Greg Owen

In an address to Russia’s Duma last month, Deputy Speaker Pyotr Tolstoy summed up his government’s rationale for a recent onslaught of discriminatory legislation and government action targeting the LGBTQ+ community in the country.

The occasion was the introduction of a bill to outlaw gender-affirming care and surgery and gender ID changes in the country.

“This is another step in protecting national interests,” Tolstoy told the Duma on June 14.

Referring to Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine starting in February last year, Tolstoy said, “We are implementing this because Russia has changed since the beginning of the special military operation. And those guys who today defend our country with weapons in their hands, they must return to another country, not to the one that was before.”

For Vladimir Putin and his rubber-stamp parliament, the war in Ukraine is an effort not only to remake Russia geographically but an opportunity to transform the country into a Greater Russia free of the “moral decay” and “pure Satanism” they say has infected the country since the dissolution of the Soviet Union.

“We are preserving Russia for posterity, with its cultural and family values, traditional foundations, and putting up a barrier to the penetration of Western anti-family ideology,” Tolstoy said during the bill’s first reading in June.

The new law is the latest in a slew of government actions aimed at erasing LGBTQ+ identity in Russia.

In December, Putin signed legislation banning “LGBT propaganda,” which includes any public reference to “non-traditional lifestyles,” along with a crackdown on the conflated sins of “pedophilia and gender reassignment.”

Bookshops have been forced to remove LGBTQ+ content from shelves, while gaming and streaming platforms have pulled down content, including same-sex pornography. Google was fined in May for refusing to remove LGBTQ+ videos from YouTube in Russia.

The same law has been used to target consensual sex among LGBTQ+ people in the country. In May, a 40-year-old German teacher was convicted of violating the law for inviting a 25-year-old man to his hotel room for sex. In March, a same-sex couple was prosecuted for going public with their relationship on TikTok.

Earlier legislation, including a law passed in 2013 that placed a limit on LGBTQ+-affirmative content disseminated to minors, has been used to shut down Pride marches, detain activists, and lay the foundation of the culture of fear overwhelming the LGBTQ+ community in Russia today.

The latest legislation would ban gender-affirming care for trans people of any age in the country and overturn the ability of trans individuals to change gender on official documents.

Richard Volkov, a 26-year-old trans musician from Moscow, told Reuters trans men he knows in Russia are scrambling to change IDs and start hormone treatment.

“This is the worst thing my country could do,” he said from Sagarejo in Georgia, where he fled after the war began. “It seems that if I simply tell myself that I exist, I am already violating the law.”

36-year-old Elle Solomina, another trans political refugee in Georgia, calls the pending legislation a purely “fascist law.”

“I have not found any explanation for it,” she said in the Georgian capital of Tbilisi, “except that in a totalitarian system, the population must live in fear.”

Russia has granted gender ID changes since 1997, four years after it decriminalized homosexuality in the wake of the Soviet Union’s breakup.

But the tide has turned since those liberalizing policies accompanied Russia’s brief opening to the West.

Now Vladimir Putin is invoking the bad old days of the Soviet Union in a call to form a new institute to study LGBTQ+ behavior at the state-run Serbsky Psychiatric Center, notorious in mid-20th century Soviet Russia for its mental and physical torture of dissidents.

Months after the war to end all wars came to a close in 1918, a German researcher named Magnus Hirschfeld opened his Institut für Sexualwissenschaft (Institute of Sexology) in Berlin, the world’s first academic institution devoted to the study of sexuality.

He bought the building from the defeated government of the Free State of Prussia in the leafy Tiergarten district. It would house a research library and a large archive with tens of thousands of volumes; a marriage and sex counseling office; a museum of sexual artifacts; medical exam rooms; and a lecture hall.

Hirschfeld, who was openly gay and Jewish, would occupy a building next door that he later acquired. The institute became a gathering place for colleagues, patients, and friends who were both. Christopher Isherwood, Margaret Sanger, André Gide and Nehru were honored guests. The Soviets were repeat visitors.

Fourteen years later — and 90 years ago this month — it was sacked by Nazi youth, a milestone in the construction of the Nazi state, and a harbinger of an even more devastating conflict to come.

On May 6, 1933, just weeks after Adolf Hitler came to power, the Nazi-dominated German Student League marched to the Institute and sacked it while a brass band played. Hirschfeld was in Switzerland at the time and later watched newsreel footage in Paris of his beloved Institut destroyed.

What volumes the Nazi youth — and later that afternoon, the SA, the Nazi paramilitary wing — didn’t destroy were hauled out of the building four nights later and thrown atop the enormous bonfire of books at Opernplatz, the most iconic of the Nazi book burnings of the 1930s. A bronze bust of Hirschfeld from his Institut was set atop the pyre.

The tens of thousands of books, papers, research documents, films and photographs represented decades of work by Hirschfeld and his colleagues, reaching back to Hirschfeld’s visit to the World’s Columbian Exhibition in Chicago in 1893, where he first encountered a gay subculture similar to what he’d experienced in Berlin. So began a career dedicated to the study of, and advocacy for, sexual minorities of all kinds.

While Hirschfeld is best known to history for his Institut and the enormity of its loss, he first gained international fame in turn of the century Germany testifying as an expert witness in a libel case involving Kaiser Wilhelm II’s close friend, the politically powerful Prince Philipp von Eulenburg, who was accused of having a sexual relationship with a German general, Kuno von Moltke.

Hirschfeld famously testified he could confirm Moltke was gay, there was nothing wrong with it, and that “homosexuality was part of the plan of nature and creation just like normal love.” 

He represented everything the Nazis would come to loathe.

Ninety years after Hitler began building his National Socialist state by tearing down the work of enlightened scholars like Hirschfeld, LGBTQ Nation spoke with Jonathan Friedman, Director of Free Expression and Education Programs for PEN America, to find out what lessons an authoritarian leader and his devoted followers from the past can teach us about the power of censorship today.

LGBTQ NATION: What does it say about Nazi tactics that they started their intellectual purge at a gay academic institution?

Jonathan Friedman: When we think about the Second World War, we sometimes forget what a multifaceted assault the Nazi regime was propagating. It was really never about only one group of people that was being targeted. It was many. It was people being targeted for religion, for ethnicity, for race, for their professions, for their political beliefs and their organizing for their sexual orientation. And, to some extent, for their gender, even at a time when maybe those weren’t the words that people used.

And so it’s astounding, I think, to reflect on what was lost, but then also, in an interesting way, in which historical chapters are now being highlighted in ways that we may have not been aware of before this one book burning, and the destruction of the Institute. It reminds us of the violence with which it began.

LGBTQ NATION: What parallels do you see in the tactics of that authoritarian regime with groups like Moms for Liberty?

JF: For many people, the drastic spread of this movement to totally erase certain identities from books in schools seems certainly of a similar vein, in the sense that both are tactics of erasure. I think a lot of the time right now, people want to downplay what’s happening. They say, “Well, if you can buy it on Amazon, it’s not a book ban,” or, “If you can get permission from a parent to go into a backroom in a library, then it’s not really banned.”

But the truth is, on the road to total censorship, there are many steps. It can be a ladder, a sliding scale. It does not happen that we go to sleep one night and wake up the next morning, and now we’re in an authoritarian country. It can be a slide, a kind of daily normalization, or routinization, of state censorship. It’s something people come to expect and come to live with. And when I speak to teachers and librarians around the country in places where these issues are intense right now, they do feel like they’re already living under McCarthyism.

LGBTQ NATION: What does the sacking of the Institute in Berlin have in common with the Don’t Say Gay law in Florida?

JF: I would say that both are cut from the same cloth, in the sense that they start from a place of intolerance, and they’re trying to weaponize that intolerance to spread misunderstanding, disinformation, marginalization, and to empower one group of people over others.

And you know, the reality is that in the United States right now, in Florida — anywhere — we’re actually living at a time of a kind of blossoming of freedom of expression, gender expression and sexuality. In fact, there has been so much circulation of ideas and information and identity that more people feel more affirmed in who they are today. And these tactics are undeniably an effort to push those identities back in the closet, to make people more uncomfortable in their bodies once again.

That might not start with book burnings. It might not start with closing of institutes. But where does it start? I think it starts with laws like Don’t Say Gay in Florida.

LGBTQ NATION: It’s like the definition of reactionary.

JF: It’s the very definition of a reactionary.

LGBTQ NATION: What characteristics do you think National Socialism and Christian Nationalism have in common?

JF: The common ideology I see would be a kind of supremacist notion that one group of people ought to be able to control society for everybody else, ought to be in positions of power, and ought to be able to keep anyone — any group of people that didn’t have historic power — at the margins. That’s a degree of commonality.

LGBTQ NATION: What do you think the ultimate aim of groups like Moms for Liberty is? What’s driving them?

JF: I think you can’t deny that there is a degree of political opportunism at work in all of this, where a particular movement is trying to galvanize people to the polls. You know, a lot of this intensified after the election of Governor Youngkin in Virginia in 2021. It has continued to have very clear political elements in both the involvement of some politicians in local school board affairs and in the passage of more and more laws.

So you can’t really distinguish anymore in a lot of states between the book bans that might be pushed by a group of local parents who are associated with Moms for Liberty and the laws that they’re taking advantage of, which are being promoted and passed in state houses in order to make that local activism easier. There’s a fundamental connection.

It’s not clear, I would say, what their ultimate aims are, beyond perhaps an effort to destroy public education.

LGBTQ NATION: How should writers today respond to censorship, and what lessons can they learn from what happened in Nazi Germany?

JF: I think we are seeing more and more solidarity. I think we’re seeing more people come together to speak out. But it’s already clear, in the second year of this, that it’s attacking more and more writers. So if censorship hasn’t come for your books yet, it doesn’t mean it’s not going to.

In a lot of places, censorship works in a chilling manner. And so people get more and more cautious. They want to restrict more and more content. They see concerning content in more and more places. And so there’s this whole effort to move the Overton windowaround how people think that libraries and schools should operate, from places that champion open inquiry and opportunities to learn about the world, to places where there are questions that one cannot ask, identities that one cannot learn about, histories that cannot be discussed.

That’s what’s so troubling, and so alarming, about the spread of this movement in our country.

Gay Ugandans are fleeing the country as the government’s Anti-Homosexuality Act moves closer to becoming law.

“The government and the people of Uganda are against our existence,” said Mbajjwe Nimiro Wilson, a 24-year-old refugee now living in a shelter in neighboring Kenya. 

Safehouses are expected to be closed with passage of the Anti-Homosexuality Bill.

Before escaping with just a backpack of belongings, Wilson was cornered by a hostile crowd on the street as he tried to buy groceries.

“They kept saying, ‘We will hunt you. You gays should be killed. We will slaughter you,’” he told The New York Times. “There was no option but to leave.”

Uganda’s latest Kill the Gays law is having its intended effect.

“It is good that you rejected the pressure from the imperials,” Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni said on Thursday, as he sent the country’s Anti-Homosexuality Act back to Parliament for additional consideration before he signs it.

The Biden administration calls the latest “Kill the Gays” bill “one of the most extreme” anti-LGBTQ+ measures anywhere in the world. The proposal mandates life in prison for anyone convicted of engaging in homosexual sex, among other draconian provisions.

Museveni congratulated lawmakers who stood up to “international pressure and shielded Uganda’s moral fabric during the passing of the bill.”

The president had in mind liberal Western influences whom he and others in the East African nation have accused of promoting homosexuality in the country and throughout Africa.

But while anti-LGBTQ+ allies have rejected pressure from the U.S., the European Parliament, and those condemning their latest attempt to erase homosexuality from the country, they have welcomed it from another Western power center.

Since 2009, conservative evangelical groups from the U.S. have been instrumental in promoting an anti-LGBTQ+ agenda in Uganda and other African nations, which have been the targets of religious indoctrination since the colonial era.

In a region where harsh penalties for homosexuality have been on the books since the British imposed them in the 19th century, conservative Christian and Muslim populations have been ripe for anti-LGBTQ+ proselytizing.

Family Watch International is an Arizona-based organization committed to spreading anti-LGBTQ+ and anti-abortion ideology around the world, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center. The group was instrumental in crafting the original “Kill the Gays” bill in Uganda in 2009.

After the Uganda Supreme Court overturned that law on a technicality in 2013, Family Watch returned to help write revised legislation that would withstand judicial scrutiny, with willing partners publicly denouncing liberal Western influences, despite accepting close to a billion dollars annually in development aid from the U.S alone.

Last month, following passage of the Anti-Homosexuality Act through Uganda’s unicameral Parliament, Family Watch sponsored a conference in the country that drew lawmakers from more than a dozen African nations, all committed to passing or introducing copycat legislation to combat “the sin of homosexuality.”

One Family Watch partner is Kenya, where the country’s Supreme Court sparked controversy recently when it allowed gay rights groups to legally register.

Kenya’s president and other anti-LGBTQ politicians have condemned the ruling, including Parliament member George Peter Kaluma, who introduced a bill to criminalize homosexuality in the country, ban Kenyans from identifying as LGBTQ+, and grant citizens the power to arrest anyone they suspect of being gay.  

“These people are perverts and I promise I will legislate to take every right they think they have,” Kaluma told the Times.

His bill would also return gay refugees like Wilson, still sheltering in the Kenyan capital Nairobi, to their home countries. 

Laws like his, predicted Kaluma, will soon cover the continent.

“It is going to spread like a whirlwind.”