Russian Arctic Circle city rejects gay pride parade application

Norilsk, Russia, January 15, 2018

Photo: nesiditsa.ru

The city administration of Norilsk, an industrial city in Krasnoyarsk Krai, Russia, has rejected an application from the Moscow sexual minorities activist Nikolai Alekseev to hold a gay pride parade on one of the city’s central streets, a city representative told Interfax-Religion today.

Norilsk is the world’s northernmost city and the second largest city, after Murmansk, inside the Arctic Circle. The bulk of its residents are metallurgists and miners.

Note that Norilsk is almost 1,800 miles from Moscow.

“The holding of a public event with your declared purpose of targeted propaganda for non-traditional sexual relations, given the intended route of the procession, infringes upon the rights of children and violates the demands of morality,” the city’s official response to Alekseev reads.

The city administration’s response was based on the law “On Protection of Children from Information Harmful to Their Health and Development,” which was first passed in Russia in 2010, prohibiting the distribution to minors of material depicting violence, unlawful activities, substance abuse, or self-harm, with a 2013 amendment adding a ban on materials propagandizing non-traditional sexual relationships.

Before the Norilsk officials’ refusal, the citizens of the northern city had shown some interest in seeing the parade come to fruition.      

Norilsk

As is evident from a large number of social network comments, the residents of Norilsk wanted to see how the sexual minority representatives would hold a parade through the city streets while forecasters were promising a daytime temperature of -31° and a wind force of 62 feet/second.   

The residents also wondered where the activists planned to recruit the declared 200 participants for the gay pride parade, given that Norilsk’s population is only 178,500.

The city of Salekhard, near the Arctic Circle and 560 miles west of Norilsk, denied a similar Moscow-led application last year for two meetings and a march to be held with supposedly 300 participants, citing the “On Protection of Children” law.

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