WATCH: Masha Gessen Says It Will Get Worse for LGBT Russians After Olympics
Thursday night, MSNBC's All In with Chris Hayes trained its lens on the 2014 Olympic Games, as out Russian journalist, author, and LGBT activist Masha Gessen discussed her concerns about the situation in Russia and her belief that life for LGBT Russians will worsen when the Games conclude.
Gessen, author of the 2012 biography The Man Without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin, asserted that Putin used the Games to try to elude the "humiliation" suffered in 1980 when the U.S. and other countries boycotted the Olympics in protest of the Soviet Union's invasion of Afghanistan. In Gessen's words, Sochi was Putin's bid "to show that Russia was great again and that he was one of the world's leaders."
But the controversy surrounding the country's draconian anti-LGBT propaganda laws has compromised Putin's efforts in this regard.
Dartmouth professor Jeff Sharlet, who also appeared last night on Hayes's program, described "the pervasiveness of the fear" in Russia and "the perversity of the law." Sharlet recounted his experiences on the ground, which he detailed in a recent GQ article titled "Inside the Iron Closet: What It's Like to Be Gay in Putin's Russia" and which Hayes summed up as "thuggish vigilantism with tacit state support."
http://www.advocate.com/sports/2014/02/07/watch-masha-gessen-says-it-will-get-worse-lgbt-russians-after-olympics
Video at link.
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