Gay hunters: How criminal gangs lure men on dating apps before extorting cash and beating them

Institutional homophobia has made the victims easy prey, say activists, with a spate of attacks in the last month, writes Oliver Carroll in the Independent. Read on: 

It was supposed to be a harmless liaison, starting as it sometimes did: an attractive profile on a gay site, a few messages about nothing much at all, an exchange of photos, and an agreement to meet.

Sergei, 38, surname withheld, says he felt something wasn’t quite right about his date when they met in Shabolovka in Moscow’s southeastern suburbs. But it was only when the pair came home, entered the flat, and two assailants jumped out from behind the curtains that he started to realise how badly wrong things had gone.

The men announced to Sergei that his date was, in fact, a minor – even though his profile and appearance suggested he was at least 20. The attackers gave their victim a frightening ultimatum: “20,000 rubles (£250) or be outed as a poof and reported as a paedophile.”

Alamy

Sergei was lucky that a 20-year army career meant he could stand up to the men physically. After an hour, he managed to persuade them to go outside so he could try to get money from a cashpoint. From there, he ran.

His story is one of several crimes committed against gay men in Moscow over the last month.

The Independent was able to speak to three of the targeted men. They suggested that gangs operating in the capital had identified gay men as easy – and silent – victims.

The mechanism is almost always the same. Handsome young men entrap unwitting victims on dating apps and other gay sites. They lure victims to an apartment, where several other gang members are waiting. The assailants film their victim, extort money and threaten them with outing or worse. Usually, the victims pay up for a quiet life. On the occasions that they don’t, things can end brutally.

While an unwelcome reminder of the difficulties of being gay in Russia, these incidents are not an entirely new phenomenon — or even the worst examples of homophobia.

Chechnya aside, the peak of anti-gay violence in Russia came about four years ago, when groups led by the nationalist Maxim Martsinkevich (aka “The Hatchet”) entrapped, beat and humiliated dozens of gay men on camera. Martsinkevich and his “Occupy Pedophilia” gang operated on the heels of the Kremlin’s 2013 infamous anti-gay law.

But Martsinkevich and his crew were always less concerned with money than with serving a warped ideology.

Activists say the vast majority of the more recent attacks have been economic in their aims.

When it’s clear homophobic crimes are at play, the state does everything to avoid prosecution
Igor Kochetkov, Russian LGBT Network
That does not mean there have not been victims of violence. On several occasions, young men have been found in pools of blood following apparent robbery attempts, and without obvious signs of forced entry.

But today’s gangs do tend to be less violent, and instead use the taboo of homosexuality in society to keep the crimes as hidden as possible.

It’s an effective enough strategy, says Igor Kochetkov, the head of the Russian LGBT Network, a prominent advocacy group.

“People are reluctant to go to the police because they don’t want to reveal their orientation,” he says. “And the regular homophobic statements from officials don’t exactly encourage them.”

The Russian court system is not set up to help them, the activist says. When the odd case does reach court, it is usually processed as hooliganism or robbery; the hate element is never included as an aggravating factor. When Martsinkevich was finally arrested and jailed in late 2014, for example, it was for a racist video. No mention was made of the anti-gay aspects of his extremism.

“When it’s clear homophobic crimes are at play, such as what happened in Chechnya, the state does everything to avoid prosecution,” says Kochetkov.

According to Andrei Petrov, programme director of the LGBT+ advocacy group Stimulus, a lack of successful prosecutions is allowing the problem of date extortion to become more widespread.

In a survey conducted by his organisation in 2018, one in five members of the LGBT+ community reported that they had been victims of such hate crimes. Only a similar percentage report the crimes to police, and even fewer are properly investigated.

Given the lack of progress in Russian courts, Stimulus has decided to try their luck with the European Court of Human Rights.

Their test case, which dates from 2017, follows the familiar pattern. The victim, Yevgeny, 39, surname withheld, answered a profile on a love.mail.ru, a well-known dating site. He sent his picture; the other party sent his, and the pair agreed to meet by a block of flats in Moscow’s suburbs. Again, there were warning signs. The date said his name was Dima in messages, but introduced himself as Danila. But regardless, Yevgeny agreed to go upstairs to the flat.

There, a gang of eight men were waiting. They made sure Yevgeny’s quick date instead ended in a heavy beating, a request for money, and a threat to call the police for “paedophilia”.

Eventually, Yevgeny plucked up the courage to report the crime to the police. But since then, two years have passed without progress, with investigators refusing to open a criminal investigation.

“I believe the police were covering them up,” Yevgeny says. “I’ve no doubt the guys think they are completely untouchable.”

Activists and victims allege the Russian government’s own “homophobia” has fuelled the extortion business.

“The reason why these guys are getting away with it is because they are on the same side,” says Sergei. “One thing gives birth to another. They know they are doing the state’s work.”

‘Hater’ is the new dating app which matches you with others based on what you both hate

Have you heard of the new dating app for people who hate the same things?

Hater offers a different kind of dating experience. The app connects people based on what they hate.

Apparently, people who hate the same things are more compatible than people who love the same things, at least according to the app’s designers.

Brendan Alper, founder and CEO of Hater took his app on ABC’s hit show, Shark Tank.  He ultimately was offered $200,000 from shark Mark Cuban.

This app is available for free in the App store.  It’s been well-received in New York City, where it has many users.

Hater currently has approximately 10,000 active daily users nationwide.

For more information on Hater, click HERE.

(Source: WGNO)

How to stop breaking up

Libby and I spent our first hours together shelving board books and pop-up books and organizing the spinner racks with copies of “The Berenstain Bears” and “The Poky Little Puppy.” Between customers we talked.

She wore a vintage sweater and hippie earrings and had the posture of a heron. I was 24, a chain-smoker, and had just moved back to Denver after trying out life in distant places. The pay at the bookstore was dismal, but everything else about the place was transcendent. Including Libby.

A dancer from New Hampshire, she made found-art collages using old books and scraps of rusty metal, layers of Gesso and paint. She told me about herself, but it wasn’t until my first visit to her apartment, when she slid book after book about art and artists from her shelves and set them in my lap, that I really began to understand her: Kurt Schwitters, Andy Goldsworthy, Russian Paper Art. They told me almost everything.

In my apartment I returned the favor, handing over books of snake handlers, Irish poets, collections of saints. Within weeks we were dating.

Hearing Libby talk about her dance classes, watching her stoop to pet a dog tied to a lamppost and listening to her recommend “Frog and Toad Are Friends” to a young mother made it impossible for me not to fall in love with her. She was falling for me as well.

But our relationship wasn’t magic. We had a lot going against us.

There were the usual suspects: family and religion, jealousy and history, a revolving cast of book studs and book babes browsing in between us. But all of that could be overcome.

It turned out that the most threatening obstacle to our relationship was the very thing that brought us together: books. Or, more specifically, the values that books represented: openness, idealism, growth. The traits that made us readers and booksellers also made us eager and independent explorers, the kind of people who placed our creative pursuits above virtually everything else, who were always broke and impractical and able to plunge headlong into whatever boggling experience lined up next.

We didn’t care about the reach of our résumé or the student loan debt blowing in through the mail slot.

When the apartment directly below mine opened up, Libby packed her art supplies and book crates and moved in. We could be close but not too close.

Rent was so cheap at that time in Denver — I paid $255 a month for a creaky one-bedroom in an old Foursquare home — that we could afford to live separately, carrying on with our lives both together and apart. Upstairs I could spread out my notebooks and papers and spend my free time writing, while downstairs Libby could spread out her bins of rusty hardware and vintage game pieces and spend her time tacking and gluing to her imagination’s content.

The bookstore environment did little to cure us of our dreams. Nearly everyone we worked with had something they cared about that occupied their lives outside of work. The jazz guitarist, the home brewer, the sheepdog trainer, the massage therapist, the shelter volunteer, the Irish fiddler, the board-game enthusiast, the endless photographers and painters and poets and cooks.

Everywhere we looked, our colleagues were laying out possible paths through life that we too might follow. Though a few were happily married, more were single, and many were downright disoriented by the notion of settling down.

So it was not surprising that during the four years Libby and I worked alongside each other there, we broke up a dozen or more times.

We broke up on the carpeted stairs between our apartments.

We broke up at her kitchen table and at mine.

We broke up while hiking during a thunderstorm.

We broke up in her car while sitting in traffic.

We broke up while walking home from the video store.

Each time, our parting essentially boiled down to: “You do your thing, I’ll do mine.”

But these breakups didn’t last, especially when we would see each other the next day at work. Watching Libby glide through with a pile of books, looking especially lithe as she rounded the stacks, was always enough to weaken my resolve. She was never more attractive to me than with books in her arms, walking away.

When word spread that this time it was really over, our bookstore colleagues would sometimes try to nudge us back together. They may have balked at convention, but they were suckers for love.

“Matt’s pants are looking extra saggy today,” a fellow bookseller would say to Libby, claiming that the nuances of our relationship were revealed by the fit of my jeans. “He’s really sad. Go look at his butt.”

“I think Libby started smoking,” another would tell me. “You know how self-destructive dancers can be. Maybe you should talk to her.”

Soon enough, the cart that once acted as a conduit for our flirtation would become a conduit for our humility.

“You see the new Lorrie Moore?” one of us would say. Or, “You see the new book about Joseph Cornell?”

A customer would interrupt, and we would touch the spines between us.

Leaning into those carts, it was easy to believe we were inevitable.

Ending our relationship was impossible, we realized, as long as we were working in that idealistic place around those idealistic people, but we weren’t giving up on our breakup that easily. Four years had passed since our first shift together, and it was time to see what would happen if we were to pursue the next leg of our journeys alone.

Libby would move to Boston to study library science, and I would move to a small town in Idaho to study writing. We didn’t know what would become of us, but being separated by 3,000 miles of American landscape would surely help us figure it out.

For three years, our relationship relied on email and long-distance calls and plane fares borrowed from the bank. We bought each other books, as we always had, and stood alone in line at the post office, believing that the best way to pursue each other was to continue to pursue our separate selves.

Then there were the times when 3,000 miles felt like 3,000 miles.

We broke up at an artist’s colony in Maine where Libby spent summers working as a librarian.

We broke up on the steps of a church in Poland, where I was on a teaching fellowship.

We broke up in a fleabag motel in Seattle and at her sister’s home in Denver.

Finally, after three years of this, we decided we couldn’t handle breaking up anymore. So after I finished school, I packed my books and my dog and drove to Boston, where we got married right away.

After a few years of being newlyweds — Libby working as a librarian, me as a bookseller and writing teacher — our first child was born and we decided to try living somewhere we could afford. I found a teaching job at a small community college in Washington State, and we settled into the rural town of Soap Lake, a place whose claim to fame was a whimsical plan to build the world’s largest lava lamp on the shores of its mineral lake.

The lava lamp never happened — hasn’t yet, anyway — but we loved the enormity of the dream.

Over the 14 years since, Libby and I have watched the tiny bookstore in our town pass from owner to owner and eventually turn into a cafe with a small selection of books. It’s how they’ve kept their doors open.

There are a couple of other bookshops about 75 miles from our home, but the closest big store, like the one we used to work in, is 125 miles away. This scarcity was among the toughest adjustments we had to make as we settled into the rural West and our family grew from two to four.

Out of this necessity, before our children could even walk, a simple family tradition emerged of taking trips in search of books. Everywhere we travel, whether it’s across the country or across the state, bookstores have become our destination and our reward.

Like all routines, this one has its familiar steps. We feel a sense of calm as we leave the outside world and step inside. Our kids beeline to the children’s section, and by the time Libby and I catch up, the two of them are usually socked away on the floor, or sometimes in a castle or fort, with coats tossed nearby.

We begin stacking titles as if we’re preparing for a long winter. In a way, we always are. Over time, our children’s piles have become markers of their growth, like the scrawled lines on the kitchen cabinet showing their assorted heights.

As for Libby and me, we have our own markers of growth: 16 years married, zero breakups.

(Source: NYT)