Anton Krasovsky was recently on the air on Russia’s Kontr TV Channel when he made an announcement to the audience: he is gay.

‘I’m gay, and I’m just the same person as you, my dear audience, as president Putin, as prime minister Medvedev and deputies of our Duma,’ he said.

Within hours, Krasovsky was fired from the government-backed cable network that he had helped launch.

But if viewers did not see his announcement live, they can’t see it now because footage was deleted from KontrTV’s website and from YouTube.

‘I can’t say I’d been preparing for this. But just before the show, i.e. two hours before the fact, I had already known I would do this,’ he told Snob.ru.

‘I also had had some 300 grams of whiskey, a bit of Dutch courage,’ he added.

Krasovsky said he began to feel awkward while discussing controversial Russia anti-gay propaganda law.

‘I felt I like a hypocrite, and hypocrisy is what I hate the most about people,’ he says. ‘The meaning of this whole story we are discussing now is that throughout my whole life I’ve been struggling with myself. And this – as you call it – coming out is just another battle with myself, with my own hypocrisy, my own lies and my own cowardice.’

He said there was ‘a storm of applause from both the audience and the show’s staff’ and after the telecast, he rushed to his dressing room and cried for about 20 minutes.

Soon after, he was fired.

‘They immediately blocked all my corporate accounts, my email. Literally immediately, overnight,’ he said. ‘They deleted not only my face from the website, but also all of my TV shows, as if I’d never really existed. The next day I wrote to … that I was totally shocked. Because it takes them half a day to put up a banner when I ask them to, and here we had such efficiency.’