Haoyang Xu came to Russia from China to study Russian at Kazan Federal University’s Department of Philology. In 2020 he met Gela Gogishvili who recently graduated as a pharmacist in Moscow. After chatting online for some time, they soon began dating and in 2021 Gela moved in with Haoyang in Kazan. The couple made videos about their daily life and published a lifestyle blog which had a total of a million followers across various social media platforms.
Sometimes, Gela and Haoyang faced harassment and threats online. In March, it happened offline for the first time: Haoyang’s professor told him in class that a student has to behave in accordance with the “traditional values of the country where he is studying.” Soon, he was contacted by a man who introduced himself as an investigative officer, asking to meet with the student. After Haoyang refused, the stranger was seen at Kazan’s pharmacies looking for Gela.
Following legal advice, the couple left the city. However, due to financial troubles they soon had to return to Kazan where they were arrested and charged with “spreading LGBT propaganda.”
Here is a story of love amid discrimination, as told by Gela Gogishvili for Groza.
I was born and raised in Moscow, and my parents have been living there since they were teens. They both moved here from Georgia to study at university, then met each other, fell in love — and I was born.
Until age 20, I was closeted. No one knew about my orientation, not even my online friends. There were a few reasons for this. First of all, I understood that Russia has strict anti-LGBT laws, even though back then they weren’t as cruel as they are nowadays. (Since 2013, “propaganda of nontraditional sexual relationships” among children was outlawed in Russia. In 2022, the law against “LGBT propaganda” was made harsher, outlawing such “propaganda” among Russian citizens of all ages — Ed.).
Second of all, since childhood I’ve seen that people around me could be very violent towards anyone different from them. Because of my asthma, I had to spend a few years in a village near Vladimir, away from the smoky and polluted Moscow. There, I heard all kinds of ethnic slurs since I was the only non-Russian boy in my class. Because I’ve already experienced racism, it was clear to me that I could just as easily be discriminated against for being gay. Thus, I kept my orientation a secret.
And I also knew that my Georgian Orthodox Christian family would not accept me. Before puberty, I was repeating after my parents that gay people are “bad” and “deserve to burn.” When at age 13 I understood that my affection towards other boys was not friendly but romantic, I felt lost and disoriented. I was thinking, “What’s going on, am I gay or something? That’s impossible!” It seemed so inconceivable and unnatural that I even considered becoming a monk or living in a forest as a hermit. Luckily, nothing of that sort came to be, and eventually I managed to accept myself.
In the village, I couldn’t stay online for more than an hour per day because the connection was barely there and my parents prohibited me from using the internet for too long. Once I returned to Moscow and got full access to the internet, I started watching international TV shows, movies, and anime that I’d never seen before. I learned more about my orientation and how [gay people] live in Russia and abroad. And, with the help of K-pop, I found out more about loving myself, and by the age of 16 I began to accept my orientation, but still I couldn’t come out. I even started a social media page about Korean music, and when my subscribers found out that the admin was a guy, they were very supportive.
In school I was a hikikomori (a Japanese term referring to people with severe social withdrawal — Ed.), leaving my house only to attend classes. After I turned 18, I became more sociable and came out to my friends. They accepted me immediately, and I realised that I could have told them everything much earlier. Then my younger sister found out about my orientation. At first she thought I was joking, but soon she also accepted me the way I am.
My whole social circle turned out to be very supportive, but all of them were straight. So I decided to meet someone from the LGBTQ+ community and found a VKontakte page that queer people my age used to connect with each other in order to play board games. There, I met my first boyfriend, and six months after the end of that relationship I stumbled across Haoyang’s profile in the dating app Badoo.
We began messaging at the end of 2020. Haoyang spoke Russian very poorly back then, so I was often helping him with his studies. Two months later he decided to visit Moscow. There, we met in person and hung out together the whole time he was in the city. For a long time, we were unsure if we should start dating. After all, it is very difficult to maintain a long-distance relationship. But on the day of his departure we decided to give it a shot.
Regardless, we only dated long-distance for a month and a half. At the time my parents still didn’t know I was gay, but I already started posting videos of Haoyang and me on social media. At first, we simply followed TikTok trends. Then we recorded some videos hinting that we are an item. And once I saw positive feedback from an accepting audience, I started openly posting videos of us together. It was one such video that my cousin came across. It wasn’t the first time she intruded on my private life: previously she put me at odds with my parents by telling them about my hobbies and would say that “Georgian men don’t make TikToks, don’t watch anime, and don’t listen to K-pop. People will think you are gay.”
The following week I was packing and preparing to move to Kazan, but at the last moment I decided to meet with my parents. It went just as bad as I expected: we had a huge fight, they scolded me for not telling them anything, since they “would’ve helped me overcome this” — as though my orientation was some kind of illness.
In the end, nothing came out of the conversation: to this day they have not accepted me. In addition, every time I talk to them, they scold me for flaunting my personal life, for “shaming them and not taking their opinion into account.” Regardless, they are going to be all right — everyone around them thinks they’re a model Georgian Chistian family who kicked their gay son out. Even Timur Bulatov, a homophobe from St. Petersburg, who was involved in harassing Haoyan and me, has stated that he thinks that my parents are good people. And they really are, and they have always taken care of me, but they just haven’t accepted my orientation and relationship yet.
Besides, I don’t go out of my way to tell everyone that I’m gay, I don’t want to influence other people in any way, and I don’t parade through the streets with flags and slogans. My mom and dad post pictures of themselves on social media — what I do isn’t any different. I act just like everyone else.
Our blog originated very naturally — we simply posted the same type of content that most regular couples put out. The first big spike in viewership happened after I came out and moved to Kazan. At that time we were trending, each video would get a million views, and our audience grew. Then for a long time our content didn’t go viral, and we even considered stopping. But a new spike occurred after the beginning of the special military operation (calling the Russian invasion of Ukraine anything other than a “special military operation” is criminalised in Russia — Ed.).
We were always posting lifestyle content: shooting sketches for TikTok and following trends on YouTube, for instance, speaking only Chinese for 24 hours. No perversions, no calls for anyone to become gay or change their sex — which we are now being accused of — just stories from our lives. We never went beyond kisses in our videos, and even those were very light and free.
It was scary, especially for Haoyang, and what we feared the most was exactly what happened.
Over the two years of blogging, we faced a lot of discrimination. Sometimes a video would get two million views, and also a thousand comments from haters. For example, they often wrote, “Give me an AK-47 and I’ll do it”, or “Drop a bomb on them”, or “You must leave the country.” Even now, many media outlets report that I am also a foreigner, and, apparently, we came from Georgia and China to “corrupt Russian children”, so we should be deported. But I am a Russian citizen, no matter how sad this entire situation is.
Before the law prohibiting “LGBT propaganda” came into effect, the only thing homophobes could do was write angry comments. This led to our accounts being blocked several times, videos being deleted and not promoted. However, we had no idea that we would face a real witch hunt and persecution. Changes in legislation have given homophobes free reign to stalk and report us to the police.
Harassment and threats always stayed online and we never faced this kind of thing offline until 2023. But on March 3, a professor at the Kazan Federal University, where Haoyang studies, said in class that she had got a call from the police and was told that one of her international students was shooting “gay content.” She did not address Haoyan directly, and he is not the only openly gay person in the group, but he is the only one who has a media presence.
It’s unclear whether the lecturer actually had had a call from the police, or if it was some homophobe <who had called>, or she herself had seen our blog. Nevertheless, this really scared Haoyang, and so we made our social media accounts private. We didn’t know things were just getting started.
After that, I started getting calls from an unknown number, but I didn’t pick up, because I never answer if I see a call from a stranger. Then this person texted me, claiming that he was from Kazan’s criminal police, and asked me to answer the phone. It seemed strange to me that a law enforcement officer would write such messages and also address me by my first name only, so I shared what was happening with my subscribers.
Then we were contacted by the human rights organisation Delo LGBT+ (LGBT+ Case) who advised us to ignore the stranger. We were very worried and wanted to make sure that it was nothing but a prank, so we took the call and recorded the conversation. The caller wanted to convince us to meet with him in order to sign some documents, promising that everything would be fine, we just had to “pay a small fine.” He even said that he could come to us and added that he wouldn’t bring a gun with him. Later fellow pharmacists told me that an unknown man went around different pharmacies in Kazan with my photo, asking if they knew how to find me.
We shared all this with our lawyer and also with our subscribers. They told us about the homophobe Timur Bulatov, whom I had never even heard of before. It turned out that not long before these events, he had started posting on his blog about Haoyan and me, and the posts were then picked up by other homophobic blogs.
It was only later that I found out Timur Bulatov is known for stalking LGBTQ+ people (In 2019, his report that led to the persecution of an artist and LGBT activist Yulia Tsvetkova — Ed.) There are many rumours surrounding Bulatov, but I don’t think all of them are true. He likes to exaggerate his importance and considers himself a big shot who has all kinds of institutions under his thumb. For example, he believes that our case was taken up by Russia’s Presidential Administration.
Bulatov began posting around March 1-2, but, as it turns out, the unknown person from Novosibirsk reported us even earlier, on February 28. I don’t know why and how everything transpired exactly, but the social media picture looks as if there is a whole homophobic network where everyone knows each other and cooperates to persecute LGBTQ+ individuals.
Per the advice of a lawyer we left town, to keep ourselves safe and make it harder for the police to locate us. A lot of people ask why we didn’t leave the country at that point. There are two reasons: studies and money. Primarily, we stayed because Haoyan had a few months remaining in his program and we didn’t want to abandon it.
Besides, emigration is not that easy. Even to move from Kazan to Moscow you have to spend about ₽300,000, and moving to another country can costs many times that. With a salary of ₽30,000 and having to pay rent, buy food, and make loan payments, it is impossible to save up, because there are also your regular expenses — food, apartment, and loan payments. When my parents found out I was gay, they stopped supporting me. Since I didn’t find a job right away, I got into debt trying to make a living.
We were unable to stay in Moscow for long due to financial constraints, since I didn’t have a job there. So, at the end of March, we secretly came back to Kazan while pretending online that we were still in Moscow. But on April 5 we were detained.
On that day, Haoyang went to Burger King with his fellow students after his classes. There he was stopped by police officers who wanted to check his passport and registration (all foreigners who reside in Russia are required by law to register their address with the government — Ed.). That was the first time in a long while that he left home without his passport, so he asked me to fetch the documents. The policeman said everything seemed fine, but then asked us to come along to the police station in order to confirm the registration’s authenticity. Without giving it a second thought, we agreed. At the station, other policemen asked why we were detained. Those who arrested us immediately replied that we violated Article 6.21 [“propaganda of non-traditional sexual relations and/or preferences, gender reassignment”] of the Code of the Russian Federation on Administrative Offenses. We were incredibly naive to take the policemen at their word.
Our lawyer was not allowed to see us for some time, so for several hours at the police station it was just the two of us. In the end, I was released after five hours, while Haoyang was detained until the next day’s court hearing. We called and wrote to everyone who could’ve been of help. I didn’t know what to do and what would happen to Haoyang, who was treated by the police like some sort of a criminal.
Haoyang hid his orientation from his parents, believing that they would turn their back on him, just like mine had. In addition, he was scared to enter a confrontation with them because they could stop supporting him financially. It’s practically impossible for a foreigner to find legal work in Russia, and it’s impossible to pay for higher education with those wages.
Various media outlets, both Russian and foreign, covered our arrest, and Haoyang’s parents could have come across some of them. When I visited him in detention, he said that it didn’t matter anymore: let the Chinese media shout about what was happening and how badly Russian authorities treat foreigners.
During the trial, immigration officers removed one of the Chinese citizens who came to support Haoyang. Additionally, police officers now check passports of all potential foreign citizens on the streets of Kazan (we were unable to corroborate this information with news reports from the time — Ed.).
When [our story] reached federal news, even people who’d never heard of us before started supporting us. We’ve even encountered some homophobes who thought that we were being treated unfairly. Many of Haoyang’s lecturers spoke out in his defence, and all of my colleagues did the same for me, even though I have been previously fired from some jobs because of my sexual orientation.
On April 6, the day after the detainment, Haoyang had his trial. Initially, the session was open to spectators, so many people came to support us: followers, friends, acquaintances, and journalists. Perhaps that was why the trial switched locations, and then closed to most of the public.
I was incredibly anxious but was also genuinely hopeful that even if the judge doesn’t acquit Haoyang, they would at least take all the misconduct into account when making the decision. In the end, the court turned a blind eye to numerous violations within the police protocols and the case materials. No one batted an eye at how new documents appeared seemingly overnight, with some even missing our signatures. They also stated that the number of underage people in our audience was 1,790, which is absurd. Even I, try as I might, can’t find out how exactly many underage viewers we have. Even the fact that all our videos are marked as suitable for ages 18+ didn’t help.
We thought that there would be several court sessions and that there was enough time to prepare and gather our thoughts. However, Haoyang’s trial lasted for just two hours. That’s how much time it took to make the decision to deport him.
We were totally out of it, especially Haoyang. Adding to our worry was the news that before being deported he’d have to spend a week in an unidentified place and in unknown conditions.
My memories of those days are really muddled because I slept very little and worried about Haoyang. I cannot accept the fact that he’s alone, with phone access to his phone limited to just a few minutes per day. Even before any of this, it was difficult for me to sleep when he wasn’t next to me, but now it’s totally impossible.
Haoyang was very inspired by our followers’ support on social media. Users launched hashtags #свободухаояну (freedom for Haoyang), #freedomtohaoyang, and #освободитехаояна (free Haoyang), shared information about Hoyang’s situation and the Russian “LGBT propaganda” law, and kept demanding for him to be released. Many videos on this subject got millions of views. I hope that it will help. We can’t change the laws themselves but we might affect the opinion of the judge or help [other defendants] in similar cases.
I want this case to help other people get through similar struggles, and also to support them in fighting for their rights. Today, I often hear from lawyers or followers that there are many such criminal cases in Russia. However, they just aren’t covered by the media to this extent. And outcomes of these cases can be even more terrifying: some are forcibly confined to mental health institutions where they are “treated for gayness and lesbianism.”
I don’t look at other countries through rose-tinted glasses. Problems, prejudice, and oppressive governments can be found anywhere. Now I live not just a day at a time, but an hour at a time: everything keeps changing and that’s why it’s hard to predict what will happen next and where we will end up in a week or in a month.
I want to support those that ended up in a similar situation. There are many of us, and they are likely just as anxious as I am, hardly able to eat or sleep. Many foreigners and emigrants had already given up on Russia, but there remain many strong, good people in this country who, for various reasons, can’t leave. They are the ones who stand by our side in this difficult time.
Groza demands that charges be dropped against Gela Gogishvili and Haoyang Xu and calls for foreign youth organisations to boycott events organised by the Russian government. Here you sign a petition demanding their release.
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