Culture

Russian Printer Claims BTS Posters Are Gay “Propaganda,” Refuses to Print Them


 

Apparently, the recent BTS chart-topper “Butter” meant something very, very different to one Russian printer. A print shop in the central Russian city of Yekaterinburg reportedly refused to fulfill an order of BTS stickers and posters over claims that the popular K-Pop band is promoting gay “propaganda.”

The owners of the K-Pop themed coffee house PinkyPop Café alleged in a series of since-deleted Instagram posts that a local printer declined to reproduce images of the band, claiming that doing so would cause children to “become perverts.”

“We discussed all the work and details and placed our first order,” the café claimed in a post cited by Russia Times, a state-backed website that is frequently critical of LGBTQ+ equality. “After seeing the photos of the bands BTS and Stray Kids, which they were supposed to print, they began to ignore us.”

PinkyPop Café had reportedly planned to hand out BTS paraphernalia — including postcards and greeting cards — with customers’ drink orders. But upon contacting the local printing company, a representative claimed that BTS is not “hiding their orientation” and told the business that it would be “stupid to support something that would leave you with no grandchildren.”

It must be said that no member of BTS is openly gay, but they have spoken out in favor of LGBTQ+ rights and in support of LGBTQ+ musicians in the past. The world’s biggest music group currently sits atop the Billboard Hot 100 with the Ed Sheeran co-written single “Permission to Dance.”

But despite the fact that the band’s members are not LGBTQ+, this isn’t the first instance in which BTS has been met with homophobia in Russia. A theater in Dagestan, a majority Muslim republic in Western Russia, pulled screenings of the concert film BTS World Tour: Love Yourself in Seoul in 2018 after local conservatives claimed the group was comprised of “Korean homosexuals,” according to the Moscow Times.

This unfounded gay panic is largely a byproduct of what has commonly been referred to as Russia’s “propaganda” law. In 2013, Russia’s legislature unanimously passed legislation banning the spread of information on “nontraditional sexual relationships” to minors, which the print shop appeared to directly reference in its initial line of questioning to the café. “Do I understand correctly that these people have a nontraditional orientation?” the printers asked of BTS.

While authorities claimed the “propaganda” law was not homophobic in intent, its enforcement has resulted in a crackdown on virtually all forms of LGBTQ+ life over the past 8 years. Russian authorities have reportedly begun surveilling students’ social media accounts for pro-LGBTQ+ posts, and a student allegedly faced expulsion in 2019 for having a pink phone case.

The clampdown is likely to intensify after Russia approved a series of constitutional amendments earlier this year outlawing same-sex marriage and banning transgender people from adopting children.

And as the controversy over the rejected BTS order garners international attention, the Yekaterinburg printer does not appear to have budged. When contacted by the Russian news site Super, a spokesperson claimed the business has “enough ‘normal’ clients to be able to choose who to work with and who not to.”

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