Trying Anyway

Catherine Polyanskaya’s answer to Russia’s state-sanctioned homophobia was a soap opera. Moonlight People is the first gay soap opera in Russia, based on real events, aimed at young people in a country where being queer gets you hated, avoided, and in the worst cases killed by authorities or hired thugs.

Putin’s government has made that the actual structure. Gauck boycotted the Olympics over it. Dissenters catch hammers. This isn’t a cultural lag or private prejudice—it’s policy.

So she made a television show. Melodrama as response.

I understand the logic. Television gets into homes the way essays don’t. Watching people like you on screen, in their own stories—maybe that shifts something. Maybe one person’s nephew sees himself reflected and thinks differently about it. That’s the bet.

The problem is what television does and doesn’t do. It’s good at emotion, at making someone feel real and human. It’s terrible at changing minds in hostile places. You don’t watch a show and unwind a lifetime of state messaging. You don’t watch a show and start risking your life for something the government wants you to fear.

But there’s something to the attempt itself. The refusal to accept that the system is closed, the decision to make something true and put it on screen anyway—to insist that this story exists, right now, in Russia. Probably it reaches people already sympathetic. Probably it just gives shape to something already there. But the act of making it anyway, of broadcasting it in a country that hates what it represents—that matters.