What a Soap Opera Can Do That Laws Can’t

Russia in 2013 was operating under its "gay propaganda" law—legislation that had taken discrimination and given it official cover, turning local authorities into willing participants and providing bored gangs with something to aim at. People were being beaten, arrested, driven out, and occasionally killed, while the state either looked away or nodded along. The Sochi Winter Olympics were months out, and the international response ranged from diplomatic protest to full boycott: Germany’s then-president Joachim Gauck was among those who declined to attend.

Director Catherine Polyanskaya’s response to all of this was Moonlight People—the first Russian gay soap opera, based on real events, aimed squarely at a younger audience. The logic is the right one: changing laws doesn’t change minds. What changes minds is recognition—seeing people who resemble you, or who resemble someone you love, in situations that feel true. A serialized drama can do that in ways a court ruling can’t. Polyanskaya designed the show specifically to make gay and lesbian lives visible to people who had been told, by their government and their neighbors, that those lives were either nonexistent or criminal.

Whether it worked is a longer and sadder story than any single series could resolve. But the instinct—to put human faces on an abstract political hatred, to make an audience feel something before they decide what they think—is correct. Propaganda works by flattening people into categories. The answer is to complicate them back.