Rsian Regn Blocks Playg of BTS Documentary Bee It’s ‘Gay’

'ANY DAY YOU N BE TAKEN': INSI WHAT 'S LIKE TO BE GAY CHECHNYA

Rsian photographer Evgeny Feldman, a regular ntributor to Mza, is workg to document the liv of the newt wave of Rsian émigrés: those who have left the untry wh the past fifteen years, formg a distct group om the migratns of the late 20th century. Feldman eds a self-published samizdat magaze whose next issue will tell ne stori om wh that rapidly growg muny. Mza is featurg one of those stori, the memori of a Mosw journalist who was raised a village Dagtan, one of Rsia’s Northern Csian republics. After the journalist me out as gay, he faced threats om fay members and ultimately moved to New York Cy to beg a new life. * dagestan gay *

Ricky-- a psdonym-- had known he was gay sce his early teens but had almost never dated.

"They said would be better if I was a terrorist than gay. "Ricky's oral was mid-2018 and was a faiar early 2017, the world had beme aware of reports that Chechen thori were roundg up and torturg dozens of men they spected of beg gay, what me to be known as a "gay purge".

GAY OM DAGTAN SCRIB HIS PE OM RSIA

Nor did beg January 2018 Rsian LGBT activists reported a h wave of tentns, this time also volvg gay women.

The nam of most of those terviewed have been changed at their requt out of ncern the Chechen thori or their fai might harm acunts pat a picture of a place where there is now virtually no space to be gay, where datg rri potentially lethal nsequenc and the supprsn of their inty is obligatory for LGBT people. He has done that, g allegedly savage methods, and the procs Kadyrov has remolled Chechnya around himself, erectg a police state and a cult of personaly built around an obssive machismo centered on sport, particularly martial the majory-Mlim regn, wh a eply nservative culture, beg gay was never accepted.

"It is a dictatorship, " said Harlem, who fled Chechnya several years ago and now ns LGBT World Bi, an NGO that tri to help gay people leave the Cs. "In 2017, that nservative hostily to homosexualy seemed to nvert to anised terror, part of a broar nservative mpaign that has also targeted dg and alhol Dzhabrailov, 27, only the send man to e forward publicly about his tentn 2017, told ABC News that armed police took him om the hair salon where he was workg. For 14 days, he said, he was held a basement wh several other gay men, taken out for torture ssns, where he was electrocuted and subjected to a mock Dzhabrailov tells ABC News'' Jam Longman the torture and terrogatn he says he endured at the hands of Chechen News"They put me on the wall, put bag on my head, " he remembered.