Sochi's gays wary of world's attention

[Graeme]

Sochi's gays wary of world's attention

"We just want Western journalists to leave us alone," says the club's co-owner, Roman Kochagov.

They are scared.

You might be, too, if you knew that you could walk out of that club one night the way 24-year old Andrey Ozerny did and end up on the wrong end of an attack by a cab driver.

[The Pecman]

Hey, but the mayor of Sochi insists the town has no gays!

http://sports.yahoo.com/news/sochi-mayor-claims-there-are-no-gay-people-in-sochi-080120594-olympics.html

[Graeme]

That's in the article I linked Andrey Ozerny wrote a letter to the Mayor to inform him otherwise...

[Chris James]

The gay community in Sochi has every right to be worried. Just imagine the gold mine of information being collected by the Russian authorities who have hacked into the private communications of all those people attending. You know they are doing just that.

[Nigel Gordon]

I have some friends in the Sochi area and they are rather upset with the attitude of the Western press who are there. It seems that there are some reporters who are actively going out and looking for a homophobic incident to give them a headline. My friends suspect that some of them are identifying gay meeting places to some of the homophobic groups in the area in the hope of instigating an incident which they can then report.