Nevsky Boulevard, Saint Petersburg’s central street, is always bustling in the evening. Tourists marvel at the magnificent architecture of Russia’s northern capital, locals hurry home after a day’s work. On September 18, the teaming passers-by might not have noticed several police buses parked along Nevsky Boulevard and a man holding a poster that read: “No QUEERFEST in Russia. Sodom will not pass. Run to GAYrope, perverts!” Moments later, a group of so-called anti-gay activists gathered at the building entrance, yelling that inside, “pro-Ukrainian sodomites” were “propagating homosexualism.”
The attack provided a dramatic start to QueerFest, an international festival of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) culture. QueerFest has never before faced pressure like this. So far, most of the festival’s scheduled performances, workshops, and discussions about LGBT activism and art have been disrupted either by aggressive protesters or due to venue cancellations.
I was at the opening ceremony that night when suddenly, a putrid smell filled the club. Twenty anti-LGBT protestors tried to storm the club, threw stink bombs, sprayed the audience with green liquid antiseptic through the entrance door, and locked us inside the smoked-filled room. Several festival participants had trouble breathing; another got a nosebleed. Police were there, but they did not detain the assailants.
Two festival events scheduled for the next day were cancelled at the last moment. The organizers told me that after phone calls and visits from police, owners of the festival’s venues cancelled contracts with QueerFest, under various pretexts. Polina Andrianova, one of QueerFest’s organizers, explained to me why this happened:
We have reasons to believe that the venues were cancelled not only out of fear of attacks, that the pressure is actually coming from the authorities. Even LGBT-friendly venues cannot withstand it. QueerFest was not meant to be an underground party: we want to bring our message to the general public. Now we are being forced to go underground, and we’re going to resist it with everything we’ve got.
The next event I attended, a concert, went on for about an hour before being interrupted by a bomb threat.
Despite the interference and intimidation, the organizers remain optimistic. They plan to hold other scheduled events and urge participants to file complaints with police about the disruptions. It may fly in the face of what they have experienced to date, but they hope the police will take their duties seriously.
