FALSE ACCUSATIONS AGAINST MOSCOW PRIDE

Moscow Pride 2006 has just published the complete budget for its operations -- showing how it spent its money and where it came from. Nicolas Alexeyev and the Russian organizers of the events  took out personal loans to help finance Moscow Pride, despie which it was forced to run up a substantial deficit of nearly 28,000 Euros. Publishing their budget and their sources of financing is a remarkable example of responsible organizational transparency (would that our U.S. gay organizations were as open about their spending.) This was a necessary step, since some gay bar owners with sinister motives have slanderously accused Moscow Pride organizers of pocketing some of the monies.

The shady Moscow gay bar owners were afraid of having problems with Moscow's authoritarian city government that would hurt their businesses because of the Moscow mayor's ban on  Moscow Pride, so they opposed it. We all are too familiar with under-the-table payoffs to police made by gay bar owners in many countries, including the U.S., especially in times past. Moscow gay bar culture is rather like that of the U.S. in the '50s, '60s, and early '70s, when nearly all gay bars were linked to organized crime. I can well recall the famous struggle in 1975 for control of New York City's Christopher Street Liberation Day Parade Committee -- which then ran New York's gay pride march -- and which had been taken over by mobbed-up gay bar owners, who reaped an enormous profit from the end-of-parade festival on Christopher Street. Gay activists under the leadership of the late, beloved Vito Russo (pioneer gay liberation activist, author of The Celluloid Closet, and later a leader of ACT UP) conducted an effective struggle to take back the Christopher Street Parade Committee from the shadowy bar owners, and defeated them in a vote at a huge and tumultuous gay community meeting (at which the "connected" bar owners tried to pack the meeting with rather obviously non-gay, louche types from Little Italy.)

The opposition for commercial reasons of the sleazy and compromised Moscow bar owners to Moscow Pride -- and their deliberate sabotage of the closing Moscow Pride party, which would have helped erase the deficit, but instead wound up increasing it when it was cancelled by the bar owners at the last minute -- is shameful, as are their false accusations agqinst Moscow Pride's organizers. You can find the whole story, along with Moscow Pride's meticulously detailed budget, on the GayRussia website by clicking here.....

RELATED READING: Today's New York Times has an editorial criticizing the homophobia and anti-Semitism of Poland's ultraconservative Kaczynski-led regime entitled "Poland's Bigoted Government" -- and you can read it by clicking here.