News
Putin bans demonstrations, public gatherings around Olympics
Russian activists say decree designed to stop challenges to anti-gay law
Russian President Vladimir Putin (Photo public domain)
The official newspaper Rossisskaya Gazeta reported the order specifically prohibits demonstrations, pickets and other public meetings “not connected with the Olympic games” in Sochi between January 7 and March 21. It said the decree also establishes checkpoints and limits vehicle access to the city during the same period in response to what Putin described as security concerns over terrorists from the volatile Caucasus region to the east of the resort on the Black Sea who have threatened to attack the games that will take place between February 7-23.
Putin also banned the sale of weapons in Sochi during the period.
Russian LGBT rights advocates with whom the Washington Blade spoke on Friday said they feel Putin issued the decree, in part, to stop any protests of the country’s broadly worded gay propaganda to minors law during the games.
“It is designed to prevent demonstrations around the propaganda against homosexuality law and other violations of civil freedoms,” Polina Andrianova of Coming Out said during an interview from St. Petersburg. She also dismissed security concerns as a justification for Putin’s decree. “It still doesn’t give him the power to do something that’s not constitutional. It’s not an excuse.”
Nikolai Alekseev of Gay Russia told the Blade “of course” the decree is designed to specifically stop any public challenges of the gay propaganda law and Russia’s LGBT rights record. He said his group plans to appeal the order and the 2007 law he said granted Putin the right to limit public assembly in the country to Russia’s supreme court next week.
Maria Kozlovskaya of the Russian LGBT Network told the Blade from St. Petersburg she feels the decree could also be used to stop non-LGBT protests during the Sochi games.
“It might not be just about LGBT rights, but human rights in general,” she said.
Putin issued the degree against mounting global outrage over the gay propaganda law he signed in June and Russia’s LGBT rights record.
Russian chess champion Gary Kasparov and gay playwright Harvey Fierstein are among those who have called for a boycott of the Sochi games. Author Dan Savage, LGBT rights advocate Cleve Jones and others have called for a boycott of Russian vodka.
President Obama, retired tennis champion Martina Navratilova, gay Olympic diver Greg Louganis and a number of LGBT advocacy groups are among those who feel the U.S. should compete in Sochi.
American runner Nick Symmonds criticized Russia’s gay propaganda ban last week during an interview with a Russian news agency after he competed in the World Athletic Championships in Moscow. Figure skater Johnny Weir, whose husband is of Russian descent, told CBS News earlier this month he is “not afraid of being arrested” while at the Olympics.
High jumper Emma Green Tregaro and sprinter Mao Hjelmer, who are from Sweden, painted their fingernails in rainbow colors as they competed in the World Athletic Championships. Green Tregaro wore red fingernail polish during an August 17 high jump competition at the same event because Swedish athletic officials reportedly asked her to change their color.
Yelena Isinbayeva, a Russian Olympic pole vault champion, defended the gay propaganda law as she criticized Green Tregaro and Hjelmer during a press conference last week after she won her third title at the World Athletic Championships. Russian sprinter Kseniya Ryzhova on August 20 dismissed suggestions she and teammate Tatyana Firova challenged the statute when they kissed on the medal podium after they won the women’s 4 x 400 meter rally at the event.
The Russian government did not immediately return the Blade’s request for comment on Putin’s decree.
The International Olympic Committee on Thursday said it had received additional assurances from Russian Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Kozak that gay people would be welcome to attend the Olympics.
The IOC declined to provide the Blade a copy of Kozak’s letter, but the Associated Press said he defended the gay propaganda law.
“These legislations apply equally to all persons, irrespective of their race, religion, gender or sexual orientation and cannot be regarded as discrimination based on sexual orientation,” Kozak wrote as the AP reported.
Andrianova told the Blade she feels Putin’s decree will affect more than LGBT Russians.
“It violates freedoms of all people,” she said. “It’s maybe directed at us, maybe not, but it violates the human rights of all people.”
Congress
10 HIV/AIDS activists arrested on Capitol Hill
Protesters interrupted Secretary of State Marco Rubio during hearing
U.S. Capitol Police on Tuesday arrested 10 HIV/AIDS activists who protested Secretary of State Marco Rubio during a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing.
The activists from Housing Works, Health GAP, the Treatment Action Group, and ACT UP held signs and chanted “Rubio’s Cuts Kill People with AIDS, PEPFAR Saves Lives!” before officers removed them from Dirksen Senate Office Building room where the hearing took place.
A media advisory the Washington Blade received before the protest noted “mounting evidence of Rubio’s attempts to sabotage PEPFAR (the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, U.S. bilateral AIDS program) and vital global health programs.” The press release specifically highlighted three specific points:
• Eliminating Centers for Disease Control’s (CDC) lifesaving PEPFAR programs, which currently support approximately 12 million people on HIV treatment across 51 countries. Instead, Rubio intends to dismantle CDC’s current PEPFAR role and stamp out their global footprint in disease outbreak and surveillance for pandemics beyond HIV. Experts including eight former CDC Directors under Republican and Democratic administrations have spoken out against this effort to dismantle PEPFAR. Recent PEPFAR data showed sharp decreases in the numbers of people newly tested, diagnosed, and treated for HIV, but these data would have been even worse if not for CDC’s PEPFAR programs.
• Withholding $2 billion in Congressionally appropriated FY25 funding, including $330 million to combat HIV, $250 million to fight malaria, $320 million for maternal and child health programs, and nearly $650 million in global health security programs.
• Negotiating secret bilateral deals blackmailing African governments by demanding access to critical mineral wealth as a condition of access to HIV treatment and prevention funding.
The groups have staged several protests against the Trump-Vance administration’s HIV/AIDS policies since it took office.
Rubio on Jan. 28, 2025, issued a waiver that allowed PEPFAR and other “life-saving humanitarian assistance” programs to continue to operate during a freeze on nearly all U.S. foreign aid spending. HIV/AIDS service providers around the world with whom the Blade has spoken say PEPFAR cuts and the loss of funding from the U.S. Agency for International Development, which officially closed on July 1, 2025, has severely impacted their work.
The State Department last September announced PEPFAR will distribute lenacapavir in countries with high prevalence rates.
The New York Times last summer reported Vought “apportioned” only $2.9 billion of $6 billion that Congress set aside for PEPFAR for fiscal year 2025. (PEPFAR in the coming fiscal year will use funds allocated in fiscal year 2024.)
Bipartisan opposition in the U.S. Senate prompted the Trump-Vance administration last July withdraw a proposal to cut $400 million from PEPFAR’s budget. Vought a few weeks later said he would use a “pocket rescission” to cancel $4.9 billion for HIV/AIDS prevention and global health programs and other foreign aid assistance initiatives that Congress had already approved.
The White House in January expanded the global gag rule to ban U.S. foreign aid for groups that promote “gender ideology.” President Ronald Reagan in 1985 implemented the original regulation, also known as the “Mexico City” policy, which bans U.S. foreign aid for groups that support abortion and/or offer abortion-related services. Advocacy groups insist the expanded rule will adversely impact HIV prevention efforts around the world.
“Congress must stop Secretary Rubio before he dismantles PEPFAR,” said Treatment Action Group’s Kendall Martinez-Wright. “Rubio continues to defy the will of Congress and the American people who want this program restored and repaired. Under his leadership he is diverting funding and trying to eliminate the essential role of technical experts in global HIV and global health, while program performance is flailing.”
District of Columbia
JR.’s hosts meet & greet for mayoral candidate Janeese Lewis George
Event organized by Capital Stonewall Democrats, Queers for Janeese
D.C. mayoral candidate Janeese Lewis George spoke to a crowd of LGBTQ supporters on June 1 at a meet & greet event held at JR.’s on 17th Street in the Dupont Circle neighborhood.
The event, organized by Capital Stonewall Democrats, which has endorsed Lewis George for mayor, with support from a group called Queers for Janeese, was followed by a “get out the vote” canvassing endeavor in which several of those attending the meet & greet visited the homes of nearby residents known to be Lewis George supporters.
The purpose of the canvassing was to remind Lewis George supporters to return their mail-in ballots or go to the polls on June 16 to elect Lewis George as the city’s next mayor, according to Matthew Kavanagh, one of the leaders of Queers for Janeese who attended the meet & greet event at JR.’s.
Local political observers consider Lewis George, a Ward 4 D.C. Council member, and former At-Large D.C. Council member Kenyan McDuffie, to be the two leading candidates in this year’s race for mayor. The two are among seven mayoral candidates competing in the city’s June 16 Democratic primary.
Lewis George told those attending the meet & greet, which was held on the JR.’s outdoor patio, that she has a long record of advocating for and initiating city polices and laws in support of the LGBTQ community. She said large corporate donors were backing her opponents and urged her LGBTQ supporters to help raise funds for her in the remaining days of the campaign.
Among those attending the meet & greet was gay longtime Dupont Circle civic activist Randy Downs who last November opened a nearby eatery called Protest Pizza. “I am queer and I am a Janeese supporter,” Downs told the Blade.
Stevie McCarty, president of Capital Stonewall Democrats, who also spoke at the meet & greet event, said his group would organize events in support of Lewis George in the remaining days of the campaign. Among them, he said, was an LGBTQ bar crawl in which supporters of Lewis George, including the candidate herself, would visit LGBTQ bars to promote her candidacy.
Virginians for Marriage Equality on Monday launched a campaign in support of repealing Virginia’s constitutional amendment that defines marriage as between a man and a woman.
Equality Virginia Executive Director Narissa Rahaman, former state Sen. Adam Ebbin, former state Del. Mark Sickles, and American Civil Liberties Union of Virginia Executive Director Mary Bauer are among those who spoke at the launch that took place in Richmond. State Del. Kirk McPike (D-Alexandria), who co-chairs the campaign, also participated.
“This amendment is about making clear that the government has no business deciding which marriages or which families are worthy of recognition,” said Bauer. “The ACLU of Virginia has been fighting for Virginians’ right to marry who they love since the landmark case, Loving v. Virginia, which struck down the ban on interracial marriage. Now we are proud to carry that legacy forward by standing with our coalition partners in the fight to pass this amendment and finally enshrine the right to marriage equality in the commonwealth’s constitution.”
Voters in 2006 approved the Marshall-Newman Amendment.
Same-sex couples have been able to legally marry in Virginia since 2014. Former Gov. Glenn Youngkin, who is a Republican, in 2024 signed a bill that codified marriage equality in state law.
Two successive legislatures must approve a proposed constitutional amendment before it can go to the ballot.
Democratic Gov. Abigail Spanberger in February signed a bill that finalized the referendum’s language.
The referendum will take place on Nov. 3.
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