We’re all ankle-deep in shit

Horror stories from the Armenian LGBT rights movement

Fighting for LGBT rights in Armenia never was pretty.

Being gay wasn’t even legal in Armenia up until 2003 — the old USSR penal code section 121 was adopted as part of our legal system. Some might say it wasn’t enforced by the higher ups — to which I would agree, if it wasn’t exploited by the police for monetary gain.

Armenians aren’t horrible people, not by a wide margin. They are more polite than most, conservative, inhibited, and have survived oppression and terror over the ages. Which forced them into closely knit communities. And while such communities have their benefits, gossip and being overall nosy is pretty widespread. And people care a lot about what others think.

While it’s easy to point a finger and call people homophobic and backwards, everything should be seen in context.

We don’t know how to deal with homosexuality. Neither the conservatives, nor the liberals and even the LGBT community itself.

Armenian Apostolic Church has virtual monopoly on religion in Armenia enforced by RA Constitution article 18. And as churches go, it is a deeply corrupt and conservative religious structure that might give the Catholic church a run for its money, except exposed pedophilia incidents are fewer and far between. It is strictly anti-LGBT and actively uses propaganda to incite hatred against gay and transgender people.

Then we have the USSR period. And the USSR criminalized homosexuality in the first place, viewing it as a “deviant practice”.

And those who opposed the communists? Right-wing conservative nationalists, strongly anti-gay, as expected.

And influential quasi-criminal subcultures adhering to some kind of “thieves’ code of honor”? Anti-gay, again.

So ideologically we got stuck between a rock and a hard place, in an almost unbreakable context of discrimination, scorn and often violence against LGBT people.

I’ve been in the gay rights movement since 2002. Here are some stories of how it went.

I was homophobic

You could say I was. All I had heard was that gay people were deviant and disgusting, and that what they were doing was wrong.

I was 18 when I changed my mind about it. I said something along the lines of “well, I find gays disgusting”.

A friend of mine asked me a simple question: “Why?”

I had no answer. There was no reason to hate them. I didn’t even know a single gay person.

I had been wrong — believing something was right only because everyone around me said it was right.

So I would ask of you to be forgiving towards homophobic people. If my friend was belligerent about what I said instead of being frankly surprised about it, maybe I wouldn’t learn an important lesson that day.

The social context around us has dehumanized LGBT people, portrayed them as disgusting, deviant things.

The LGBT community has often reinforced this assumption

And there goes a controversial statement. I suggest we keep an open mind and let me explain my statement. But if you don’t feel like it, you’re free to pick your torches and sharpened pitchforks in the booth to the left.

I’m not about to point the finger of blame towards the LGBT community instead of providing you with context. If we were this generous with people who hate gay people, why should we make an exception here.

You see, there’s a deep divide between the progressive and conservative groups in Armenia — to the extent of them refusing to acknowledge each other’s existence.

Some conservatives see progressives through a lens of conspiracy theories — and Russian propaganda has only reinforced this opinion.

Others see them as weird, nontraditional and un-Armenian.

Progressives mostly see conservatives as uncivilized aggressive savages.

There was also a large generational gap back in the early 2000s. Almost all of the parents and educators were conservative. And even among young people, progressives were a minority.

Back in 2005 I had long hair, like I do now. A male with long hair walking downtown, that alone was asking for trouble. Nothing as serious as getting shot or knifed, but there would likely be physical violence involved. I was a fighter, so I didn’t mind it too much.

But there were a lot of people who didn’t ask for it. And I was heterosexual. Being gay was much worse.

Nobody would see you as a human being if you were gay. Any and all violence would be seen as justified.

And as the progressives were busy proving their legitimacy, they often wouldn’t get involved in this, lest they added the stigma of being gay lovers to the burden they carried already.

Gay people from progressive communities were mostly indistinguishable from their straight counterparts. That’s how homosexuality was seen in the progressive community — it was just your sexual preference, not part of your identity.

But, as I already said, the progressives were a minority even in their age group. So most gay people came from conservative circles.

Some were closeted. Some were not. And when they had to pick out an identity, they took what was forced upon them. They took on the exaggerated feminized speech and mannerisms, strongly concentrated on expressing their sexuality and made a lot of unwanted sexual advances towards other men, both in real life and over the internet.

And still, they were — and still are — people. I don’t have to like what they do, but they deserve the same rights and liberties as any of us.

All of us, victims of context and circumstances.

My split from the mainstream LGBT movement

My previous brush with my own unjustified homophobia led me to a decision: never believe anything only because people believed it to be true.

Thus a collision course both with ideological conservative groups and the mainstream LGBT movement was plotted.

The idea of an LGBT community was abhorrent to me; I viewed it as a form of segregation. I advocated for coexistence, and was told at this point coexistence was not a realistic perspective.

I argued that we already had the progressive community that was pretty LGBT-friendly, and subdividing us even further served no purpose. Then one day I was politely asked not to frequent gatherings. Turned out, a lot of those gatherings were “community building” and involved sex, and LGBT people didn’t feel comfortable having sex with straight people around.

I had already predicted that the fight for LGBT rights would devolve into complaining and sex-parties. The process had already started, turned out, without me noticing.

When the LGBT movement made its move towards left wing politics, I stood my ground, and while many activists are still on friendly terms with me, the movement as a whole no longer interested me.

Right-wing pundits would accuse LGBT rights groups of profiteering off of human rights issues. We dismissed it as another conspiracy theory. After all, I was an LGBT rights activists and had not earned a penny for my troubles.

Turned out, in some cases they weren’t completely wrong. The fight for LGBT rights had become a comfort zone. International donors investing in human rights were financing LGBT rights NGOs. Which provided those groups with steady income. It’s usually fine; people providing tremendous community service should be compensated for their work. Except when they exploit it. And some did. And it would be unrealistic, expecting them to destroy their livelihoods by defeating homophobia.

John Doe 1

I first heard of John Doe 1 in conjunction with a certain unpleasant controversy. You see, John Doe 1, with his friend, Jane Doe 1, had opened a social media account centered on outing LGBT people they disliked. They posted a lot of personal stuff — explicit pictures, sex chats and the like.

I was pretty disgusted by it.

Next I heard of him, shortly after, he was a key person in a new trans rights NGO.

John Doe 2

Why do gay Armenian men often sexually harass other males? The answer is pretty simple; just take out some words from the equation. Armenian men often sexually harass other people. Ask any Armenian girl to show you the spam folder on their Facebook account, you’ll see what I mean.

I advocated for tackling the sexual and communication ethics of LGBT people as one of the key problems. Not many cared, citing “freedom to express their sexuality”. It was a certain trait of the LGBT community, some form of entitlement, which I sadly observed from a former dear friend of mine — John Doe 2.

John Doe 2 wrote to me on Facebook one day.

— Dude, you’ve got to help me, they are coming for me. I’m panicking.

—Calm down, John Doe 2. What has happened?

— I registered a female profile on a social network to have sex talks with men. I think they might have found out my phone number and will be coming after me.

I told him to kill his numbers to be safe and reassured him that he was safe.

Then I asked him if he thought his behavior was ethical, and if he understood the concept of informed consent.

He told me he had the right to act the way he did: other gay people around him didn’t share his sexual preferences, and he was entitled to getting what he wanted, even through deception.

I was disappointed. I believed him to be a decent person, but now I wasn’t quite sure anymore.

The funniest thing is, everybody believes you’re gay

Back in 2012 I was a part of the #SaveMashtotsPark movement. The government of the time, corrupt as it was, didn’t seem very much amused about it, so they tried to find a weak spot in the movement — and believed I was that weak spot.

I am and have always been pro-human rights and anti-religion. So they used the pro-government conservative bloggers (sounds like another conspiracy theory, doesn’t it — except it absolutely happened) to paint me as a devil-worshiping homosexual financed by George Soros and sent to destroy Armenia.

The #SaveMashtotsPark movement itself was a loose coalition between lefts, nationalists, human rights activists and many others. Strangely enough, their effort largely failed.

The movement mostly supported me, and I’m forever in their debt for that. Considering the social and political climate, it might have been easier to just drop me.

I did get dozens of death threats and other pleasant messages, and still get the occasional “we’ll get you and kill you”, but then, sticks and stones, eh?

John Doe 3, the photographer

Recently I read an article about an Armenian woman who had found out her husband, 19 years her senior, being a pedophile.

And something clicked in my head. I had known her husband. And among the usual accusations that she was slandering her husband amidst a custody battle, I knew she wasn’t lying.

John Doe 3 was a pedophile. And taught photography to children.

Back in the 2000s, the gay community contained a lot of kids who had just reached puberty and decided to accept their sexuality. And some older men, known then as “teddy bears”, who didn’t mind to sexually exploit them. And some of them liked them as young as they come.

John Doe 3 was one of those “teddy bears”. And you could do nothing about it. He was a prominent member of the LGBT community, and a charismatic person, to be honest.

You see, John Doe 3 wasn’t what you would typically call a monster. He was a deeply damaged man with failed childhood and deviant sexual urges, and lacking the ethical backbone to fight against those and seek help. He was an intellectual, and intellectually arrogant, feeling like he was above the rest and was entitled to get what he wanted — be it through manipulation or other means, no matter the cost others would pay.

People genuinely loved him, many did. And if you moved against him, you might end up as an outcast, your voice drowned against the outrage.

While many knew his love for younger boys and girls, we never knew he was also a rapist.

Then his wife found out, and called the police.

And I can kind of understand why the police hesitated to have him arrested.

I’ve described the some of the context of those times. Now imagine telling people — and a lot of them — that their child was molested or violated. Worse still, imagine telling people their child was gay and sexually active.

You wouldn’t be able to stop people from killing John Doe 3. And, what is more important, I fear to imagine the violence those parents would inflict upon their own children.

It would have blown up, and the understanding of it kept us all put.

Only at the point when activist Mariam Sukhudyan exposed cases of systematic pedophilia in a school for children with special needs — a long story in itself — it became safe to talk about pedophilia. Only because in this case the victims were essentially abandoned children; no one to care for them, yet no one to harm them any further.

Being outed as a pedophile and a rapist left John Doe 3 a pariah. I want you to keep in mind that even false allegations would have done the same. There was no due process to prove his guilt, so people just ignored his presumption of innocence. And still, he walked free from persecution for 6 years after being outed.

Only in 2018 did the police push criminal charges against John Doe 3. At that point, he had successfully vanished. Some say — he had left the country altogether.

If you think I believe my silence was justified, you’re wrong. I’ll have to live with the understanding that I kept silent about a terrible atrocity, and only because I was afraid to cause a worse one.

There’s no prettier way of saying it; we’re all ankle-deep in shit, and we all have something like this to live with.

The breaking point

It was the summer of 2018. I was coordinating a search effort for a lost child who had an autism spectrum disorder.

Around a week of searches had brought no results, and everybody was emotionally and physically exhausted.

Many of the volunteers were parents of autistic kids — and some of them brought their kids with them.

I would meet volunteers in our field HQ, organize them into groups and send them to comb down area assigned to them, gather information from the press and people reporting sightings, the police, the rescue teams and so on.

And then a weirdest thing happened. Three guys came to the HQ, and one could immediately tell they were trouble. They started asking about our progress at first. Then they told us they knew we had hidden the kid. They knew we had staged the disappearance to stage the discovery too, only to be hailed as heroes and lobby for pro-LGBT laws.

Then they started threatening to break our kneecaps.

It came out of nowhere.

First I tried to defuse the situation. Then I had them removed from the compound, sans violence, of course. They promised to be back.

Having had almost no sleep for days, exhausted, unable to guarantee the safety of my volunteers and their children, I called the police liaison to the search effort and told them of the situation and that I was disbanding the volunteer effort on my side.

The police liaison said it was the right thing to do.

Remember how I earlier said early progressives did not want to associate with the LGBT cause? Here’s why. Associating with such a polarizing topic will mean that it will come to haunt you no matter what you do, it will interfere with your job, your personal life and the causes you participate in. You become a magnet for trouble. And, eventually, more a liability, than an asset.

The kid was never found. I felt I had failed him. Thus, I withdrew from all kinds of social activism.

Epilogue

Re-reading my text, it looks like I concentrated on the negatives only. There was a lot of good stuff too. I think the whole LGBT movement improved the quality of life for many people and was overall more of a positive thing. Did I demand too much of it? Maybe I did.

I still believe what I said during that TV debate. That all of us, the progressives, the conservatives, LGBT people, all of us are citizens of the Republic of Armenia. We all have the same human rights, and unless we can learn to coexist, Armenia cannot hope for a brighter future.

Thanks for reading, and have a nice day.