The Moscow IDAHO festival has been officially open by Louis-Georges Tin (the founder of IDAHO) and Nikolai Alekseev (co-organiser of the Moscow Pride festival) on the 25th of May at 10am.
This opening was an occasion to present the program of the festival, but also to show some actions that took place in the 50 countries where peoples has celebrated IDAHO (you can find more info on www.idahophobia.org).
Different organisations was there to express their support for Moscow Pride festival and describe some of the actions they made in their own countries to highlight the need of support for Moscow. The InterPride was also represented and expressed their support to the Moscow Pride.
The rest of the day has been reserved to the LGBT sub-culture, with different visual campaigns, movie projections and a short concert by a singer playing guitar.
At 6pm started Merlin Holland (Oscar Wilde grandson) lecture in a Moscow Library, exactly 111yrs after his grandfather has been arrested. But after ½ hour 10to15 people stand up and start yelling homophobic slogan and singing. The Police react quite fast but they had time to throw an egg and spread some pepper gas in the room, it was the first direct attacked of this festival. The lecture moved to and other room and continues in a cosier and more emotional atmosphere.
During all this actions (that lasted more than 5minutes) Merlin Holland stood still and looked at them in the eyes all the time of their actions, it was really impressive and empowering to his behaviour, it's really gives you hope in the future when you realize how straight people can also understand homophobia, not as someone from outside viewing homophobia, but we could have seen in his eyes the passion to front homophobia and the real anger against homophobia that hurts so much his family and childhood
Concerning the lecture:
The Library manager introduce the lecture with a great speech explaining how they were really honoured to welcome him here, and that this library was open to everybody without exception and that was the reason why they agreed to welcome this reading. She also said that she regrets that this event couldn't have been promoted because of Russian homophobia.
This reading was really emotional, I don't want to seems to be a "drama queen" but I have to admit that I've almost cried.
At the end of his lecture everybody stand up and applause for more than 3 minutes! :-))
Watch the pictures from MOSCOW on IGLYO.com
