A new Belarusian organization is trying to open up minds about the queer community in a country teeming with stereotypes and misinformation.
“It’s silly not to recognize that we have a queer community in society,” says Daria Parafinyuk, a Belarusian activist. “But even though there is one, we are invisible, unheard, very stigmatized by society and discriminated against by the regime.”
At the heart of most of the prejudice, says Parafinyuk, is banal ignorance: ordinary Belarusians have no conception of terms such as non-binary or the acronym LGBTQ+; they have never had open conversations about gender and sex. And that’s exactly what needs to be changed, according to GetaOkay, an initiative Daria and a fellow Belarusian, Volha Kavalskaya, founded a little over a year ago after they had both emigrated to Georgia (the name stems from the Belarusian term for “it’s okay”).
The idea for the project emerged through a collaboration between the Russian NGO Frame – also now relocated to Georgia − and the Belarusian Human Rights School, where Daria and Volha were participants, to train people in developing social campaigns around rights issues.
Daria belongs to the queer community, and while Volha does not consider herself to be a queer person, she sees this as a bonus as she can be an “outsider” and notice some things that are not obvious to people within the queer community.
It took several months to work out the concept and get the project rolling. Not finding inspiration elsewhere, Daria and Volha developed GetaOkay from scratch. From the outset, they acknowledged that influencing the legal system or government action in Belarus would be difficult, if not impossible. But thanks to their experiences with activism in other organizations, they had an understanding of how to organize and work with ordinary people.
The guiding idea of GetaOkay soon gelled: to work with Belarusians and try to reduce stigmatization through educational and awareness-raising campaigns. “We were just going to tell, show, explain, and talk to people and thus reduce the level of aversion toward queer people,” Daria says.
At the same time, working with the queer community itself was not initially the goal, though this directive still appeared as a “by-product,” Daria says.
“In Belarus, in principle, there are a sufficient number of various initiatives and organizations that work with the queer community, but few work with the public on this issue,” she says.
“If You Talk to a Gay Person, You Will Become Gay Yourself”
Before beginning in earnest, the two co-founders felt that they had to better understand the myths that they would need to fight against.
“We roughly understood what prejudices against queer people exist in society, but we didn’t want these to be unsubstantiated, so we decided to do it scientifically,” says Volha.
The two women developed a questionnaire with open-ended questions and distributed it through social networks and messaging accounts of Belarusian civil society groups, selecting the responses of 445 Belarusians who did not identify as members of the queer community. They also conducted 10 additional in-depth interviews.
“Now both we and other organizations can build on our research as we work,” Volha says. “It was more qualitative than quantitative research, but we ended up with a pretty good sample of the most common stigmas and labels to work with first.”
Initially, they were very worried that few people would want to participate in the study, especially with open-ended questions. Colleagues from other initiatives warned that it usually doesn’t work.
“But the opportunity to openly express dislikes and negativity seems to have appealed to them, and people started to actively participate. I must admit that many of the questionnaires were very hard to read because of the negativity,” Daria says.
The two co-founders then identified six basic stigmas attached to LGBTQ+ people – such as the belief that people can be forced into being queer, leading to the fear that if someone socializes with such people, they will become queer too.
The second most common prejudice concerned parenthood. While people can be generally pretty neutral about queer people themselves, the idea that they should be able to raise children prompted aggressive reactions.
While no division of responsibilities within the group had been planned, it turned out that Daria, having coaching experience, became more involved in organizing various events and working with the queer community, while Volha was more involved in managerial work, research, and publicity.
Six months ago, Ksenia was added to the team to take care of promotion, and Maria was added as a designer – both also Belarusian emigres in Tbilisi (some names in this article have been changed for reasons of security.)
Circumventing Censorship
Since the disputed 2020 presidential election claimed by the country’s authoritarian leader Alyaksandr Lukashenka, the Belarusian regime has engaged in a brutal crackdown against any dissenting voices, including civic activists, journalists, and thousands of others, many of whom have fled abroad. In this atmosphere, individuals and media suspected of harboring any ideas undesirable to the regime, such as “non-traditional values,” are subject to repression and arrest, accusations of extremism, and having their websites blocked.
Given such existential threats and the existence already of various sites serving the queer community,the founders choose a hashtag strategy, with the thought that any online media can be banned, but not a hashtag.
“We liked the idea of introducing some element that would unite other information sites. This solution was the hashtag #ГэтаОкей, under which any media outlet or organization can publish material on the topic of queer. And the idea worked –the hashtag is being actively used,” says Daria.
Of course, not all ideas that initially seem brilliant end up working. The co-founders decided to try to motivate popular Belarusians to share stories related to queer topics, but it didn’t work as well as they hoped.
“We wrote to them on social networks, asking to share stories with their audience,” says Volha. “But many were simply afraid to bring up such topics on their pages, some didn’t want to face the heckling or lose some of their audience. Some just said they would do it and went silent. This campaign can’t be called a complete failure, but we only managed to get about 30 posts. It was a disappointing experience for me.”
In-person events have also been a priority since GetaOkay’s start, and over the last six months alone, the group has organized or co-organized 11 cultural and educational offline gatherings both inside and outside Belarus: in Minsk, Mogilev, Vitebsk, Warsaw, Vilnius, and Tbilisi.
Among these events have been seminars with the media. The team tries to interest journalists, especially those from media outlets that are not oriented toward the queer community, to publish their material. They help choose a topic, find central characters for the stories, and talk about the language of hostility and how best to write on the topic of queer.
“After one of our media workshops, seven of the 20 participating outlets wrote to us saying they wanted to run stories on the topics we suggested,” says Volha. “It’s hard to measure success when we’re working with people’s beliefs, but … we had quite a lot of material [distributed] with a total reach of about 100,000 views. That’s a good result for us!”
Food for Thought
One of the outlets was the political news site Салідарнасць (Solidarity). Olga Kot, the author of the article, says, “Many people think that there are more important problems in Belarus today: repression, political prisoners, Russia’s war against Ukraine. But there is never a right moment, there is only now. Queer-themed articles are not just texts about gender identity. They are about people’s rights, about freedom of choice, about the right to be different, and the right to be equal. It is about all of us, it is about democracy.”
Given how deeply stereotypes have taken hold, as evidenced by GetaOkay’s research, Kot said it is critical that content debunking those myths appears in mainstream media and not only specialized sites read by activists.
“It’s our job to give people the ‘mind food’ to think about why the topic of queer people grabs them, why it makes them angry, why they feel that way. If this happened in your family, would it be the worst thing in your life? We don’t give any attitudes or ready-made positive labels. We allow our readers to think,” she adds.
GetaOkay additionally organizes seminars for people who would like to know more about gender issues. Olga Poloyko, an accountant from the IT sector, attended one of these events in Tbilisi:
“Before the seminar I knew about the LGBTQ+ community, of course, but I had not even heard about the existence of a [broader] queer community. It became interesting just to find out what it is in general,” she says. “It seems to me that everyone came to the lecture simply because the topic is interesting, unusual, and not particularly publicized. There are still a lot of blind spots. I realized that everything is much more complicated and much more diverse than I thought.”
She also valued the ability to receive trustworthy information, as opposed to searching online. “In these offline meetings, it’s much safer than looking for information on the internet. It’s more likely to be reliable, and you can always ask additional questions if you doubt something.”
The events in Tbilisi are publicized within the local Belarusian community and are held at Kropka, a Belarusian-run space available for free to activists to hold events for up to 25 people. Alina, who works at Kropka, says, “Our space has a non-discrimination principle and when I came to work at Kropka I didn’t really understand what that meant,” she says. “Now I’m learning how to use feminitives to ask people what gender to refer to them in.
“Before that I took a course about gender run by another organization, but it was quite complicated. But at the GetaOkay training I liked that the language was simple, and the participants didn’t hesitate to ask some perhaps even silly questions. Daria calmly reacted and answered them. There was no judgment, always a pleasant atmosphere.”
Work Inside Belarus
Almost nothing specific can be said about individuals in Belarus who identify as queer or groups that support them because of the risk of official persecution.
Even so, the queer community lives, and “is replenished with new, young, active people all the time,” Daria says. “Someone leaves, but a lot of people stay. Everyone inside Belarus is now working in a kind of guerrilla mode. To get into the community, you need someone to know you personally and be able to vouch for you. To get into an event, you need to give a password, which is transmitted only orally from person to person.”
Even with such precautions, the Daria and Volha say they understand the risks and acknowledge a feeling of responsibility for those who choose to stay in Belarus. Daria does not travel to Belarus, but helps coordinate events from a distance.
“One of the areas we work in is supportive events where people can just come to socialize, hang out, share their experiences. It can be art therapy or a simple tea party together,” she says.
The primary audience remains, however, those outside the queer community, which isn’t always clear to everyone, including some who have rebelled against the name of the initiative.
“I remember one activist commenting that ‘I don’t need to prove that I’m okay.’ But here I had to remind them that the queer community is not our target group. And the very concept of ‘it’s okay’ can be interpreted in different ways,” Volha says. “For example, it’s okay to be inquisitive and want to understand what gender is.”
But the main difficulty is the inability to reach out to the most negative part of society. That’s why GetaOkay’s work is frequently with people who are generally positive toward the queer community, those who don’t understand something, or in the worst case, display a neutral attitude. Aggressively minded people simply won’t even read articles and posts, and won’t come to lectures, say the founders. “Our task is to work on the cumulative effect, so that the theme of queer more and more seeps into the ordinary layers of life,” says Volha.
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Tanya Hendzel is a freelance journalist specializing in environmental and social topics. Originally from Belarus, she is currently living in Belgium.
This article was produced with the support of the International Visegrad Fund.
