Since December 2018, a new purge of LGBTQ people has begun in Chechnya, a conservative territory in southern Russia, governed by the religious tyrant Ramzan Kadyrov. While world governments and mainstream media outlets have failed to take significant actions to sanction Russia and protect queer Chechens, a growing number of LGBTQ activists across the U.S., Europe, and Russia, have been raising their voice in protest. One of the most prominent activist groups expressing solidarity with Chechnya’s LGBTQ community is the New York City based Voices 4.
“We’re having a vigil with RUSA LGBT this coming Sunday outside the Russian consulate in New York,” Wyatt Harms, a Voices 4 activist, told Screen Shot. “There will also be a simultaneous vigil happening in Belgium that’s led by recently escaped queer Chechens. And so it will be a global vigil to commemorate what is happening in Chechnya and draw attention to our solidarity with our LGBTQ people there.”
News about the persecution of Chechnya’s queer population emerged in April 2017, when an independent Russian newspaper, the Novaya Gazeta, began reporting about the kidnapping, detaining, torturing, and murder of men and women suspected to be gay. Reports indicated that victims are often lured through gay dating apps, and that many have been turned in or murdered by members of their own family (encouraged to do so by the extremist regime). Since then, dozens of LGBTQ people have been murdered and hundreds detained.
As word began to circulate about the most recent ongoing purge of Chechen queers, Voice4 members joined forces with RUSA LGBT (the Russian Speaking American LGBT Association) and called an emergency meeting at New York City’s LGBT centre, where plans for Sunday’s upcoming vigil were discussed. Present at the meeting was exiled Russian professor Lyosha Gorshkov, who currently presides over RUSA LGBT. Gorshkov, providing information from ‘the inside’, stated that the mainstream media continuously downplays the tragedy unfolding in Chechnya, and that the number of victims in reality is much higher than official reports indicate.
Gorshkov further claimed that seeing as world governments and the United Nations are both reluctant and unable to force Putin to crack down on Kadyrov’s murderous anti-LGBTQ campaign, the best way to help at the moment would be to express solidarity with queer people in Chechnya and show them as well as the Russian government that the world is watching. Gorshkov added that donating to organisations operating on the ground will also be extremely helpful, as they smuggle first aid and other necessary supplies to victims.
Word about Sunday’s rally is rapidly spreading across social media, and particularly on Instagram, a tool proving to be significantly useful for Voices 4’s organisers to get their message across and recruit supporters.
“Our organisation began on Instagram,” says Adam Eli, writer and co-founder of Voices 4, “I posted and said we’re gonna do this march, and if you wanna come plan with us then you can come meet us at this time and place. We always made sure we created a new graphic to post each week, and that way it sort of snowballed. IG has been an extremely powerful tool.”
“Especially because we’re not seeing much press coverage, social media is a really good way for an activist group like us to disseminate information,” says Harms, “People turn to social media as another medium to see what’s happening in the world, and when mainstream press won’t cover what’s happening in Chechnya to the degree that we like, we can step in and help educate our followers and other people we interact with online about what’s happening and how they can get involved.”
Voices 4’s message is clear: now is the time to rally the LGBTQ community worldwide, as well as its allies, and raise awareness of the atrocities unfolding in Chechnya. We must show queer Chechens that they aren’t forgotten, and remind the Russian government that the heinous crimes committed against LGBTQ people on its territory aren’t going unnoticed.
Those of you tuning in from New York City, bundle up and attend Sunday’s rally which will be held across from the Russian Consulate at E9 91st Street, NY from 1:00-2:00 PM EST. Those of you who cannot attend the vigil, please visit Voices 4’s Instagram page and share their posts calling for action. For donations, please visit the website of the Russian LGBT Network, or Venmo @Voices4-.
Being ‘gender fluid’ and tackling the binary, whether that’s toxic masculinity or what’s expected of your gender, have only recently entered the conversation among the masses. Toxic masculinity has become a popular debate, from what it means, to the effects it has on society and men themselves. It’s also what inspired the photography series Blah, Blah, Blah, Genitals, a social experiment exploring the formation of gender identity in boys.
While couch surfing through Barcelona, creative duo Julia Falkner and Lorena Hydeman wanted to ask the question, how do boys see manhood? With all these debates around what it means to be a man today, has toxic masculinity become a thing of the past?
We sometimes have a rose-tinted lens towards the future. As generations progress, there’s this idea that those that come after us will be more open-minded. McCrindle’s consultancy predicts that there are 2.5 million more Generation Alphas being born every week. These are the children of millennials and born around the year 2010. Generation Z is those born around the 2000s. These generations are expected to be the longest living generations as well as the wealthiest.
In order to respond to this, through family and friends, and with the permission of their parents, Falkner the photographer and Hydeman interviewed and photographed 17 boys aged between 6-16 on what masculinity meant to them.
Dressing up in what is usually deemed to be feminine clothing and playing with makeup, Falker noticed that though the boys enjoyed experimenting with this treasure chest of options, they were also aware that they couldn’t wear this to school in case they were made fun of. “All the boys were really intelligent and shooting with children is always a raw and honest experience but the one thing I did notice was how open the boys depended on which parent/guardian was in the room”.
Many of the boys had one thing in common: their fathers were not present in their lives and those that were raised in single-parent households were more receptive to feminity. “When I asked Rio, who was playing basketball and was already wearing basketball shorts, what he wanted to wear, he went into his mother’s wardrobe and picked out her wedding corset,” says Hydeman. “What was endearing was when he was trying it on, he was saying how he felt so bad that his mother had to wear this on her wedding day and he was just so empathetic towards her”.
When speaking to Screen Shot about how the experiment reflected different minorities’ relationship to gender fluidity, Hydeman said that what became clear was the impact of what fathers thought on the children’s choice of clothes and makeup. “One thing that stands out to me is this conversation I was having with Taye and Tyrell’s mum and how their dad didn’t want them to be a part of it. Coming from a Jamaican background, there’s this alpha male machoness that was prided on. Almost as if how tough your boys are mirrors how much you’ve left an impression on them”.
During the process of the experiment, the creative duo themselves said they had to check their own stereotypes; who they thought would be the least receptive participants to the experiment, often turned out to be the most engaged. For example, boys in their teens were just as open-minded as six-year-olds. “Most of the boys became more feminine than I thought they would,” says Hydeman. “I misjudged them and thought that the sporty boys wouldn’t want to wear heeled boots but that was the complete opposite.”
When exploring how masculinity and toxic masculinity has shaped these boys’ lives, what was apparent was how toxic masculinity in Generation Z and Alphas would perhaps look different from what it does today. Throughout the experiment, what was clear was how the boys, especially the younger boys, were open to the idea of wearing a dress. “They realised it’s just a silhouette at the end of the day,” Falker and Hydeman both say.
While talking to the boys about what it meant to them to be a man or a woman, both Falker and Hydeman reported how respectful and appreciative these young boys were of the women in their lives—something that might have been shaped through discourse around women’s rights. “Maybe toxic masculinity had to become so bad that the next generation would want it to be different,” says Hydeman. Maybe this is a sign of better things to come. A sense of hope and openness via the younger generations ahead.
Blah Blah Genitals went on to be exhibited at the Photo Vogue Festival 2018 in Milan as part of the group exhibition, Embracing Diversity, and as a solo exhibition at Galleria Lattuada.