Jail Won't Stop Russia's Anti-Gay Psycho

[theHandpuppet]

The Daily Beast
World News
08.20.14

Jail Won't Stop Russia's Anti-Gay Psycho
The conviction of the man known as The Hatchet, infamous for filming himself torturing gay people, is good news. But the violence won’t end until homophobia stops being legal in Russia.

In a year of bad news for LGBT people across the global south and east, it’s been a good couple of weeks. A court struck down Uganda’s anti-gay law, and the country’s president has backed away from it. Kenya’s parliament rejected a draconian anti-gay bill. And now one of the nastiest men in Russia, Maxim Martsinkevich, has been sentenced to five years in prison.

You may know Martsinkevich from the dozen videos posted on the Russian social networking site VKontakte showing him and his colleagues threatening, beating, stripping, torturing, urinating on, and otherwise harassing gay people. His gang, known as “Occupy Pedophilia,” would lure gay men with the promise of sexual encounters, usually with teenagers, and then humiliate them online.

The video that got Martsinkevich—nicknamed Tesak, or “The Hatchet”—into trouble was a particularly odious one, in which he stripped and beat a gay Iraqi man, shaved his head, painted Stars of David on his body and a rainbow on his forehead, and humiliated him with sex toys.

Presumably, “Iraqi” was not the most startling word in that sentence. Yet interestingly enough, it was the one that got him into trouble with the law. Tesak was jailed not for harassing gay people—that’s basically the law in Russia now—but for being racist....

MORE at http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/08/20/jail-won-t-stop-russia-s-anti-gay-psycho.html

[shenmue]

1. Wow, what a piece of shit