I’m not in the habit of bursting anyone’s bubble, in fact I encourage the LGBT community of Scotland to celebrate yesterday’s Equal Marriage Bill. However, and hate my views all you want, out of the hundreds of celebratory posts clogging up my Facebook how many of you happy-campers actively campaigned for this right? More importantly, how many of you are actually aware of the horrors the LGBT world community faces daily?
Yesterday’s law will see gay couples being able to marry by as early as autumn and was a colossal leap in the right direction; but just because we in Scotland – the 17th country to legalise same sex marriage – have been generously afforded the equal right to express the love we harbour for members of the same-sex doesn’t mean we’re in the clear.
The most notorious of countries to literally slaps the LGBT community around is Russia and anyone who truly cares about the welfare of our community will cease celebrating, pick up their metaphorical pitch forks and chase Putin’s bigoted views screaming from this world.
Hard facts: in Russia only 1% of the gay population lives outside the shadows. The rest carry out their love-affairs and lives in upmost secrecy for fear of being caught. There are groups so devout in the belief that being gay is wrong that they actively ‘hunt’ members of the its community for fun. The use of the word hunt isn’t an exaggeration, it’s what they do.
Trolling through gay dating sites with fake profiles, these ‘hunters’ use technology as a snare trap; they treat websites as a ‘safari’ and use them to lure their pray. Once caught the men are held down and tortured. Don’t believe me? Google search it, because these ‘vigilantes’ don’t even bother to hide their identity. Being humiliated, beaten and urinated on? That’s treatment bestowed upon the lucky ones. This homophobic vigilantism has seen men beaten to death, left blind, be subjected to sexual abuse and even gang-raped. How redundant: an anti-gay group raping a man. It’s that statement alone that shows you these groups aren’t acting out of belief or conviction, they’re acting out of ignorance and brutality in a country that affords our community no rights.
Laws outlawing ‘gay propaganda’ (i.e. admitting you’re gay) have sparked a massive increase in homophobic attacks by right-wing groups. Little FYI, Russia: Being homophobic isn’t a political belief. Most of the Russian population don’t actively know anyone who is gay, so an old prejudice still remains; a prejudice that sees homosexuality likened to paedophilia.
My annoyance? In various places all over the world we are being hunted down like dogs and treated worse, yet all I’m seeing is people leaping on the bandwagon and posting statuses about how we can get married? I’m sorry, where are the statuses about the 15 year old boy who was kidnapped, tortured and filmed? The posts about the lesbian couple that live in fear that their children from previous marriages will be taken away from them under the propaganda laws? Be happy, yes, but realise we aren’t equal at all.
So before we go congratulating ourselves on a job well done, patting our government on the back and hanging up our protest signs, remember that we’re still allowing this f*ck-fest of a country to host the something as important as the Winter Olympics. Ask yourselves this: How many of you, the ones who are celebrating proudly on Facebook, would stick up for someone who was being violently beaten or subjected to abuse for their sexuality? Even though I’ve harped on about Russia, that behaviour still happens here and that belief still lingers in the heart of a lot of the Scottish population.
This positive change occurred because of the hard work a handful of our community put in. Not your Facebook posts. You think we’re equal? Don’t make me laugh. I’d still be scared to hold my boyfriend’s hand walking through Glasgow – whether there’s a ring on my finger or not. Wake up, people. We’ve won a battle, not the war.