“Polit-gramota” showed gender and sexual ignorance of the young politicians

On 25^th of March 2009 Youth informational project “Polit-gramota”. arranged the 20^th anniversary debates, which took place in club “Sochi”. Whereas the debates were during the Week Against Homophobia within the bounds of campaign “Xenophobii.NET”, managers agreed with LGBT-organization’s Coming Out proposal to devote one round to the topic “Homophobia as a political problem”. Maxim Ivantsov (Youth human rights movement) and Michael Potepkin (Youth movement “Nashi”) have been debated.

Per se the debates should have been moved near the questions as “What is homophobia?”, “Does the homophobia exist in modern society?”, “Wherein it shows up?”, “Is homophobia a political problem?”, “And how to overcome this problem?” etc. But instead of it the discussion came to “low-kitchen-chat-about-sex” level, accompanied with the dirty jokes.

The obvious discussion’s participants’ misunderstanding of the problem’s content, inability to articulate political position concerning homophobia made the debates look very farcical performance.

Potepkin showed the whole groundlessness in questions of gender, sexuality, human rights and the number of other cases. His strength was that he presented homophobic-homonegative position, which is very popular in Russia nowadays. His comparisons of homosexuality with the necrophilia, and constant attempts of joking about this called out the delight only in the area of his supporters from the movement “Nashi”, who were present at the debates in a big quantity. The very overfree behavioral pattern and positioning himself during the discussion as well as the constant interruptions of the opponent hid under the “strong mask” the helplessness of the argumentation, the absence of the discussed subject’s knowledge, unwillingness and attempt of the reflexion. His chip rhetorical methods looked very unconvincing. Such absence of the tact and respect towards the opponent and other people isn’t surprising, and rather has symptomatic character to the all native mainstream politics, where the culture of public performances swiftly falls down during the last few years.

But in spite of all different interpretations of the debates’ course , we can affirm with the confidence that coming out of this problem onto the public space of the youth politics is very significant event. During the course of the discussion it became obvious that the very political and social significance of the homophobia problem made these debates so hot and left a few indifferent. The managers of the debates said it was the first time since the all 20^th debates in several years that atmosphere was so tense and lively and so many people who wanted to ask questions to the participants of the discussion. The theme of homophobia just starts to be widely discussed in real public space, and it’s, alas, normal to this period that LGBT-society meets tough disapproval, homonegativism and the very homophobia.

Historically based, LGBT-society began get used little by little to warm tolerant conditions, which are built within its own space and the space of the friendly heterosexuals. The open “face to face”  homophobia is not so often phenomenon, that’s why some of the LGBT representatives sais nobody “discriminate against them and everything is good at all”. But such kind of discussion helps to show everybody, who believes everything’s good, that the problem exists and it’s necessary to work hard on its solving. And not only LGBT-society should solve it, but the whole society: all the people of the goodwill, who understand that homophobia is a big social problem.

In conclusion we want to thank first of all Maxim Ivantsov, who in spite of the discussed subject’s complexity decided to debate about homophobia, and sure special thanks to Youth informational project “Polit-gramota” for the organization of the debates.

Valery Sozaev

Gulya Sultanova