See the facebook event.
On August 3, 2013, the world will be sending a message to Russia that its treatment of its LGBTQ community is an attack on human rights.
On August 3rd, Toronto's LGBTQ community and our allies will be gathering at Church and Wellesley to send a message of hope to the LGBTQ communities in Russia that we support their fight for human rights and that we will be demanding our elected officials do something, that we all do something, to pressure Russia to end its homophobic laws and ensure that the LGBTQ community there have full human rights.
We will be meeting at Church and Wellesley at 7:30PM and then walking together to the Russian Consulate at Church and Bloor St.
BRING POTS and PANS - To make some noise!
WEAR SPORTS GEAR - To acknowledge that Russia is hosting the Olympics, a time when all the world will be watching! From speedos to Football pads!
RAIN or SHINE!
It will be an opportunity to find out what you can do - there are many ways to send the message we stand with Russia's LGBTQ community.
#TOwithRussia
Just how hostile is the climate in Russia?
It's awful.
Consensual homosexual sex was decriminalized in 1993, but that has come to mean less and less in recent years. Ten gay activists brave enough to show up at a January demonstration in Voronezh were beaten by a mob. The body of a gay Russian man was found in Volgograd on May 10. He'd been sodomized with beer bottles and set on fire after coming out to acquaintances. Another was found stabbed and trampled to death in June.
President Vladimir Putin claims to care about "the rights of sexual minorities," but speaks darkly about gay marriage with respect to what he calls Russia's "demographic crisis." He's strongly influenced by the Russian Orthodox Church, whose Patriarch Kirill claims that recognizing same-sex unions is an "apocalyptic symptom."
A Levada Center poll of Russians revealed earlier this year that 89 percent of responders said they had no homosexual friends or relatives. Half said gays and lesbians made them feel "irritated and disgusted."
