Just saw this on digg
"It’s no secret that Russia is a scary place for LGBT people right now. For years, gay pride parades have been met with violent protestors, anti-LGBT laws have been passed, and even public figures, like Russian celebrity Ivan Okhlobystin, have made anti-gay comments without fear of repercussion.
“It’s really sad, I grew to love Russia,” said Bass. “I lived in old communist Russia — I wasn’t in Moscow — I was in the 1960s real Russia. So I really got to know them and appreciate their culture, and even then I knew how much they hated gays. That was one of the first things I realized, was how much they made fun of it. It scared me how much they talked about it, and how offended they were by gays.”
One moment that sticks out for Bass in particular was during his medical testing before the training even began. “They had to give me a colonoscopy to test everything,” he explained. “They did it. I was completely awake. It was very barbaric — their medical testing is very barbaric — and I’m sitting there and they’re doing the procedure with lots of doctors in the room. So I have tears coming down my eyes, because it hurt so badly, and they all start laughing. And I asked my translator, ‘Why are they laughing?’ and they said, ‘Well, they know now that you’re not gay.’ And they were all laughing because my colonoscopy hurt so much, and they were all happy because I wasn’t gay.”"
http://www.buzzfeed.com/erinlarosa/l...ar-for-his-lif