The following day, I asked the visiting activists what they thought of the presence of the many corporate floats and all the advertising merchandise at New York Pride: even some of the smaller rainbow flags carried by the RUSA contingent had the CITI logo on them. He told me that following the march he had hidden at a post office and watched as right-wing thugs chased a group of participants back and forth across a busy road. On Sunday, marching down Christopher Street, he and I debriefed on Kiev Pride three weeks ago. Karasiichuk had his jaw broken at Kiev Pride 2012. synagogue where RUSA started, the Dyke March in Brooklyn on Saturday, a number of parties, and at least one wedding-two of the guests from Kiev, the executive director of Gay Alliance Ukraine Taras Karasiichuk and Nik Maslow, got married. Most or all of the nine men and women attended Pride Shabbat at Congregation Beit Simchat Torah, the L.G.B.T. RUSA had raised the money to bring Kostyuchenko and Annenkova to New York Pride, along with seven other activists from St. The banner Kostyuchenko carried with her ex-girlfriend Anna Annenkova was also a Russian flag, emblazoned with the words “Our turn.” One young man wore a polo shirt and a baseball cap in the colors of the Ukrainian flag another, who carried a Belarusian flag, wore short shorts the colors of the American flag, with rainbow-flag Matryoshka-doll stickers, the RUSA logo, affixed to each buttock. There were also rainbow flags, carried aloft or worn as capes, a rainbow flag with the word “peace” on it, a rainbow-flag-U.S.-flag hybrid, and a blue-pink-and-white transgender flag. There were the flags of Ukraine, Russia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan-each carried by someone who hails from one of these former Soviet republics. Many of the RUSA marchers carried flags, like some sort of a post-Soviet reunion. The Ukrainian-born New York photographer Dina Litovsky was there to capture the event.
#First gay pride parade in russia how to#
Near the end of the parade route, one of the RUSA marchers approached me and asked if I could tell him how to find a pro-bono immigration lawyer: he had come over from Siberia three months earlier. I too have had to leave Moscow with my family, and this year my thirteen-year-old daughter placed herself in the lead of the RUSA contingent.
On Sunday, no fewer than two hundred and fifty people walked behind its banner-that’s as many people as took part in Kiev Pride three weeks earlier, and at least ten times the number of participants in Moscow Pride last month. Refugees have swollen the ranks of RUSA’s contingent at the Pride march. It has been providing support for hundreds of people who have fled rising anti-gay violence and legislation in Russia and some of the former Soviet republics. So, on Sunday, Kostyuchenko wore a tiny little black dress with feathers when she marched in New York Pride with RUSA L.G.B.T, a New York-based organization that began as a social group for gay Russian-speaking émigrés but that, in the past couple of years, has found itself thrust into politics. Kostyuchenko has attended the past five of Moscow activists’ attempts to hold a public Pride event, has been detained all five times twice she ended up in the hospital.
“And high heels.” You can't wear dresses and high heels at a Pride march in Moscow, where your day will consist of thirty seconds, if that, of standing holding a banner, followed by being beaten and dragged off to the police station, possibly to be beaten again. “I realized it was my only opportunity to wear a mini dress to Pride,” she said. Suddenly, it occurred to her: she could wear anything at all. Yelena Kostyuchenko said she had only a few minutes between getting home from her newspaper job in Moscow and leaving for the airport to fly to New York on Saturday-and in that time she had to figure out what to pack. organization Queer Home, visited New York City for the first time from Kiev.
Volodymyr Naumenko (third from left), the head of the Ukrainian L.G.B.T.