San Francisco Chronicle - Tuesday, July 30, 2002
Anna Badkhen, Chronicle Staff Writer

That was when Panchenko had to confess that he was gay. He was sentenced to four years in jail.

Life for gays in Russia has improved since then. In 1993, two years after the Soviet Union collapsed, President Boris Yeltsin repealed the infamous Article 121, which labeled sex between homosexual men a crime punishable by up to five years in prison. Russia's gays began coming out of the closet, albeit shyly. Gay bars, clubs and Web sites began to appear in major Russian cities.

Panchenko, now 51, runs a support group for people with HIV and AIDS in St. Petersburg.

But attitudes toward gays haven't changed much. This year, federal lawmakers introduced a bill in the Duma modifying the Russian Criminal Code to make homosexuality a crime again.

Even though the bill is not likely to pass, political analysts say, it has sent shock waves through the gay community. Should it become law, Panchenko said, "many people will go into hiding, and this will aggravate the HIV epidemic among gay men."

No one, officially or unofficially, is prepared to estimate the number of gays in the Russian population. But as in most other parts of the world, the first registered cases of HIV here were among gay men. By the end of 2001, however, they accounted for only 0.4 percent of registered cases, while intravenous drug users made up more than 90 percent.

Ironically, say experts, the decline was a result of the one major AIDS education campaign the former Soviet government supported -- one targeted specifically at gays. As a result, said Nikita Ivanov, a lawyer at the Moscow- based Ya Plus Ya HIV prevention center, "gay men are more likely to have safe sex."

However, such socially responsible behavior appears not to have lessened the homophobia that runs through Russian society. Gennadi Raikov, leader of the People's Deputies party and the man behind the federal bill, insists that the Kremlin made a mistake when it removed from the Soviet penal code penalties for same-sex love among men.

"We can see how that bit of the old criminal code was a barrier shutting out international organizations of homosexuals with powerful financial resources," Raikov told the newspaper Komsomolskaya Pravda last month. "In those days they were afraid!"

Such attitudes can be heard in unexpected quarters. Yevgeni Kovalyov, who runs a support group for St. Petersburg drug users, admits to being suspicious about HIV-positive gay men.

"A lot of gay men infect young boys with HIV on purpose, so they can then turn these boys into their concubines," Kovalyov said. "Didn't you know?"

The broader public distaste for gays was reflected in an April poll conducted by the BBC that found 47 percent of those surveyed believed gay men should be incarcerated.

Hate crimes against gays are common -- Ivanov said six gay men were killed last year -- but their homophobic character goes unrecorded by authorities who are reluctant to acknowledge the problem or even the existence of a homosexual population in Russia.

"Hate crimes against gay men occur in Russia just like ethnically based hate crimes, except no one talks about them," Ivanov said.

And while the government has taken steps to stem a rising tide of hate crimes against Jews, non-Russian ethnic groups and people of African and Asian descent, some prominent officials remain openly homophobic.

Moscow Mayor Yuri Luzhkov banned a Gay Pride parade last year saying that "such demonstrations outrage the majority of the capital's population, are in effect propaganda of dissipation and force upon society unacceptable norms of behavior." The country's human rights ombudsman, Oleg Mironov, has said gay men are not normal.

In such a climate, the prospects of an openly gay politician or a powerful lobby pushing for gay rights are bleak. Same-sex marriage or homosexual adoption, increasingly accepted in the West, are almost out of the question. Said Eduard Mishin, director of gay.ru, a Russian-language Web site for gay men: "I can't even begin to imagine what they would do to a child at school if he were to tell his classmates that he has two fathers."

email Anna Badkhen at abadkhen@sfchronicle.com.
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