Armenia’s Animosity Towards Gays

20-year old Ruben (the names of our interviewees have been changed to protect their privacy) is a bartender at the only gay bar in Yerevan and also one of only three men employed as strip dancers in the capital’s nightclubs. Ruben has not told his family about the nature of his work, only a few of his friends know. And those few friends are also aware of the fact that Ruben is in love with a boy.

“My parents were suspicious of my sexual orientation during my last years of school, and we had many fights about it at home. Now we don’t talk about it anymore; they think I’ve changed. As for my work, they know that I’m a bartender in a club, but they don’t know that it’s for gays. The mere mention of the striptease job is out of the question,” said Ruben. Ruben is a student and future economist. He said that he hardly made any money dancing, because male strip shows were organized very rarely. But he also said that making money was not the biggest problem he faced. His greatest problem has been to overcome the period of dispute with his parents and resigning himself to his current situation.

“When my parents found out, they isolated me. They wouldn’t talk to me, kept being hard on me and I was in a very bad state psychologically. I was aggressive and behaved badly – imagine what you would do if the world you lived in did not accept you,” Ruben said. Mistreatment and intolerance of homosexuals, which often then turns into animosity, are typical in Armenian society. A survey we conducted among 100 people of different ages in the center of Yerevan offered further support to this fact. According to the results, 53 percent of the respondents felt animosity towards homosexuals, 40 percent were tolerant, 4 percent treated them well, and 3 percent were undecided. When asked, “What would you do if your child were a homosexual?” 73 of the respondents said that they would disown the child.

Psychologist Davit Amiryan believes that this attitude in Armenian society is actually typical of all former Soviet countries. “Ignorance and misperceptions about homosexual relations have led to its association in people’s minds with perversion, which is why many people don’t consider that it has a place in Armenian society,” said the psychologist. He also said that homosexual tendencies could arise at different ages and that it was necessary to have correct information about homosexuality in general in order to understand the homosexual population.