What Was Actually Happening While Everyone Laughed at the Sochi Hotels

The international press had a genuinely good time with the Sochi hotels in February 2014—the dual toilets, the brown tap water, the stray dogs roaming unfinished corridors. It was easy material, and the mockery wasn’t wrong exactly, but it had a convenient side effect: it gave everyone a safe register in which to talk about Russia without looking directly at the part that was harder to joke about.

In the rest of the country, gay and bisexual people were being beaten on the street and filmed while it happened, the footage circulated as either a warning or entertainment depending on who was watching. The contrast was genuinely difficult to sit with. This was the global sporting event, Russia’s grand gesture of openness, staged in a country running on state-tolerated homophobic violence. AllOut ran a petition—Love Always Wins—gathering signatures to pressure world leaders into pressing Putin to change course. Hundreds of thousands of people signed. You know signing a petition won’t fix anything, but you do it anyway, because the alternative is just watching and saying nothing at all.