Gay Russians Pose For Alexander Kargaltsev

This might be considered a very serious post, but I think it's something that we should all be paying attention to and thinking about.

Something I have been following very closely over the last few months are the events in Russia. I'm sure I am not the only one here incredibly concerned about the path the Russian government is now taking, as it has many similarities to the early days of Hitler's Nazi Germany.

You are no doubt aware of the debate regarding the Winter Olympics being held in Sochi next year, and the efforts campaigners have taken to encourage a boycott. But there is more going on in Russia that people are not paying enough attention to.

The Russian government is furthering the extreme nationalist sentiment by creating "prison camps" across Russia, yet no one seems to know who the suggested inhabitants of these camps will be. There is a suggested law which would criminalize families where any member is LGBT, meaning that potentially hundreds of thousands of children will be snatched from their families and put into an abusive care system.

Just in the last few days there have been extreme right-wing riots in Russia, where minorities were attacked, with little action from the authorities to stop it. There are also more than 50 right wing Nazi groups openly discussing their attacks and planned abuses of minorities on the Russian version of Facebook, and this number is growing.

This photography project by Alexander Kargaltsev shares the images of young gay men who fled Russia for a better life in the USA. His models have all faced this homophobia and nationalist extremism before it even came to the worlds attention. This fanatical nationalist extremism has been growing in Russia for decades, and now it has almost a seal of approval from the Kremlin.

If I may ask you to be conscious of what is happening there, and happening elsewhere in other draconian nations too, and join forces with a Human Rights organization such as Amnesty International, perhaps we can do something to change it?