Jailing of Russian Anti-Gay Psyhco Will Not End Mistreatement of Gays

Many news outlets have reported on the conviction of Maxim Martsinkevich to five years in prison for his torture and mistreatment of gays.   While Martsinkevich was perhaps a more visible ring leader, there are all too many more like him, all egged on by Russia's anti-gay laws ushered under the regime of Adolph Hitler copy cat, dictator Vladimir Putin.  Anti-gay horrors, of course are not limited to Russian and across the Middle East and many parts of Africa gays live lives of fear and sometimes violence.  Fanning it all is religion - that pestilence to humankind - and opportunist politicians who seek to distract an ignorant populace from the true of extent of their misrule and corruption.  A column in The Daily Beast looks at the continuing anti-gay violence that is all too prevalent.  Here are excerpts:

In a year of bad news for LGBT people across the global south and east, it’s been a good couple of weeks. A court struck down Uganda’s anti-gay law, and the country’s president has backed away from it. Kenya’s parliament rejected a draconian anti-gay bill. And now one of the nastiest men in Russia, Maxim Martsinkevich, has been sentenced to five years in prison.

You may know Martsinkevich from the dozen videos posted on the Russian social networking site VKontakte showing him and his colleagues threatening, beating, stripping, torturing, urinating on, and otherwise harassing gay people. His gang, known as “Occupy Pedophilia,” would lure gay men with the promise of sexual encounters, usually with teenagers, and then humiliate them online.

The video that got Martsinkevich—nicknamed Tesak, or “The Hatchet”—into trouble was a particularly odious one, in which he stripped and beat a gay Iraqi man, shaved his head, painted Stars of David on his body and a rainbow on his forehead, and humiliated him with sex toys.

Presumably, “Iraqi” was not the most startling word in that sentence. Yet interestingly enough, it was the one that got him into trouble with the law. Tesak was jailed not for harassing gay people—that’s basically the law in Russia now—but for being racist.

The Putin regime’s attack on LGBT people has been a piece of its revanchist nationalism, and indeed the extreme right that is now Vladimir Putin’s base has as much animus against foreigners as it does against gays. Long before Tesak launched Occupy Pedophilia, he ran an ultra-nationalist, neo-Nazi group called Format 18, with the same practice of making hideous torture videos—only against foreigners, not gays.

On the other hand, it’s easy to see his conviction as a cynical move by the less than fully independent Russian justice system. Tesak was becoming the public face of Russia’s anti-propaganda law. He was an embarrassment to Putin.

But how can the government object to persecuting gay people when it also persecutes gay people? Tesak’s conviction looks like a convenient way out. He’s thrown in jail, but homophobia is still OK. 

There is, of course, that nagging problem of Occupy Pedophilia’s name and its claim of having tortured more than 1,500 gay men. Perhaps Tesak’s most famous victim was the Ukrainian Alexander Bohun, a former contestant on that country’s version of The X Factor.

And don’t expect OP’s antics to end just because its leader is in jail. Tesak only appears in a fraction of OP videos. There are plenty of other vigilantes interested in torturing gay men with the winking semi-approval of the authorities.

Tesak’s sentence won’t stop the violence. To do that, more fundamental change is needed—starting with the state-sponsored homophobia that encourages such violence. Of course, that Tesak is going to jail is good news. But as long as the Russian Orthodox Church, Russian government, and Russian media spread lies about gays being pedophiles, perverts, or worse, there will surely be other executioners to take his place.