On Oct. 6, some 300 people gathered in Chicago’s LGBT community to mark the ninth anniversary of the brutal slaying of Matthew Shepard. In 1998, anti-gay bigots savagely killed Shepard, who was 21-years-old and a student at the University of Wyoming.
Earlier that same year, two racist bigots killed a 47-year-old African American man, James Byrd Jr., in a ghastly murder
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Both victims were tortured before dying and both deaths testify to the hateful diseases that are a part of the U.S. social system.
The Gay Liberation Network (GLN), formerly known as the Chicago Anti-Bashing Network, sponsored Saturday’s event. The featured speaker was Nikolai Alexeyev, a leader of the group Gay Russia and a main organizer of Moscow Pride. Attempts to organize pride demonstrations in the Russian capitol have been met with violent attacks by neo-fascist gangs aided and abetted by the Moscow police.
The Mayor of Moscow, Yuri Lushkow, banned the pride actions in the past two years and denied Gay Russia’s plan to lay a wreath at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. The reason Gay Russia wanted to lay the wreath was to pay their respect to the Red Army soldiers, “who fought against Nazism, the most homophobic ideology.” (Pravda May 29, 2006)
Alexeyev and others—including members of the European Parliament who supported the rights of Gay Russia to free speech and assembly—were pummeled, punched, kicked, clubbed, bloodied, tear-gassed and then arrested. Not one of the fascist scum was detained.
This violent rerun of a pogrom had the rabid blessings of the Patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church, the Grand Mufti of the Islamic faith and the chief Rabbi of Moscow. In Latvia, the Roman Catholic Cardinal Archbishop of Riga called on his followers to fill the streets to stop the Pride March.
Alexeyev told PSLweb.org that Gay Russia had already set a date for Moscow Pride 2008, and that he was aware that after the 1917 October Revolution, the Bolsheviks under Lenin did away with the Czarist laws against gay people. This revolutionary policy was later overturned under the Stalin leadership, when anti-gay laws, along with those that criminalized abortion, were put back on the books.
These laws remained until the counterrevolutionary regime of Boris Yeltsin removed them in order to comply with rules to join the European Council of Nations. On that government’s part, it was only a form without content. There were no efforts to raise consciousness or to protect the rights of LGBT people.
The counterrevolution in the Soviet Union was a major defeat for all workers, gay and straight. Basic rights and the social safety net that had previously protected workers were suddenly gone.
But the removal of the reactionary laws did have an effect on those who were oppressed by them and this led to the formation of Gay Russia and the courageous struggle for equal rights.
The fact that the decriminalization took place under Yeltsin has undoubtedly created some illusions in the value of bourgeois democracy—as has the sometimes self-serving support of the bourgeois politicians from the United States and Western Europe. But every emergent struggle goes through this experience. It should in no way deter progressive people from supporting the courageous struggle of our Russian sisters and brothers.
Before its overthrow, the German Democratic Republic had come to a progressive understanding of same-sex relations and published their views for mass education. This breakthrough was helpful to revolutionary Cuba, which inherited the anti-gay bigotry deeply engrained under capitalism and colonialism, but in recent years has made great strides.
‘Justice for victims of bigotry!’
At the rally, Stephanie Fisher of Chicago ANSWER and the Party for Socialism and Liberation spoke of the death of transgender immigrant Victoria Arellano.
Arellano died after being held by the Homeland Security’s Immigrant and Customs Enforcement agency for two months. While in custody, she was denied her AIDS medications. She was only 23-years-old. Arellano joins a growing list of immigrants in the last two years who have died in ICE custody due to inadequate medical care.
Fisher pointed out that inequality, intimidation, and violence directed against LGBT people, immigrants, African
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Fisher received a warm applause when she declared, “We won’t stop until we win justice for Matthew Shepard, Victoria Arellano and all LGBT people. Full equality for
all immigrants now! Freedom for LGBT people! Freedom for the people of the Middle East! Stop the war and bring all the troops home now. If we stick together and stay in the streets, we will win.”
Among the other speakers was Andy Thayer, GLN co-founder and leading anti-war organizer, who spoke on the U.S. occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan, the complicity of the Democratic Party, and the new threats on Iran. Attorney Dana Kurtz spoke to the problem of police violence against LGBT people. Kurtz represents lesbian women who were gay-bashed by an off-duty Chicago cop following this year’s pride demonstration.
Lloyd Kelly and Robert Thomas spoke about the racism faced by LGBT youth on Hasted Street a central commercial area of the LGBT community.
Rev. Liz Stedman, an openly Lesbian Episcopal chaplain at Northwestern University, spoke about equal rights within the church and the attempts of anti-gay zealots to split the Anglican/Episcopal Church.
After the rally, the crowd marched through the streets of Chicago’s gay business district and into a non-gay entertainment district next to Wrigley Field.
Despite the Cubs being knocked out of the playoffs that night, most fans emerging from the ballpark gave the marchers a friendly reception, applauding and high-fiving the participants.
