As the target of constant homophobic abuse as a teenager, Rimas Prokopovicius rarely heard anything positive about gay people when he was growing up in a provincial city in northern Lithuania.
Like many young LGBTQ+ people in the Baltic state, a member of the European Union since 2004, he blames the country’s “gay propaganda” law.
While the 2009 legislation has not been enforced in recent years, LGBTQ+ rights campaigners say it legitimises homophobic attitudes, curbs free speech and is hampering their fight for same-sex civil partnerships to be legalised.
“I’d really like to see the law (overturned) … Because, thinking about myself as a child, it was extremely hard to live with parents that don’t really accept you, then going to a school that is very intolerant,” said Prokopovicius, 21.
“It was pretty rough. I was bullied a lot,” he told the Thomson Reuters Foundation in the capital, Vilnius, where he studies molecular biology.
Dubbed the “gay propaganda” law by critics, the Lithuanian legislation bans sharing information with under-18s that “expresses contempt for family values (or) encourages … entry into a marriage and creation of a family other than stipulated in the Constitution”.
Supporters of the measure say it helps protect traditional family values.
Despite an outcry over similar legislation implemented recently in Hungary, the law has not received the same global attention.
However, it is being challenged in Europe’s top rights court in a case filed by a lesbian author, Neringa Dangvyde Macate, who died last year and whose mother is continuing the case.
In 2014, Macate’s book of fairytales that featured two same-sex couples was withdrawn from sale and then reissued in 2015 with a sticker stating it was potentially harmful for under-14s. The law has also been used to suppress television adverts.
“This law is something that does inhibit free speech,” said Robert Gilchrist, the U.S. ambassador to Lithuania, who himself is gay.
A government spokesperson could not immediately be reached to comment on the European court application or the status of the law, which officials have said has not been implemented since 2014 and was being discussed with LGBTQ+ groups.
This year, Hungary was condemned by the European Union for banning the dissemination of content deemed to promote “gender change and homosexuality” to under-18s, while Russia’s 2013 “gay propaganda” law regularly makes international headlines.
‘CHILLING EFFECT’
In Vilnius, LGBTQ+ student activists said they also thought the 2009 law had contributed to the widespread homophobia they encountered when growing up, making it harder to come to terms with their gender identity and sexuality.
“I knew what I was supposed to be and I was aiming for that, despite my better judgment,” said Eddie Balciunaite, 20, who leads Vilnius University’s LGBTQ+ society and identifies as transgender and non-binary – neither male nor female.
“There is a complete lack of information publicly for queer youth. Nobody talks about it or talks about it only negatively,” Balciunaite said, during a party to celebrate the LGBTQ+ society’s third anniversary.
Like other ex-Soviet Baltic states, Lithuania decriminalised gay sex in the early 1990s on becoming independent, but at the same time it banned same-sex marriage by defining marriage as solely between a man and a woman in its 1992 constitution.
The nation of 2.8 million is one of only six EU countries, along with neighbour Latvia, that have not legalised same-sex civil partnerships or marriage – a key demand of Lithuanian LGBTQ+ rights campaigners. Estonia allowed them in 2016.
A draft civil partnerships bill was rejected by 65 votes to 63 in May, after about 10,000 people marched against what they saw as a threat to family values on the streets of the capital, at a rally called “The Great Family Defence March”.
The group that organised the march, the Lithuanian Family Movement, wants the 2009 law to stay.
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