June 12, 2016, LGBT Pride was held in the capital of Ukraine. What is the history of the event? Why it was not possible for it to took place earlier?
Ukraine has been a part of the atheist Soviet Union till it collapsed in 1991. Those 70 years of communism were enough for the most of people to loose direct connection with the church. Yet communism as a philosophical movement was close to the religion itself; it declared total "morality" of its followers, and the family was the base cell of the state structure, next being the workplace and the community.
The first attempts to hold Gay Pride took place in the second half of the 2000s. They were completely unsuccessful due to multiple reasons:
- no general knowledge about human rights discrimination issue;
- lack of understanding of the issue's importance;
- lack of strong protesting social base;
- LGBT opposition to the common people through striking images.
Another great issue is that LGBT movement perceived itself as "anti-fascist" and "anti-nationalist", and mostly Russian-speaking, so it failed to achieve support from Ukrainian-speaking activists.
So, in the 2000s, Gay Pride comprised not more than several dozen people, who were usually dispersed by right-wing radicals.
In 2015 Gay Pride was so secret, that many its supporters did not manage to arrive at the venue far from the downtown.
In 2016 1,500 participants were guarded by 5,500 police and 1,200 National Guard. Most of the participants declared they supported the idea of equality, themselves not representing LGBT. The security measures proved to be over excessive.
As joke says, police held successfully 2016 Kyiv Gay Pride.
Was it a true achievement? The route was less than 1 km long. The territory was surrounded; any suspicious men were apprehended with disrespect to their human rights. In fact, a small part of Kyiv was made a gay ghetto for 4 hours. After the parade, the LGBT parade participants were evacuated in special buses, and even a few underground trains were rolling exclusively for them.
Traditional arguments of Kyiv Pride opponents included the need to preserve traditional family, interpretation of the parade as LGBT propaganda to involve more people in "perversion".
Leading Ukrainian politicians abstained by all means from any comments - to save face in front of both liberal foreign partners and traditionalist Ukrainian voters; MP Nadiya Savchenko has clearly supported the parade.
It's a pity that so much taxpayers' money were lost to create nice media picture.
On the other hand, Ukraine prevented Russian propaganda from creating their favourite image of "fascist" Ukraine.
Besides, equality and human rights were affirmed. As one says, this is "what Maidan stood for" - the European values.
