Russian TV anchor Anton Krasovsky has been fired after coming out on-air earlier this year.
"I'm gay, and I'm just the same person as you, my dear audience, as President Putin, as Prime Minister Medvedev and the deputies of our Duma," he said, according to an interview with Snob.ru. He was reportedly fired from KontrTV, a government-backed cable network that he helped launch in December, and the footage of his announcement was quickly deleted from KontrTV's website and YouTube.
In an interview with CNN, Krasovsky said he knew he would be fired for coming out, but felt it was important to take a stand. Though the studio audience and crew applauded after his announcement, he went into his dressing room and cried for 20 minutes, before being fired a few hours later.
"They immediately blocked all my corporative accounts, my email. Literally immediately, overnight," Krasovsky said. "They deleted not only my face from the website, but also all of my TV shows, as if I’d never really existed. The next day I wrote to [network head Sergey] Minaev that I was totally shocked. Because it takes them half a day to put up a banner when I ask them to, and here we had such efficiency. One could say they can when they want to. Now they’ve put everything back, but you couldn’t say why, really."
One reason they may have put everything back is because of the international heat Russia is catching for their anti-gay laws, which in turn has generate new interest in Krasovsky's story.
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