Courage

Alexeyev being arrested.

Nikolay Alexeyev (a.k.a. Nikolai Alekseev) was the first person convicted under St. Petersburg's homophobic law which attempts to silence all public LGBTQ protests in that city. Unlike the massive coverage of Chen Guangcheng's ambivalence under duress in China, very little print was spent on Mr. Alexeyev's conviction, based on his non-violent protests which entail holding hand-written posters in public places. The posters declare, "Homosexuality is not a perversion." This Pink News article has more information. It is notable that the coverage of the Chen Guangcheng case often focuses on his heterosexual nuclear family. One man stating that he is not less than human seems to draw less interest.

This is the challenge and pain for the outlier in any society. African-Americans in the South knew what it meant to protest non-violently in a place where their lives were considered less than human by White racists in power. Indigenous American across both North and South America have experienced genocide at the hands of those who have power and a sense of inherent superiority. 

Alexeyev knows what it means to stand alone in an open square of a hostile city in a hostile country. He knows the cold steel of handcuffs on his wrists. He knows the inside of police vans and cells. He is not an academic elitist, like some, including at least one Harvard elitist,who have persecuted him within the international LGBTQ movement. Those same people have persecuted and maligned Peter Tatchell, another fearless gay activist. Self-serving homophobes posing as international experts. Every movement for liberation attracts power brokers. 

The May 4th conviction of Mr. Alexeyev is simply another Russian declaration of its national and cultural homophobia. Russia intervened recently to protect the dictatorship of al-Assad in Syria from intervention by the United Nations. Russia is a country which admitted in 2010 that 500,000 people annually had died annually from diseases, crimes and accidents due to alcohol consumption. Apparently, the human right of Russians to be alcoholics is never in dispute.