The Saturday Profile: Russia’s Best-Known Gay Activist Has an Uphill Fight

AT first glance, it seemed like a breakthrough for homosexual equality in Russia. After years of battling the authorities, here was Nikolai Alekseyev, Russia’s most visible gay-rights campaigner, on a popular prime-time debate show called “Duel” recently talking about plans to hold a gay pride rally in Moscow.

But the discussion quickly deteriorated, with hostile and bigoted remarks coming not just from Mr. Alekseyev’s opponents but also from the host, who at one point equated homosexuality with pedophilia. When a woman in a Kentucky Derby-style hat started into a screed about “homosexual extremism,” he had had enough.

Calling the woman a lying “hag in a hat,” Mr. Alekseyev charged offstage, stamping a hole through the set as he left.

Any conversation about gay rights in Russia today is bound to be tense. But with Mr. Alekseyev, it can be explosive.

For six years, he has flouted a government ban and held an annual gay-rights event that he calls Moscow Pride. He has weathered arrests and attacks by neo-Nazi thugs, and once got into a shoving match with the press secretary of Yuri M. Luzhkov, the former Moscow mayor who has referred to Mr. Alekseyev’s protests as “satanic.”

With short blond hair and a round, youthful face, Mr. Alekseyev, 33, has the air of a maligned schoolboy out for retribution. He decided to become an activist after Moscow State University, where he was enrolled, refused to accept his graduate thesis, “Legal Regulation of the Status of Sexual Minorities.”

He is brash and provocative, even among would-be supporters. He has berated journalists for coverage he disagrees with.

“He is a complicated person and does not have a mild personality,” said Anna Komarova, a transgender activist allied with Mr. Alekseyev. “But laid-back people choose other occupations.”

BEING a gay-rights activist in Russia is not for the timid. At this year’s Moscow Pride, held outside the Kremlin last month, the two dozen or so participants stood little chance against the phalanx of police officers deployed to stop them. Most were arrested seconds after unfurling a rainbow flag or a placard denouncing homophobia. Gangs of muscular men wearing surgical masks and yelling antigay slurs chased away the rest.

Participants suffered only minor cuts and bruises, and all were released the same day. Mr. Alekseyev, who spent this year’s protest coordinating from an apartment — his father was recently found to have cancer, he said, and he could not risk being jailed as a repeat offender — said previous years were bloodier.

Few others in Russia have risked being as publicly outspoken — or just as out — as Mr. Alekseyev. He calls news conferences at fancy Moscow hotels, gives interviews to newspapers and has appeared on television with increasing regularity. He has, for better or for worse, become the face of a budding campaign for gay rights in Russia.

His efforts have attracted news media attention and forced politicians to discuss the issue. But it is a steep uphill battle; asked to weigh in, Vladimir V. Putin, Russia’s prime minister, said homosexuals deepen Russia’s demographic crisis. And Russia joined many African and Muslim-majority countries on Friday in voting against a United Nations resolution condemning discrimination against homosexuals that, nevertheless, passed.

Mr. Alekseyev, who founded the group Gay Russia in 2005, believes that there can be no advance in rights until gay people are allowed to protest publicly.

But in a country where the authorities view any sort of public protest with trepidation, his position has provoked hostility.

“This is a very dangerous thing,” said Aleksandr Khinshtein, a member of Parliament, and Mr. Alekseyev’s principal opponent on the recent debate show. “Homosexuality can never be allowed to be considered normal. It’s a question of survival.”

Even other gay-rights campaigners have criticized Moscow Pride, saying the rallies and the violence that typically accompanies them distort perceptions of the issue in Russia, where there is still significant confusion about what homosexuality is and what exactly gay people want.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: June 18, 2011

An earlier version of this article incorrectly stated the citizenship of Nikolai Alekseyev as a result of his marriage to his Swiss partner. He is not a Swiss citizen.

View the original article here

A Comeback Trail Runs Uphill

He says AOL will “disrupt” the online industry this year. He says that after nearly a decade of stumbles, AOL is poised for a comeback.

When hundreds of employees crammed into the company cafeteria here heard that, they applauded.

But many had heard it before, from an ever-changing string of leaders when AOL was owned by Time Warner.

AOL split from Time Warner in December of 2009.

It is different this time for the now independent AOL, says Mr. Armstrong. “We’ve made a tremendous amount of difficult changes and reshaped what the company is doing and where it’s going,” Mr. Armstrong said later in an interview. “But I’m excited now about what the next phase is.”

Never mind that AOL’s business is steadily shrinking or that its rivals are bigger, healthier and have deeper pockets. Mr. Armstrong says he has not lost faith that his overhaul, now two years in the making, will eventually reverse AOL’s steady decline and turn the company into a global digital media company with high quality content.

His biggest step was acquiring the Huffington Post, the news, aggregation and commentary site co-founded by Arianna Huffington. He put Ms. Huffington, the political pundit turned blogger, in charge of all AOL’s content business.

He also replaced AOL’s management team, expanded the local news site Patch, retired a myriad of products and redesigned AOL’s home page to display advertising more effectively.

Last week, AOL said that quarterly revenue from online display advertising grew 4 percent after more than three years of declines, a bright spot in an otherwise lackluster earnings report that showed continued deterioration in its business.

(In January of 2010, AOL stock sat at $25.68. It closed on Friday at $19.58.)

Mr. Armstrong said that was evidence that the emergency surgery on AOL was starting to pay off. But he acknowledged that it would probably take another two years before AOL’s overall business turned the corner.

The problem is, as it has been for nearly a decade, AOL’s dial-up Internet access business. The number of online subscribers has fallen to 3.6 million, from around 22 million at the time of the company’s disastrous mega-merger with Time Warner in 2000. AOL is losing 19,000 paying customers a week. Many of those who remain are either stuck in the habit of paying, do not need a faster connection or live beyond the reach of broadband.

In an effort to offset the lost dial-up revenue, Mr. Armstrong has vastly expanded AOL’s editorial operations by buying the Huffington Post along with the technology news blog TechCrunch and the video site 5min Media. He also pushed ahead with Patch, the local news start-up that he co-founded and AOL later acquired. It now has journalists covering city council meetings and charity fund-raisers in more than 800 towns.

However, those initiatives are either still in their investment phase or too small to make much of a difference financially. Patch’s spending — $80 million in the last six months alone — far exceeds its revenue, for instance. The Huffington Post, however, is expected to turn a modest profit on revenue of $60 million this year.

Ross Sandler, an analyst for RBC Capital Markets, likened AOL to an oil well that was running out of crude. It remains profitable, but has a difficult future — even in the hands of Mr. Armstrong, who Mr. Sandler said was doing a credible job.

If anything, Mr. Armstrong has been too optimistic about AOL’s resurrection, he said, suggesting that Mr. Armstrong spent too much on acquisitions with little short-term payoff while his turnaround will probably take longer than promised.

“The right decision would have been to low-ball the expectations,” Mr. Sandler said.

Mr. Armstrong, 40, joined AOL two years ago and was well aware of its trajectory. He said it was an opportunity, albeit a risky one, to lead a well-known company with big resources and a focus on online content. According to comScore, a site that tracks online data, AOL, with 118 million unique monthly visitors, has the fifth-largest online audience in the United States, behind Yahoo, Google, Microsoft and Facebook.