Okay, I am an asexual lesbian currently living in Russia. I've been inhibiting queer English-speaking online spaces for more than 7 years and boy does it feel incredibly weird sometimes. Our queer community is HUGE and incredibly diverse, we have our own culture and history spanning centuries, but to the outside world we're practically non-existent. Due to the current laws we can't even talk about our identities and experiences, tumblr is the only place where I feel relatively safe, only because nobody gives a shit about tumblr.
The experiences of queer people in conservative spaces are wildly misunderstood by people who have not lived in them. Little queer communities are often formed naturally, because queer people tend to gravitate towards each other almost instinctively, united by the shared sense of alienation and loneliness. That has been my experience, but I've been incredibly lucky to be surrounded by fellow queer people for almost my entire life.
I lucked out with my parents as well. My mom, step-dad and my father are all accepting and supportive. I feel like the assumed reality of most "queer people in conservative spaces" is that their families are the problem, or at least a huge part of it. That has not been the case for most of my friends. Sure, some of them have awful abusive parents, some are still in the closet, some had issues that have been sorted out by now, but A LOT of Russian parents are supportive of their queer kids. The bigger problem is the law never being on our side, the living in a state of neverending fear and stress, the constant looking over your shoulder.
I knew a girl in my year in high school who had two moms. I don't know what their situation was, but I know there are are a lot of same-sex parents in Russia, even though it is incredibly illegal and they are always at a huge risk of losing their child.
I know a few trans people as well, a couple of them have transitioned, although I genuinely have no idea how they even accomplished that. Their very existence is at a constant risk. They don't get talked about very often even by our own community.
And of course a lot of people, including myself, desperately want to move somewhere safer. Looking at photos of irl pride events genuinely makes me cry every single time. But of course it's not physically possible for everyone to move wherever they want to. You know how migration policies are like. The class inequality in this country is genuinely insane, the vast majority of people are somewhere between "dirt poor" and "struggling lower middle class". In a country where being queer is like this👌close to being fully illegal, of course queer folks specifically are at a huge risk of unemployment and homelessness. My parents knew a gay man who was fired explicitly because his employer found out about his sexuality. More recently my friend told me about a fight her gay coworker had with his boss, during which a friend of said boss shouted out "what were you thinking, hiring a f*g in the first place?!" He's a nail tech, by the way.
So what we're left with at the end of the day are a lot of queer folks, who don't have the opportunity to move, who are at a constant risk irl, who are prohibited to exist online by their own government. It makes me sick.
And I understand why nobody wants to talk about it or to hear me talking about it. We're The Bad Place. The oppressive imperialist force in so many ways. I get it, that makes me feel sick too. But the queer voices need to be heard. Just like the queer voices of the Middle East, Asia, Africa, the American South, the rest of the Eastern Europe and so on and so forth deserve and need to be heard.
