The protests in Belarus have brought together people from different parts of the wider society. Despite the often hostile attitudes of other protestors towards them, the LGBT community in Belarus continues to actively participate in the protests.

As of the end January 2020, 52 Polish municipalities have adopted a resolution on being “free from LGBT ideology”. As a result, the French municipality of Saint-Jean-de-Braye has broken off its partnership with the town of Tuchów in southern Poland and the Central Region - Loire Valley suspended co-operation with Małopolskie Voivodeship.

On September 16th 2019, the city council meeting room in Lębork (a town of about 40,000 people in the north of Poland) is full of media and observers from local civil society organisations. There are also two members of the Polish parliament (one from the ruling party, one from the opposition). The session is being broadcasted on the city’s website, but apart from that two television cameras are also recording.

Until recently a flag, painted on the balustrade, contrasted the otherwise concrete-grey waterfront next to the Angara River, which trenches the city of Irkutsk into halves. Its rainbow colors attracted attention of disapproving minds. Now it is gone, but those who painted it to hint at their irrevocable existence are still here. One of them stands at […]

Over a year has passed since the Russian independent press outlet Novaya Gazeta first published information detailing the massive persecutions and aggression against members of the LGBT community in the Chechen Republic.

The start of this year was an important moment in the socio-political history of Belarus. In late December 2017 a local feminist and anti-discriminatory group of activists called MAKEOUT published a unique LGBT magazine in Belarus. The journal bears the same name as the organisation and was already presented to the public in Minsk. Its content is a summary of the last 20 years of the Belarusian LGBT movement.

Why I am writing about this magazine here and why should we regard it as something significant? First and foremost, MAKEOUT is a professionally-printed publication which deals with a very sensitive topic, especially in a socially conservative post-Soviet country. When considering the regional context it is also quite remarkable that the publication does not come from Russia or Ukraine, but from Belarus, a country that was the least likely to allow such a publication, mainly because of the amount of negatives stereotypes and attitudes towards non-heterosexuals that still exist there. Against these odds, MAKEOUT has succeeded in creating something without precedence.