Editor’s note: The videos above and below contain strong violence.
A YouTube video uploaded Tuesday shows a gay couple being attacked by a group of young members of a far-right group in the Ukrainian capital of Kiev after they were spotted canoodling on a bench.
“It looks like they’re mistaking this place for America,” shouts one young man with a shaved head from the group in the video. Moments later, another one squirts pepper spray in the couple’s faces while several more beat and kick them as they hurl homophobic slurs.
The attack was part of a social experiment on tolerance in Ukraine inspired by a similar one conducted in Moscow earlier this month (below). In both cases, a hidden camera captured public reactions to two men holding hands while walking in the city.
In June, a Supreme Court of the United States ruling made same-sex marriage legal in all 50 states.
But in Ukraine and Russia, conservative attitudes toward the LGBT community pesist — and in Russia, where the government has taken a harsh anti-gay stance, those attitudes have even worsened. In both countries, attempts to hold public pride events have been met with violence, if not banned outright.
The social experiment video in Moscow was uploaded to YouTube by ChebuRussiaTV earlier this month. In the video, two male actors explain that they want to “check how people in Moscow, Russia will react to a gay couple.”
ChebuRussiaTV placed a hidden camera inside the backpack of someone walking a few steps ahead of the two men in order to covertly film the reactions.
As the two men walk through Moscow and past some of the city’s most popular tourist attractions, passers-by make homophobic comments.
“Hey, look at the two gays walking by,” shouts one man.
“I’m not really surprised he said that, after all the reactions we’re getting,” comments one of the actors.
Another muscly man gives one of the actors a hard shove with his shoulder as he passes by. “What’s your fucking problem? Come over here, you gay!” the man says.
Ukrainian news site Bird in Flight recreated the experiment in Kiev this week, but featuring a gay couple instead of actors in the video.
Unlike in Moscow, passers-by did not shout homophobic slurs, but reacted to them “like aliens,” according to one of the men. Several people are seen staring as the couple walks past, and one young woman jokingly asks if the two men can “kiss each other for us.”
The couple then decides to take a “more provocative” approach. One of the men sits in his boyfriend’s lap on a bench along Kiev’s main promenade, Khreshchatyk Street. That’s when the violent group of about 10 to 15 young men attacks.
Almost 80% of Ukrainians oppose any sexual relations between people of the same sex, according to a 2013 poll conducted by the GfK Group. In another poll by the Ukrainian Gay Alliance and Ukrainian State Sociological Institute, 63% believed homosexuality to be “a perversion” and “a mental disease.”
Three-quarters of Russians “don’t think homosexuality should be accepted by society,” according to a 2013 Pew Research Center study.
Despite the attack, one of the men in the Kiev video says the fact that onlookers didn’t shout homophobic insults must be an improvement.
“People could have been thinking something [insulting] … but they decided not to say it aloud,” the man says in the video. “This alone is a step forward.”
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