«You sit and think that God will punish you»
In 2023, when the Supreme Court of the Russian Federation declared the non-existent «International LGBT Social Movement» an extremist organization, the Russian queer community finally went underground. For distributing any content mentioning LGBT, you can receive a hefty fine or even a criminal case. Stores stopped selling books with stories about same-sex love, online cinemas are deleting series and films with queer characters, and the social network VKontakte blocks search queries about LGBT. Queer people who agreed to talk about ways to preserve their identity under these conditions were forced to hide even for phone interviews—in friends’ apartments, or even in the forest.
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