Youth Exchange. Hamburg - St. Petersburg.

19.08.2014

From July 28 to August 3, 2014 volunteers of ComingOut and SideBySide cinema festival made a trip to Hamburg in frames of youth exchange between St. Petersburg and Hamburg. As in previous years this week in Germany was filled with activities: visits to volunteer organizations, discussions with local LGBT community, meetings with city politicians and citizens who are interested in life of young people of Russia today.

It was the first exchange experience for the majority of the group. The team was interested to learn about the work of German LGBT organizations (LSVD, German Gay and Lesbian union) and other organizations who support non-heterosexual and non-cisgender people. We were all impressed with the visit to AIDS-Hilfe - support center for HIV-positive people, especially for homosexuals. Center staff shared about the cooperation with educational institutions, mentioned about difficulties in communication with high-school homophonic students and about teachers who avoided discussions of sexual growing-up with students. At the end of the meeting we were shown visual materials that AIDS-Hilfe volunteers use for education of school student about HIV protection.

It was very crowded meeting when we met politicians at the the day when rainbow flag was hoisted on the city hall. Aside of Filipp Sebastian Kun, LGBT issues representative at the city parliament of Hamburg, there were Farid Muller, ‘Green alternative’ political fraction representative, and several dozens of journalists and young citizens of Hamburg. We discussed results of recognition of ComingOut as a ‘foreign agent’, difficulties with finding venues for SideBySide Cinema festival and QueerFest, HIV prevention among MSM in Russia and medical support for HIV-positive and many other topics.

During all days of our trip we were surprised and carried along by the constantly high interest of German journalists to the events of public life of Russia. We participated in panel discussion on the main grand stand CSD, several times we talked with representatives of German radio stations and papers. Last year the main theme of questions we were asked was so-called ‘propaganda of homosexualism’. This year people were interested in the foreign agent status, introduction of ‘distribution certificates’ for movies, how do NGOs operate in new conditions. Unfortunately, not for all the questions we were able to give consistent answers - since for us these legal initiatives are shock as well. Our volunteer translators admitted with sadness that translating the Russian situation into other languages had been getting more and more difficult each year. The more joyful it was for us to join the Hamburg Pride and hear words of support from its organizers, participants and viewers, and also from all those who came on Friday and Saturday for the joint info stand LSVD-Hamburg, ‘ SideBySide and ComingOut.

WE express our deep gratitude to Barbara Mansberg and Wolfgang Proyssnes for making this trip possible and for making it the way it went.

We thank Vozyanov Andry (text) and Evgeniy El (pictures)