News
Gay asylum seeker flees violence in Putin’s Russia
Nasonov, boyfriend left Russia in July after bloody attacks
Andrew Nasonov (Washington Blade photo by Vladyslav Rekhovskyy)
Andrew Nasonov was at a protest in the Russian city of Voronezh against the country’s controversial proposal that sought to ban so-called anti-gay propaganda to minors on Jan. 20, 2013, when a lawyer with the country’s Orthodox Church encouraged nationalists and hundreds of other people to attack him and the handful of other LGBT rights advocates who were protesting.
He said local police questioned him about the attack before another group of people who identified themselves as members of the Moscow Criminal Investigation Department kidnapped him and brought him to a basement. Nasonov said the men took his passport, backpack and cell phone, beat him and threatened to take him to a nearby forest before releasing him five hours later.
“They tried to make me say that I had tried to murder someone,” he told the Washington Blade during an interview in Lafayette Park adjacent to the White House, speaking through an interpreter. “At the same time they assaulted me and abused me and called me gay.”
Nasonov, 25, and his boyfriend arrived in D.C. on July 2 in hopes of receiving asylum in the United States.
Nasonov told the Blade they decided to leave Russia after the Voronezh Human Rights House, a local advocacy organization with which he was connected, was attacked. Nasonov said those affiliated with the group were also targeted.
“I worked with those people,” he said. “After all those things happened, I decided to move to the U.S.”
Mother urges lawmakers to oppose gay propaganda law
Nasonov told the Blade he came out when he was 19 after “a long process.”
He does not speak with his father, and his grandmother is unaware of his sexual orientation. Nasonov said his mother cried when she found out he is gay, but she soon accepted his homosexuality.
Nasonov said his mother in a video she made urged Russian lawmakers not to approve a bill that sought to ban so-called gay propaganda to minors in the country.
He told the Blade she did not experience any repercussions from Russian authorities over her opposition to the measure that President Vladimir Putin signed in June 2013.
“She lives in a small village and they don’t have that much information about all this LGBT activity,” said Nasonov. “People know (that I’m gay) and they sometimes terrorize my mother (by asking her) do you know that your son is a ‘faggot.’ And she says OK, but he’s born this way.”
Russia’s LGBT rights abuses ‘may change’ when Putin leaves office
Nasonov, who worked as a part-time freelance reporter for Novaya Gazeta, an opposition newspaper, told the Blade he feels Russia’s LGBT rights record has continued to deteriorate since Putin signed the propaganda bill into law.
Two masked men last November attacked members of a Russian HIV/AIDS group with air guns and baseball bats as they attended a meeting of a support group in the organization’s St. Petersburg offices.
Police in Moscow and St. Petersburg in February arrested more than a dozen activists who tried to stage pro-LGBT protests hours before the opening ceremony of the 2014 Winter Olympics that took place in the Black Sea resort city of Sochi. Russian authorities detained Vladimir Luxuria, a transgender former Italian parliamentarian, twice during the games.
Bomb threats and venues abruptly cancelling events disrupted the Russian Open Games that drew more than 300 LGBT athletes from Russia and other countries a few weeks after the Olympics ended. Authorities in May arrested several people who took part in separate LGBT rights demonstrations in Moscow.
Coming Out, a St. Petersburg-based LGBT advocacy group, waged a 16-month battle against a 2012 law that requires groups that receive funding from outside the country to register as a “foreign agent.”
A local judge in July ruled Coming Out must register as a “foreign agent.”
National Organization for Marriage President Brian Brown is among the American anti-LGBT advocates who attended the International Family Forum in Moscow that ended on Sept. 15.
“As far as Putin is the head of state, there is no chance for the situation to get better,” said Nasonov. “It’s only after he resigns or whatever it is that it may change.”
Nasonov seeks to help fellow asylum seekers
President Obama, Secretary of State John Kerry, U.S. Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), U.S. Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-Fla.) and other American and European officials have repeatedly criticized Putin over his support of Russia’s gay propaganda law. The Kremlin has also faced scathing criticism from the West over the annexation of Crimea and the war in eastern Ukraine between the Ukrainian government and pro-Russian separatists.
Nasonov told the Blade the lawyer who organized the attack against him in January 2013 has recruited what he described as “volunteers” to fight in eastern Ukraine. He said this man subsequently went to the region to fight alongside the pro-Russian separatists in the country’s Donbass region that includes the cities of Donetsk and Luhansk.
Voronezh is less than 200 miles from the Ukrainian border.
“It’s just like an invasion of Russia into Ukraine,” said Nasonov.
Nasonov and his boyfriend, who have been together for more than four years and currently live in Silver Spring, have yet to formally apply for asylum because they said they need someone to translate the necessary paperwork into Russian. The couple continues to receive support from Spectrum Human Rights, an advocacy organization that works with LGBT Russians and those from former Soviet republics who are seeking refuge in the U.S.
Nasonov has also begun standing outside the White House on some afternoons with a large sign that highlights his plight and those of other LGBT Russians.
He hands passersby a flier that details his experiences in Voronezh. It also contains a picture of him laying on the ground with blood on his face after he was attacked during the January 2013 protest.
“I’m trying to tell Americans who come to the White House about the situation in Russia,” Nasonov told the Blade before he walked onto Pennsylvania Avenue and stood in front of the Executive Mansion while holding his sign. “I’m trying to put pressure on the Russian government from here and to help other Russian LGBTs who are here already who came to Washington seeking asylum.”
Editor’s note: Nasonov is the first in a series of LGBT Russian and Ukrainian asylum seekers the Blade plans to highlight in the coming weeks.
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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