Although his face was beaten and his nose broken, Nick Storchay a 17-year-old homosexual, says that the attack only makes him stronger.
He was marching
in a gay rights parade in Kyiv on June 6 when militants beat him during an
attempt to disperse the rally.
Participants knew
that the march could be dangerous. Organizers tried keeping the location a
secret before the event, although it was eventually leaked. As a result, a
large group of anti-gay militants appeared. Some wore balaclavas, while others
were not afraid to show their faces.
The threat of
violence didn’t stop Storchay from making the trip from his native Zaporizhya
to Kyiv. “I’m proud of who I am, and I want to speak up,” he said. “I’m not
afraid to be who I am. Love is not so different as people might think. Do you
think those far-right people know what real love is?”
When the march
was over, panic and disorganization took over. “The police were too busy
chasing down these far-right people,” he says. “A lot of marchers were left to
their own, making them vulnerable … It was too
dangerous for us to go to metro stations or underground passes.”
Storchay found
himself in the Obolon district. “My friend and I were walking in the
residential areas along the Dnipro embankment, and we tried to act ‘straight,’
hiding our rainbow bracelets and the rainbow hats we wore during the march,” he
says.
A group of
unmasked young men noticed them and first began attacking Storchay’s friend,
beating him in the head. Storchay ran and screamed for help while the other
assailants chased him. His friend went in search of police. “Residents in that
neighborhood saw it happen, but didn’t do anything,” he says. “How could you
tolerate violence in your neighborhood?”
The thugs caught
up with Storchay, punching him, knocking him over and beating him. Then they
ran away. Storchay collapsed near a kiosk selling produce. “I was bleeding, but
then a miracle happened around all this violence,” he says. “This warmhearted
woman took me into her small shop and took care of me. She gave me cookies and
called a taxi for me. I don’t know if she knew I was gay, but this woman showed
there’s still something good in this world.”
Though a serious
act of violence, Storchay doesn’t want the attack to take control of his life.
“Yes, we need to take hate crime seriously in this country, but I don’t want my
life to become possessed by these thugs,” he says. “I’m happy with who I am.”
