Rainbows Don’t Bite

I don’t consider myself any kind of revolutionary, Norman Röhlig wrote. He’d been sitting on a vacation terrace somewhere with a bad Aperol Spritz, furious and sad, aware that he lived inside what he called the Berlin bubble—the comfortable, tolerant air of a city that has the luxury of being tolerant—while in Russia, gay men and women were being hunted on social media by organized vigilantes, tortured, and killed. Röhlig was the owner of a small PR agency. He did not go to demonstrations. He had done nothing yet. I know that besides all the screaming I’ll manage to do nothing again, he wrote. That turned out to be wrong.

His call to action found Julian Laidig and several others who took the idea and made it structural. They called the movement "Enough Is Enough" and organized a march through Berlin on August 31, 2013, demanding an end to state-sanctioned violence against gay, lesbian, intersex, and trans people in Russia. They marched to the Russian embassy. Thousands showed up, including spontaneous passersby who joined mid-route with no prior plan.

Vladimir Putin had signed into law a ban on the "propaganda of non-traditional sexual relations" in the presence of minors—which in practice meant homosexuality couldn’t be discussed in public at all, except in condemnation. Holding hands with your partner could get you arrested. Or beaten by vigilantes who organized on social networks specifically to track down and attack gay people, often filming it. The police watched. At least one young man reportedly died from his injuries.

The march aimed at more than the Russian government. Germany and its corporations were preparing to participate in the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi—McDonald’s, General Electric, and Panasonic were official sponsors. The demonstrators wanted these companies, and the German government, to say plainly that a state criminalizing its gay citizens violates human rights. That’s not a complicated position. It shouldn’t require a march to establish it.

Something Röhlig wrote stays with me: the gap between screaming about something from a comfortable position and actually moving. The Berlin demonstration was loud, colorful, full of music. It moved through the streets and reached the embassy and was, by any measure, a success as an act of collective will. Whether it moved the sponsors is a different question. Rainbows don’t bite, and corporations know it.