Inside the Iron Closet: What It’s Like to Be Gay in Putin’s Russia
At GQ, Jeff Sharlet reports from Russia on the decline of gay rights in the country and the violent risks that it entails. “I wanted to see what ordinary LGBT life was like in a nation whose leaders have decided that ‘homosexualism’ is a threat to its ‘sexual sovereignty,’” Sharlet writes. “The medicine is that of ‘traditional values,’ a phrase, ironically, imported from the West, grafted onto a deeply conformist strain of nationalism. In Russia, that means silence and violence, censorship, and in its shadow, much worse.”