Speaking on the phone to BuzzFeed News from Chicago where he now studies violin at the Chicago College of Performing Arts, Kolesov explained what happened shortly after he uploaded the video. “If you are watching this video and you or someone you know is in a difficult situation, know that I love you and that your happiness is worth living and fighting for.” “I would like to say to the Russian lawmakers that if what I am doing right now is ‘same-sex propaganda’ then what you are doing can be considered ‘encouragement of suicide.’” He ends the film with a single message: The anti-propaganda law is, he says, killing people.
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We shout and make as much noise as possible just so other people like us who are scared and can’t be themselves would know that they are not a mistake and they are not alone.” “We don’t come out for the ones who hate us to know.
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“We don’t come out for heterosexual people to know,” he says. He wants to stop other Russian kids hating themselves and feeling like they’re the only one. “She asked me for the same reason as my older brother – they are ashamed to have a gay son and brother.” “One of the requests she had for me was not to tell anyone about it,” he says. “I loathed myself and every LGBT person around me.”īut in a different, more accepting environment, he gradually became stronger, and last month told his mother he was gay shortly before uploading the video. “The first time I met an openly gay person I started shaking because I know that I am just like him.” Initially, he was still unable to shake off everything he had learned about gay people.
RUSSIAN GAY MEN NAKED FULL
“For the first time in my life I met people who openly lived a full life despite being LGBT,” he says. “They said that they don’t approve of her ‘lifestyle and she hanged herself…I thought that this could be me.”Īged 16, after ten years of learning the violin, Kolesov won a full scholarship to attend a music school in Canada. “One day during my depression I was talking to my friend and he told me that his friend came out to her parents as a lesbian,” he says. But while struggling with depression and amid several suicide attempts, Kolesov realised that he could not put his mother, who had lost another of her sons in a car accident, through more grief. “I never thought I would live to be 23,” he says. He says he asked God if he could die before his mother found out he was gay. I asked, ‘Lord why me? Why do I have to go through all of this?” In his Pentecostal Church in St Petersburg, Kolesov even signed a petition against a gay pride parade for fear that if he did not others would become suspicious. “Every night I cried and prayed that God would deliver me. Learning the violin from aged six was his only outlet.
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“How could I be Christian and be gay at the same time? My self-hatred put me into a deep depression,” he says in the video. This isolation grew as Kolesov got older and became more involved with the church. It has also helped to shut down organisations and websites that try to help sexual minorities and, according to reports, fuelled violence and hostility toward LGBT people. In 2013, Russia introduced a vague, far-reaching law, referred to in the West as the “gay propaganda” law that forbids any suggestion to children that homosexuality is normal and that in practice, human rights organisations attest, has muzzled LGBT people across the country.
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His video reveals another, invisible kind of prison that exists in Russia for LGBT people – one of silence and fear. It was just days after reports had emerged that the authorities in Chechnya were arresting, imprisoning and murdering gay men. He agreed to be interviewed on the phone at first, and then via Skype. It detailed the years he spent praying that God would take his homosexuality away, the depression he suffered, the five attempts to kill himself, and his reasons for speaking out now. Kolesov sent a link to the YouTube video – which he uploaded a day after his birthday – and said he hoped that it might at least help one child. “I did it,” he wrote, “Because it breaks my heart to know how many Russian children and other LGBT youth around the world feel like they’re alone”. He explained that he grew up in a Pentecostal Christian family in rural Russia, that both his parents were pastors, and that he had just come out as gay on YouTube. A 23-year-old Russian violinist called Artem Kolesov emailed BuzzFeed News last week with a message that began: “Hello, I know that you receive thousands of emails every day, but I would like to share my story with you.”