GQ article on what it's like to be gay in Russia right now

That's terrifying and heartbreaking.

It is so eerie for me to read an article like that and realize that 100 to 125 years ago, my grandparents had to flee Russia, because a previous regime treated Jews the way this current regime treats gays.

And yet I long to visit Russia, to see Moscow and St. Petersburg, and the cities where my grandparents and their grandparents lived: Rostov-on-the-Don, Minsk and a small shtetl outside of Minsk called Babruysk, my own personal Anatevka.

How, I wonder, would they treat me if I visited?

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Of course Belarus is its own special nightmare. My beloved Belarusian masseur goes back with his wife and kids to visit every year and it's hard to get him to talk about it. Besides the suitcases they need for themselves on their extended visits, they have to bring TONS of stuff for his relatives.

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That's beautiful, Jay.

I had a conversation with a ballet dancer from Belarus who lives in the US now. He's probably no more than 25 years old, so he grew up in the country that was no longer part of the Soviet Union or the Russian Federation. I told him that three of my grandparents had come from Belarus: one from Minsk and two from a small town nearby. He asked me the name of it and when I said Babruysk, his eyes lit up and he said, "My mother's family lives in Babruysk! They have always lived in Babruysk! It is not small town now. It is important industrial city."

I wondered if his great-grandparents knew my grandparents' families, how felt about the Jews killed in the pogroms, the Jews who stayed, the Jews of Babryusk who were killed by the Nazis--by firing squads in groups of 30 when the labor camp grew overcrowded. Did his family help the Jews? Did they care when they were liquidated?

And who lives now in my great-grandmother's home?

At any rate, I didn't ask him any of those questions. I congratulated him on his performance.

It's no picnic for LGBT people in Belarus, but it's no pogrom either. I think things are marginally better there than in Russia or the Ukraine.

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Updated On: 2/9/14 at 12:06 AM

I don't think things are so bad for the LGBT people in the Ukraine (comparatively speaking of course). They are fighting to be integrated in the EU and are well aware that homophobia would prevent them from this goal. But Russia, OTOH, is rushing full-speed back into the Middle Ages.