The Advocate is a magazine that exists to?stand up for LGBT rights, inform its readership of LGBT issues, politics, news, and entertainment. They are an undeniably influential voice in the LGBT community.

So why did they choose Vladimir Putin as The Advocate Person of the Year?

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Not An Honorific

In case you wondered, the exact placement of the words “Person of the Year” was not an accident. This selection was not made to laud Putin’s achievements, but rather to call attention to his atrocities.

Evoking the mustache of a man known for the oppression and mass murder of innocents serves as both a condemnation for actions committed by the Russian government, those the government has allowed to be committed in their name, and those the LGBT community fears may indeed be forthcoming. And there is no reason to believe those fears will not prove to be?well founded.

?Imagine a boy who dreams of being a KGB officer?when everyone else wants to be a cosmonaut.?

This quote appears early in The Man Without a Face, Masha Gessen’s 2012 biography of Vladimir Putin.?The Advocate

Those words were written?early because they succinctly sum up the nature of the man. His childhood dream was not adventure, discovery, or even national acclaim. Instead his innermost desire was for?power, power won by intimidation, espionage, and fear. Can there be any surprise that he has shamelessly employed all these tactics to achieve and maintain his status?

The Power of Propaganda

One look at Russian media proves the point. What can they do but parrot the administration’s agenda? After all, they are owned by the state, and for all intents and purposes, Putin?is?the state. But as skewed as a government owned media may be, the onslaught doesn’t stop there. Putin’s message is also backed by the?Russian Orthodox Church whose leader recently referred to same-sex marriage as “a very dangerous sign of the apocalypse.”

With their government telling them homosexuality is perverted and intolerable, their media echoing the sentiment, and their church piling on, is it any wonder that a large majority of the Russian people believe exactly that?

No Sign of a Turning Tide

Since the beginning of Putin’s third term in 2012 his agenda has become ever?more extreme. He has signed a bill making it illegal to distribute material targeting minors with “nontraditional sexual attitudes,” and announced at the Olympics that the LGBT community would be safe as long as they didn’t engage Russia’s youth.

The biggest issue with these actions is that they strongly imply that the LGBT community is somehow targeting children in the first place, that the only way someone might?be LGBT is by being corrupted through outside influence. The language is specifically chosen to characterize members of the LGBT community as predators looking to steal kids.

And that intention brings us all the way back to The Advocate’s choice of a Hitleresque image. After all, if there’s one thing Hitler?taught us, it’s that there is no more effective way to unite a country than choose a minority to demonize, and we all know how that turned out.

Is it any wonder The Advocate considers Vladimir Putin as the single biggest threat to the LGBT community existing in the world today?


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