“I’m gay, and I’m just the same person as you, my dear audience, as President Putin, as Prime Minister Medvedev and the deputies of our Duma”. These were the words of gay and proud TV presenter, Anton Krasovsky, as he spoke in a live broadcast on the government-controlled KontrTV network.
The announcement was made in January, before the law banning ‘gay propaganda’ was passed in June, but Krasovsky reports that the footage was swiftly deleted from KontrTV’s website and YouTube. Krasovsky was fired from his job and told Snob.ru that “they immediately blocked all my corporative accounts, my email. Literally immediately, overnight. They deleted not only my face from the website, but also all of my TV shows, as if I’d never really existed”.
In an interview last week on CNN, Krasovsky said he knew that coming out on live TV would result in him being fired, but, he said, “Somebody should do it. I decided it’s time to be open for me. That’s it.”
He also spoke out against a boycott of the 2014 Winter Olympic Games to be held in Sochi – which other gay activists such as Steven Fry are supporting – saying, “Russian gay people need international support, but international support is not a boycott of Sochi Olympic games, because Olympic games is an international event. It’s not a Russian event, it’s not a personal event of Putin, it’s an event of millions and millions of people … 7 million people in Russia are gay. If you want to boycott Olympic games in Russia, you’re trying to boycott 7 million gay people in Russia. You want to boycott me.”
Image: Twitter
