Moscow Pride 2011: You are invited

By Contributing Writer on Sunday, October 31, 2010 - 16:33

[Editor’s Note: This article was written by the team of Gaelick, an award-winning Irish website for LGBT-news.]

2011 will mark the first state-sanctioned gay pride in Moscow. To celebrate, organiser and recently kidnapped gay rights advocate, Nikolai Alekseev, is encouraging LGBT people from all over the world, and our allies, to attend and make Moscow Pride 2011 an international celebration.

© Nikolai Alekseev via Wikipedia

Unlike previous years, where police have turned a blind eye to assaults by anti-gay thugs, this year’s parade should be protected by the police after the recent ruling by the European courts that Moscow’s ban on gay parades violated freedom of assembly, right to remedy and prohibition of discrimination.

The sixth annual Moscow Pride is scheduled for May 28, 2011 and Nikolai insists that hotels in Moscow are uninterested in discriminating against LGBT travelers and more interested in our money.

I had a Facebook chat with Alekseev yesterday and he was very clear that he feels that, “International solidarity is important.”

He told me that the first Moscow Pride — in 2006 — was attended by activists from over 30 different countries. “We had conferences, cultural events (...) and we attempted to hold a picket which was banned. Several of us were arrested,” and setting a pattern that would continue until this year’s successful bait-and-switch, “there was a lot of violence.”

The committee then decided to play down the international element for the next few years. According to Alekseev, “We wanted to show to the Russian media that our event was first of all a Russian event. We did not want our opponent to use the argument that foreigners were trying to push the Mayor to allow the Pride.”

However, now that the battle for an officially supported Pride parade is won, Alekseev and the organisers, “want to have many people from everywhere coming to celebrate with us.”