Anton Krasovsky

Life and career

Krasovsky was born on 18 July 1975 in Podolsk and studied at the Maxim Gorky Literature Institute. In 2011 Krasovsky participated in the presidential campaign of Mikhail Prokhorov. He also worked as a journalist and editor at the pro-Kremlin NTV channel. He also worked at Kommersant, Yandex, Nezavisimaya Gazeta and Vogue, and other publications.

Krasovsky later began work at another pro-Kremlin channel, Kontr TV, started by himself and Sergey Minaev in December 2012. On 25 January 2013, during a discussion of a proposed national ban on "homosexual propaganda", Krasovsky revealed his homosexuality, stating on-air, "I'm gay and I'm as much a human-being as Putin and Medvedev." (Russian: Я гей и такой же человек, как Путин и Медведев.) His statement was not made available online or was deleted soon afterwards, and on 28 January Krasovsky resigned from the channel and denounced the working environment there. According to other sources, he was fired the same day. His face was soon censored from the show website and removed from the TV show's archives.

Krasovsky stated that he came out because he had enough feeling like a hypocrite. He later referred to the channel's entire output as "propaganda." In May, following the murder of Vlad Tornovy reportedly because he was thought to be gay, Krasovsky published an article in The Guardian denouncing homophobia in Russia. He wrote:

How did it come about that today in Russia a good gay person is a dead gay person? How did there come to be a law in the Duma that forbids justifying homosexuality? Until now, the only thing you were forbidden to justify in my country was terrorism.... So as far as the deputies are concerned I am not a human being in the same sense that they are; I am to be classed as scum, like a terrorist. As far as the deputies are concerned I am scum by the fact of my birth, and it was criminal negligence not to have made a note of that in my birth certificate. What seemed like a bad dream only a couple of years ago has now become reality. And it is terrifying to imagine what could happen tomorrow.

Krasovsky spoke out in August 2013 against the boycott of the 2014 Winter Olympics in Russia that some gay rights activists proposed. He said: "If you want to boycott Olympic games in Russia, you're trying to boycott 7 million gay people in Russia. You want to boycott me." He is interviewed about his experiences in the 2014 documentary film Campaign of Hate: Russia and Gay Propaganda.