PLAYBOOK INTERVIEW

Who cares about gay pride in Sofia?

Brussels is bathed in rainbow flags as LGBTQ communities in other European countries face fundamental problems.

The annual Brussels Pride parade takes place May 20, on the heels of International Day Against Homophobia. For LGBTQ activists there are now bigger problems than the status of same-sex relationships in Europe’s de facto capital.

This week EU institutions flew rainbow flags and projected them onto the European Commission’s Berlaymont headquarters. The Brussels local government painted pride-themed pedestrian crossings. Thousands tweeted support for equality. Few LGBTQ communities in Europe have the luxury to appreciate that flurry of activity.

A new catalogue of the state of LGBTQ rights in Europe produced by the campaign group ILGA Europe shows a yawning gap between the human rights promises of the EU charter of fundamental rights and the reality for LGBTQ communities.

While Malta, Norway and the U.K. get good grades in the ILGA Europe report, there is a massive gulf between them and the worst EU performers: Latvia, Lithuania and Poland.

In some parts of Europe, gay people now fear for their lives. A claim of genocide was filed May 16 in the International Criminal Court by three French NGOs against officials in Chechnya, Russia.

POLITICO Brussels Playbook spoke with a Bulgarian activist, Radoslav Stoyanov of the Bulgarian Helsinki Committee, to understand what it is like in Bulgaria to enforce rights granted through EU membership, and what happens at a pride event that exists in parallel to an “anti-gay parade.”  

Stoyanov has been campaigning for his rights for more than 10 years, a career that started with the translation of Wikipedia articles on homosexuality into Bulgarian at age 17.  

“There was not much information in Bulgarian. It was English language information that showed me that it was OK and that there are millions of people like me,” he said. 

It was through his online research that Stoyanov learned that as a new member of the EU, LGBTQ Bulgarians were entitled to legal protection: “So I started filing cases, mostly against media, with our anti-discrimination commission. They were strategic cases against bad language and stereotyping. I was successful with most of the cases.”

But in recent years Stoyanov’s work has begun to crash into barriers. Today there is an apathy — present in Bulgaria’s LGBTQ communities, its political class and the general population — that stops equality from being achieved.

Bulgarians tend not to trust their institutions; be they the government, media or NGOs. “When you don’t trust institutions, you don’t engage with political life, and that includes LGBT organizations — it covers all issues,” Stoyanov said.

A growth of a visible LGBTQ community in Bulgaria’s post-Soviet era was undercut by the arrival of internet apps.

The apps allow gay people to find each other, meet, and form small networks. Alongside this, the need for cafés and bars as meeting places has diminished, as have opportunities for activists like Stoyanov to organize. “Now people are pretty much happy being in the closet,” Stoyanov lamented.

While Sofia Pride, set for June 10 this year, has slowly grown in size over the last decade — to around 2,000 people attending in 2016 —  so has the backlash.

Sofia Pride is typically accompanied by an “anti-gay parade” and next to no political support.

While ambassadors from Western countries have happily joined the stage at Sofia Pride, and individual Bulgarian politicians have participated in past events, only ultra-nationalist parties take an organized view. They’re against the event. 

Despite all of this, Bulgaria is not the most difficult European terrain for LGBTQ campaigners.

While only 27 percent of Bulgarians believe there is nothing wrong with a same-sex relationship, 51 percent told a 2015 Eurobarometer survey that they supported equal rights. That compares to just 36 percent in neighboring Romania and Slovakia. 

Activists in Romania face a similar mixed record to Bulgaria, with challenges ahead.

The first Romanian pride event in 2004 was cancelled and for years the crowd was smaller than 300 — a world away from the hundreds of thousands who join events in cities such as New York, Amsterdam and Sydney.

While today the crowds in Bucharest include politicians and pop stars, several recent reports have catalogued an institutionalized acceptance of homophobia and tolerance of homophobic violence in Romania.

Back in Bulgaria, Stoyanov is trying to take his case to the media.

“We are invited by online media to discuss LGBT issues, but always in a debate with far-right nationalists. We don’t have a chance to send a positive message because it is always a defensive situation against attacks from ultra-nationalists,” he said.