“They assaulted and humiliated me a lot,” says a disembodied voice as a figure stalks and prowls across the floor of a barren warehouse, jerking bolt upright then collapsing on the ground. “They asked for 500,000 rupees for my release.”
Dancer and choreographer Kosta Karakashyan remembers where he was when he first heard the news of the “gay purge” in Chechnya, a semi-autonomous Russian region that came under international scrutiny for its brutal crackdown on LGBTQ+ people under strongman Ramzan Kadyrov. “I was at Pride,” Karakashyan, who was born in Bulgaria but studying at Columbia University in New York City at the time, tells them. “I read about it, but I wanted a more in depth look. So I went to the Russian LGBT Network site.” Read more via them