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Anastasiia Larkicheva is the first openly LGBT+ blogger in Russia, known for boldly sharing her love story and fighting for the rights of the queer community. With over 250,000 followers, her blog has become one of the most popular hubs for information, support and advice on gay rights, sexual orientation and gender identity.
In Russia, where LGBT+ rights are still oppressed and ignored by the media, being an openly LGBT+ blogger requires extraordinary bravery.
Today Anastasiia speaks with us about how her talent, courage and experience helped her become an important figure in the fight for LGBT+ rights in the Russian Federation.
Anastasiia, first of all, I would like to say that I admire you! You need to be an incredibly confident person to stand up for your rights under such difficult conditions. If you wouldn’t mind me asking, who was the first person you came out to?
Thank you very much for the kind words. Probably the first person was myself.
I remember I was 6-7 years old, I was at a high school basketball game, and a girl my age was sitting next to me. She was carefully watching the game, and I was watching her, looking at every detail of her: golden curls, a fashionable green T-shirt, and at some point I realized that I liked her in a special way.
But I didn’t tell my parents anything. They guessed it for themselves which was very unexpected. When I was 17, I came to my dad’s work on some business. My father was so tense, I felt that he wanted to say something, but he couldn’t decide. We sat silently on a bench in front of the office and eventually he blurted out: “Are you dating a girl?” I was dumbfounded and timidly uttered an affirmative “yes.” He seemed to exhale with the words “this is completely your business, and we will support you.”
Now I understand that I always gave them hints unconsciously. My entire room in our apartment was plastered with posters and cutouts of beautiful girls. And when it came to LGBT people, my family began to poke fun of me, and I immediately put an end to this ridicule, having defended LGBT rights since my childhood. But I was very, very lucky. In my country, children are kicked out of their homes, some are punished, or some families try to “treat” them. My parents accepted me, for which I am extremely grateful.
This is a great story that can serve as an example for many parents! Did you ask for your parents’ blessing when you proposed to Marina? How did they react when they found out?
Frankly, I didn’t know that I would propose myself! Before I met Marina, I said that I would never get married. But at some point I just felt compelled to do it. Then we lived very meagerly in an old apartment for $300 a month, literally collecting coins from throughout the house to buy bread and eggs for breakfast. I was 18 years old, Marina was 20. New Year’s Eve came around, and at that point I was working as a consultant in a women’s clothing store. On my lunch break I ran to a nearby jewelry store and chose a ring with the last money that I had.
That evening we prepared dinner, and when it hit 12 o’clock I knelt next to our crumbling sofa where we slept and asked “will you marry me?” Marina was shocked, but without hesitation she answered “yes!” The next day we told all our friends and family, but no one believed it, because at that time we had only been dating for 3 months. Our feelings raised doubts among others, but from the very beginning we knew that we would be together for the rest of our lives.
Three years later we got married in New York, and two years later we moved to the U.S. We recently celebrated our eighth anniversary together!
An amazing and incredibly touching story! Tell me, how did you decide to talk about your life publicly?
Somewhere around 2013 I started running ask.fm, a service with anonymous questions and answers. I was frank and sincere in my answers, so my audience kept growing. In 2014, I registered on Instagram, and almost immediately gained my first 5 thousand subscribers, and thus began a new stage of my public life.
In September 2015, when I started dating Marina, I didn’t want to keep her or our relationship a secret; I published photos of us together and wrote posts. For people from Russia in 2015, all this seemed unimaginable— beautiful and stylish women kissing in photographs. By 2016 I became one of the first bloggers in Russia to collaborate with advertisers, first through bartering, then for money. That same year, we created a YouTube channel, and today there are 300 thousand people on it. We create educational videos for our Russian-speaking audience discussing myths about lesbians, lesbian sex, and conduct interviews with lesbian couples. The videos get more than 500 thousand views on average. The world’s largest brands have invited me for collaborations as well. For example, Marina and I were the first openly gay couple in the country to star as a couple in a shoot for Gucci Beauty. Since 2017, we started traveling and integrated
content from different countries into my blog. Fashion is also an integral part of my content, I’m a fan of style!
How much influence do you think you’ve had on your audience? And do you encounter much hate on your social networks?
Every day I receive messages from subscribers expressing their gratitude. People write to me that I helped them accept themselves and, by my example, I make it clear that you can live freely even in Russia and that your surroundings can accept you! And several other people wrote letters to me saying that they wanted to commit suicide, but my blog and my posts helped them accept themselves. For me, this is one of the most valuable achievements in life.
It seems to me that, before my blog, people in Russia and the CIS countries had a completely different idea of lesbians or none at all.
Many people write to me that they used to be homophobic due to ignorance or a lack of information in general, but after they got acquainted with my blog, they completely changed their minds!
I’m very glad that even in my homophobic country I was able to achieve success in the creative arts, work with major brands, choose to stand out, and not be embarrassed to be myself. I was able to help tens of thousands of people accept themselves, look inside, understand that everything is fine with them and they are normal. And, of course, there is hate. But it doesn’t mean anything to me. I’m about kindness, love and caring for the world!
Now we live in New York, continue to work with major brands, and are also involved in social life, helping children from the post-Soviet space adapt to a new country, supporting them with motivational and inspiring content.
