The founder of the Moscow gay pride movement was convicted Friday of promoting homosexuality and fined $167 in the first prosecution under a controversial new St. Petersburg municipal law that human rights activists have denounced as homophobic.
Nikolai Alexeyev had been accused of spreading homosexual “propaganda” when he picketed St. Petersburg City Hall in April with a poster that read: “Homosexuality is not a perversion. Perversion is hockey on the grass and ballet on ice.”
The law, enacted in St. Petersburg on March 7, bans activities that would promote gay culture among minors. It calls for fines ranging from $167 to $16,700 for “publicly spreading information capable to harm the health, moral and spiritual development of under-age persons including forming in them deformed notions of social equality of traditional and nontraditional marital relations.”
Laws similar to St. Petersburg’s are in effect in other Russian cities and are under consideration by the Russian parliament, or duma, and by the city of Moscow.
