life impossible in the Islamic republic.
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