In accordance with Russia‘s purported “gay promotion law,” a gay Chinese national who is well-known on TikTok and YouTube will be expelled from the nation.
Haoyang Xu, a Chinese national, moved to study Russian at university, and Gela Gogishvili, 23, a Russian native, met two years ago on a dating app.
Being the cultural center and capital of Tatarstan‘s province, Kazan, they have spent the past year updating social media with posts about their daily lives there.
Simple enough are the YouTube videos.
For their 65,300 subscribers, they might recreate popular TikTok trends or sequences from movies, or they might just cuddle up in bed and kiss and hug each other.
Their TikTok videos for their 740,000 followers aren’t so different. Washing dishes or dancing together in their bedroom.
But on Wednesday afternoon, Haoyang was arrested by police outside a Burger King for promoting ‘non-traditional sexual relationships’.
In Russia, LGBTQ+ people are silenced by a powerful law that bans so-called ‘LGBTQ+ propaganda’ in any media, from streaming services and social media to films and music.
Passed in 2013, the law initially banned content seen by minors but was extended to all age ranges last November as part of President Vladimir Putin’s increasing effort to cast Russia as facing a battle against ‘corrupt Western values’.
In a YouTube video posted on the day of Haoyang’s arrest, Gela said that police stopped his boyfriend and asked to see his passport and registration documents.
He asked Gela to bring them to him at the restaurant, but when he arrived, the officers escorted them both to the Yapeyeva police station to check the documents were ‘not fake’.
‘It seemed like a trap,’ Gela said in the video, adding: ‘We arrive at the police station and they accused me of LGBTQ+ propaganda Article 6.21. Haoyang is threatened with deportation.
‘They deceived us.’
Gela claimed they were held in the station for five hours. They were only allowed a lawyer after one of the couple’s subscribers phoned the station and demanded they have access to one.
Gela said he was released three hours later, but Haoyang was detained overnight and his mobile phone confiscated by migration officials.
Robert Lebedev, the PR manager for the Moscow-based LGBTQ+ group Delo LGBT+, told Metro.co.uk that the couple have been targeted by high-profile homophobic campaigners since December.
In February, a local tipped the police about them Haoyang and Gela’s social media platforms.
‘They had to flee to Moscow to escape police pressure,’ Lebedev said, noting they sought legal help from Delo LGBT+, before having to go back to Kazan.
Haoyang was accused of uploading 19 videos in which the couple ‘touch each other on different parts of the body, including the genitals’, the court heard today.
Prosecutors accused Haoyang of ‘spreading among minors the desire to change sex’.
Their lawyer, Adel Khaydarshin, questioned the prosecution’s claim as the couple’s YouTube viewing statistics are not public and the content is listed as 18+.
He faced being fined up to 200,000 rubles (nearly £20,000).
On the couple’s joint Telegram, a post said Haoyang was found guilty and sentenced to a week in a temporary detention centre for migrants before being deported.
Gela told the Telegram news channel SOTA after the ruling: ‘We didn’t want to hide and scurry like rats. We wanted to fight for our rights and love.’
His lawyers will appeal the ruling.
‘It’s a scene we saw coming,’ Lebedev said, adding: ‘There was only a small chance Haoyang could escape.’
Ksenia Mikhailova, a lawyer for the advocacy group Coming Out, told Metro.co.uk that Haoyang’s guilty verdict captures the ways in which the ‘gay propaganda law’ can be especially punishing for non-Russian LGBTQ+ people.
‘(Article 6.21) of the Administrative Code against propaganda does not provide such a punishment (of deportation) for an arrest of a Russian citizen, only for foreigners,’ she said.
‘The anti-propaganda law makes foreign citizens more vulnerable to intersectional discrimination.
‘The law affects queer people in all aspects of their lives because it’s difficult to predict what behaviours will be recognised by a court as positive LGBTQ+ representation.’
Queer Russians are not the only ones caught in the law’s dragnet, she added.
‘It affects not only queer people – several people who are not LGBTQ+ activists are being recognised as “foreign agents” for LGBTQ+ propaganda,’ Mikhailova said.
Lebedev agreed. He said three out of four ‘LGBTQ+ propaganda’ cases since Putin ratified the law in November have been against non-Russian citizens.
‘They’re trying to present so-called “gay propaganda” as something non-Russian, that “we can never be gay, only foreign citizens and they should be deported”,’ he said.
‘This narrative is relatively new – and it scares us.’
Despite facing the same charges, Gela, Lebedev added, is unlikely to face the same fate as his boyfriend as he is a Russian citizen. He will, however, likely faces fines in the thousands.
Footage on Gela and Haoyang’s joint today Telegram showed Haoyang being led away in handcuffs.
‘Here it is in Russia, in handcuffs to lead a man for the fact he simply loved,’ the caption read.
‘Love is illegal.’