Welcome to Chechnya - Metro Weekly - July 9 2020

in the case, who were skydiving instructors and undertakers,
and areas where the companies are much smaller and have been
historically much less responsive to social change and the fundamental
impacts of the queer movement over the last decade.
MW: At the time that this happened at the New York Post, since
this was before there was an advocacy group on the side of gay and
lesbian journalists, did you feel you had any recourse to fight that
discrimination?
FRANCE: No, I knew that I had no recourse. At the time, there
was no gay rights law in New York City. That came later. There
was nobody for me to complain to. I was simply out of a job. Also,
I was being told very clearly that there would be no job for me
in journalism. There were very few openly gay journalists at the
time. I think there were two. One was at the New York Post, and
he was protected by the union there. Once you got in the union,
you were protected from the kind of hostilities that I was experiencing.
And I hadn't yet been at the paper long enough to get into
the union. That's what they were doing there with this kind of
gate keeping, to make sure that they were able to figure out who
was queer and who wasn't, before union eligibility. The New
York Times had no openly gay journalists at it. The Wall Street
Journal had no openly gay journalists. The only other one that I
knew of at the time was at the San Francisco Chronicle. That was
Randy Shilts. It was an entire field that was foreclosed to queer
people, and it was just one of many.
MW: I understand the deep-seated bias that existed, but what
rationale did people have for caring if a gay or lesbian wrote a news
article? It doesn't make any sense.
FRANCE: Right? What do they care if somebody is transgender
while embalming a dead body? Hatred just doesn't make any
sense except to people who are hating.
MW: Last week, Russian voters approved a constitutional ban on
same-sex marriage, in addition to all other sorts of referendums
that they "approved." Based on what you know and what you're
hearing from people in Russia and in Chechnya, is this a real gut
punch? Is it something that they were expecting and are prepared
to keep fighting?
FRANCE: Well, my friends in Russia just feel entirely hopeless,
unfortunately. The vote tally, as it were, is packed with fraud.
We've seen it in city after city, in exit polls. In Saint Petersburg,
for example, the majority of voters [polled] said that they voted
against the constitutional amendments. However, the city itself,
in the final official tally, was something like 70 percent in favor
of the constitutional amendment. This is really not a case of the
Russian electorate going against queer people. It's really a case
of the Kremlin just taking over the role of autocracy and dictatorship,
and dressing it up as the public will. That's what has
people so dispirited.
MW: That's a really curious thing, too, that it does look from the
outside like it's the public will. It looks like Putin’s side has won
over the hearts and minds of the people in the Russian federation.
That they really just do believe that queer people don't deserve civil
rights, certain human rights. Is that how it feels walking around
Chechnya, for example, is there a sense of people being unwelcoming
to any LGBTQ presence?
FRANCE: Well, I guess it depends on where you are in the country.
Moscow and Saint Petersburg are modern cities. They have
gay clubs. They have gay social and political organizations.
There's a queer presence that you don't see in other places. But
nationwide polls tell us that almost half of Russians find gay
people to be totally unacceptable. That is because they've been
fed this propaganda against the community by state-controlled
media. Activism has no purchase on state controlled media,
because it's state-controlled media. That is almost every media
outlet in the country. The very few that are Russian-based that
have a kind of liberal worldview are so marginalized by the political
structure that they have very little impact.
You could do a major investigation, as the newspaper Novaya
Gazeta did in 2017, and reveal these atrocities in Chechnya that
are being undertaken by the government against the queer community.
And the rest of the country will know almost nothing
about it. It doesn't create a wave of followup stories by other
newspapers and television outlets, because it's not part of the
approved national narrative. It's the lone voice in the distance
with a very small readership, and it just doesn't get picked up.
MW: In that environment, how did you find your way into telling
the story in Welcome to Chechnya?
FRANCE: I made contact with a very small group of activists that
have very quietly constructed this vast underground network of
safe houses and pipelines to be able to rescue queer Chechens
from certain death, and try and find ways to get them out of the
country. I asked them if I could come and film their work, and
they said yes. I went immediately into the underground when I
arrived in Moscow, and traveled in and out of that network for
much of the next 18 months. My view of life in Russia is really
constrained. My view of queer life in Russia is constrained by
my having only experienced it from inside these cloistered safe
houses.
MW: Did you have any opportunity to involve authorities here or
in Russia? Was it necessary to contact the state department, the
embassy, or anyone like that?
FRANCE: I only did reporting to the state department after I
finished my reporting inside Russia. I wanted to confirm that
the U.S. had not received any of the people who were seeking
extraordinary visa invitations from foreign countries. And they
confirmed that, that there were no people brought in through
this network who were allowed to come into the U.S., while
countries like Canada and others, with a much more liberal
“This is a story of the queer community on a
global level, who are responding in very direct
and increasingly dangerous ways to PROTECT
THE PEOPLE WHO ARE BEING HUNTED AROUND
THE GLOBE BY THE CHECHEN AUTHORITIES.”
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JULY 9, 2020 • METROWEEKLY.COM