There are no gays in Sochi says its’ mayor

There has been a lot of coverage of homophobia and the oppression of Russia’s gays leading up to the Olympics and now that the games are in full swing while the media is mostly focused on the sport some journalists have been asking the more hard hitting questions while the politicians are speaking. Sochi’s Mayor Anatoly Pakhomov, said in an interview that his city has no gays.

When the news media arrived in the sea-side town they found several gay bars and a small and now hidden community. The quote seems similar to one the former president of Iran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, made several years ago (see video below).

Many including British writer, presenter, actor and director Stephen Fry, were calling for an outright boycott of the Olympic games no such boycott materialized as we’ve seen in past games. While many took the absence of many world leaders from the opening ceremonies as a political statement, there have been plenty of previous games without prime ministers and presidents.

One journalist for Vice decided to fire up the social networking app Hornet on his smartphone and see if he could find gays in Sochi. Benjamin Butterworth explained in the article how the app works, but to put it simply, a user is able to set their location manually and chat with locals in that area. So he chatted with a few ‘gays’ in Sochi, many he found are still loyal to Putin, but one who spoke more freely. Of course as anyone can choose Sochi as there location it’s possible many of the people he was trying to connect with were also not really in the city. He also didn’t mention if he came across any athletes attending the games, but surely those boys have been warned to stay off social networks and safely inside the protection of the athlete’s village. (Read the Vice article, Vice: I used a dating app to speak to Sochi’s gays).

Sochi’s mayor has been proved wrong on this occasion. Of course when the world’s media leaves Sochi, will the gays defect too, will they remain hidden or will they be hunted down by extremist-homophobes? The worry will be when media attention is no longer on Russia.