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Proposal Before Ukrainian Parliament Seeks to Criminalize Gay-Themed Art

An anti-gay special interest group in Ukraine has thrown their support behind a bill before the national parliament that would criminalize positive depictions of homosexuality in art, film, and television, the Associated Press reports. While taken as discouraging news to gay advocacy groups around the world, the bill’s emergence is less than surprising given the current status of gays and lesbians in Ukraine: Last Wednesday, Oleksandr Zinchenkov, head of the Our World advocacy group, told the Washington Post that intolerance towards the LGBT community in Ukraine “has entered the stage of physical violence.” Just this May, two gay leaders were violently beaten following the cancellation of what would have been the first-ever gay pride parade to take place in Kyiv.

While Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych has not yet commented on the proposal, Yuri Meroshnichenko, a party member who serves as Yanukovych’s representative in parliament, has openly voiced his support. If passed, the bill could have far-reaching effects on those working in the country’s creative industries. Filmmakers like Robert Crombie, director of the 2008 film “Sappho” (a “landmark for the Ukrainian film industry,” and the first domestic film to gross more than $1 million, according to RussiaProfile.org), or photographers like Yevgenia Belorusets, whose project “A Room of My Own,” depicting LGBT families in the Ukraine, was recently seen at the Visual Cultural Research Center in Kyiv, could well face up to five years in prison and unspecified fines. 

Ruslan Kukharchuk, director of the anti-gay group known as Love Against Homosexuality has been speaking out for the bill, and in past interviews has called homosexuality “as natural as bestiality, necrophilia and pedophilia.” Attributing the increasingly tolerant treatment of homosexuals in the United States and western Europe to “years of propaganda,” Kukharchuk hopes the proposed bill will effectively ban any positive depiction of LGBT relationships in public. “We must stop the propaganda, the positive description and the publicity… of this abnormal lifestyle,” Pavlo Ungurian, one of the six legislators from who helped draft the bill, told reporters. “Our goal is the preservation of the moral, spiritual and physical health of the nation,” he said, describing the increasing intolerance of the LGBT community in the West as “not evolution, but degradation.”