Moscow — It’s the sort of thing one hates hearing from one’s child. “You know, mom,” my 11-year-old daughter said, “It makes me particularly nervous when people make fun of gays.”
In Russia, everyone is talking about homosexuality these days.
I knew exactly what she meant, and I said so: I’d felt the same way as a kid growing up in Moscow, when I heard an anti-Semitic remark. I always felt I had to respond, and I also felt like I would much rather disappear. “Nervous” — as in tense, threatened and angry — is not a bad word to describe the feeling.
In Russia, everyone is talking about homosexuality these days. Several municipalities have adopted laws banning “homosexual propaganda” — defined, essentially, as the claim that same-sex unions are not inferior to heterosexual ones — and the same measure is pending on the federal level, certain to pass in the next few months. In the adult world, this law-making insanity has had some positive consequences in addition to the infuriating ones: Many people have decided to come out of the closet, and some heterosexual opposition activists have felt compelled to take a stand on the issue.
If my children’s experience is any indication, things are a lot less nuanced and a lot more cruel for kids — as they usually are. The talk of “homosexual propaganda” has brought to the surface all the homophobic jokes adolescents can produce. My daughter takes up the fight at every opportunity, telling other children they are insulting her parents, who are lesbians. My son, who is 14, seems to avoid confrontation.
We, their lesbian parents, have made sure to include them in adult conversations on the topic. I want them to know that our friends, most of whom are heterosexual parents, have taken to wearing pink triangles to show their opposition to the law. My daughter’s school principal has become an outspoken heterosexual supporter of L.G.B.T. rights. And when the country’s most prominent homophobic politician attacked our family directly in a recent newspaper interview, the parents of my son’s best friend and classmate immediately got in touch asking if they could do anything to help protect us. I have been hoping that all of this support will help our children feel sane in the face of the insults.
So when my daughter confessed to feeling nervous, I told her I had felt the same way as a kid and talked to her again about all our smart grown-up friends and acquaintances who knew what was right. I told her she did not have to fight every battle and could also go to adults to ask them for help.
Then, to lighten the mood a bit, I showed her and her brother a short video I had come across recently and that seemed like a perfect message from a world where things are much more as they should be in Russia. It shows a man and woman talking on a beach, and when the woman mentions her husband, the man casually mentions his own.
At the end of the clip, my children shrugged and said in unison, “I don’t get it. Is this homosexual propaganda?”
by Masha Gessen
Source – IHT Global Opinions
