Uber gay porn king Michael Lucas has kept his clothes on in front of the camera for a second time with his new documentary about the plight of gay men and women in Russia. It is a vast improvement on his first attempt at getting serious with his ‘Undressing Israel’ movie where life for the stream of hot gay hunks he interviewed couldn’t have been any rosier. Here Russian born Lucas (born Andrei Lvovich Treivas) was back in Moscow his birth city to discuss that being a homosexual during Putin’s regime can be a serious danger to your health.It’s hard to get past a culture where the first time young gay kids learn anything about their sexuality is when they open their Soviet Encyclopedia and turn to the letter H. There for homosexuality they read just three facts. 1: its a sickness, and 2: a harmful influence of the West, and 3: its a crime for which you can go to prison for. And it doesn’t get much better for when the boy turns into a young man he will not just be mocked and humiliated by society but gay bashed several times and quite severely.
The personal accounts of the gay Russians trying to lead normal lives, albeit almost all of them in the closet, were grim and depressing. Given the fact that they have to deal with so much sheer undisguised hatred every working day, it is no wonder that all of them without exception would chose to leave and move anywhere else in the world to live if they could.
One of the commentators that Lucas interviewed made several good observations about in this present tough economic climate in Russia, Putin needs to distract peoples attention from his main problems and focus them on other media grabbing agendas. The harassment of gay people is one such target especially as they are considered a soft option and will not fight back. It has eerie overtones of the old Bush campaign that stirred up the US conservative wing about gay marriage in such a way that they would be sure to turn out to vote on Polling Day and at the same time re-elect him. Coincidentally our economy was in ruins then, but somehow that was hidden from us at the time.
The rhetoric spouting by one of the vehemently anti-gay legislators as he justified his unequivocal hatred of the LGBT community was barbaric and heinous and he refused to accept either reason or factual information. When Lucas informed him that there was data that showed that the largest single group of people who committed suicide in Russia where young gay teenagers, I thought the man would explode with rage.Some of the gay and lesbians that Lucas interviewed tried to put a brave spin on the situation saying that things were definitely improving and that LGBT was now becoming accepted as part of the general protest. The majority of the others however thought it was just getting worse.
Lucas’s interesting film probably didn’t say anything new, and it avoided drawing its own conclusion as to what lie ahead for the gay community there. It does however quite rightly serve as a wake up call for those of us that live in the relative freedom of the West, lest we should ever think that gay rights are the rights for everyone.
Labels: 2014, documentary, gay, politics
