For nearly three years, queer people in Russia have effectively been treated as outlaws: On November 30, 2023, the authorities declared the nonexistent “LGBT movement” “extremist.” The Russian Orthodox Church has joined the government’s campaign against LGBTQ people, and for believers, pressure from the church is often even more traumatic. Reporting for Meduza, the LGBTQ outlet Just Got Lucky spoke with queer believers and priests who support them about how they explain to themselves and their loved ones that their sexuality does not conflict with their faith.

Some names in this article have been changed to reduce the risks to those involved. Russia considers Meduza an “undesirable” organization and queer people “extremists.” Warning: This article contains strong language.

‘Either you hold services and get fined, or you don’t — and compromise your conscience’

In December 2023, the Vatican allowed Catholic priests to bless same-sex couples. The church stresses that a blessing does not mean Catholicism endorses same-sex marriage. Nevertheless, the Russian Orthodox Church predictably called the decision “a sharp departure from Christian moral teaching” and said it would never recognize same-sex unions.

The Russian Orthodox Church’s official position on homosexuality has always been unequivocal. As early as 2013, Patriarch Kirill called Western countries’ recognition of same-sex unions “a harbinger of the end of the world.”

In 2021, Vakhtang Kipshidze, deputy head of the church’s Department for Relations with Society and the Media, told journalists that the Russian Orthodox Church was prepared to accept queer people only if they repented “of their sin”:

No one knows how many queer Russians consider themselves active churchgoers — no such statistics exist. Since Russia outlawed the nonexistent “LGBT movement” in November 2023, gathering any data about queer people’s lives has become extremely difficult.

There is no doubt, however, that some LGBTQ Russians are religious. Many are unwilling to give up their identity, partner, or way of life. But they cannot renounce their faith simply because the official church criticizes them, either. These believers are among those who make up parishes and religious communities independent of the Russian Orthodox Church.

Father Konstantin (not his real name) holds services not in a church but in the homes of members of his community, which belongs to the Old Catholic Church. As in Orthodox churches, priests who identify as Old Catholics celebrate Mass and liturgies and perform baptisms and weddings. Unlike many communities affiliated with the Russian Orthodox Church, Father Konstantin’s parish welcomes everyone — even members of other denominations, atheists, and LGBTQ people.

Many members of Father Konstantin’s congregation are openly queer. He is openly gay himself.

The parish relies on voluntary donations from community members to cover basic needs and buy items for worship. In this and similar communities, priests combine their ministry with jobs outside the church.

Father Konstantin says people mostly hear about his parish through friends and acquaintances. The community has no website or social media accounts “because there’s a risk of persecution”: “Holding services in residential spaces is prohibited, and not every community can set aside a separate space for gatherings. So either you hold services and get fined, or you don’t — which means compromising your conscience.”

The priest believes services in apartments have “a special beauty.” There can be no organ accompaniment or lavish religious decorations; the atmosphere comes from the sacred act of worship itself. “It’s a bit like the catacomb churches during the Roman persecution of Christians,” Father Konstantin says. “It makes a powerful impression on people: They like feeling part of something bigger, so they come back.”

Father Konstantin holds services, baptizes queer people, gives them Communion, and gladly officiates church weddings for them. Some travel long distances to receive the sacraments from him; sometimes he travels to other cities himself: “People want to affirm their commitment, and they see our church as the way to do that, because neither the state nor the official churches will approve of or recognize their marriage.”

His community is not the only one in Russia where couples can have a secret church wedding, he says. Other priests, both Orthodox and Catholic, also marry couples in homes and sometimes even in churches, if they can arrange to close them to outsiders for a while.

“People hide their orientation and are afraid to confide in a priest. That breaks a lot of people,” Father Konstantin says. “Some turn away from God to lift that weight off their shoulders; others just suffer. I often talk to people like that and show them that Christianity doesn’t conflict with their ideals. On the contrary, it says people should love and respect one another.”

The priest believes that suppressing sexuality and struggling to reconcile faith and identity can seriously harm mental health. In this way, Father Konstantin says that when the church harms its own parishioners, it is effectively mutilating its own body — something it condemns.

“If we keep rejecting, condemning, and hating one another out of pride, the planet simply won’t be able to take it,” Father Konstantin says. “The church evolves; it’s a living organism. I hope that one day the Orthodox Church will find the courage to recognize and support LGBTQ people. Keeping silent about such an important issue leads to scandals, and that harms the church itself and the cause of Christ.”

‘I don’t think it takes us away from our main purpose — to grow in love for God and our neighbor’

Elena (not her real name) considers herself an Orthodox Christian and pansexual. Her parents turned to religion shortly after marrying, then joined a religious community that Elena considers “a sect, but not a heretical one.” “When I was little, my mom occasionally took me to services, but I wasn’t interested in religion until I was a teenager,” Elena says.

The family spent about two years in the community, leaving it when they moved away. Soon afterward, Elena’s mother left her father.

When Elena was 11, her mother began singing in a church choir and met some Old Believers. She took her daughter to church, and Elena became interested in Orthodox Christianity. She went on pilgrimages and became close friends with the choir directors, whom she still calls her “godparents.”

Elena began to recognize her pansexuality at 18. “I think my struggle to accept my orientation came specifically from my religious upbringing,” she says. “Particularly from being used to always trying to be the good girl everyone expected me to be and unquestioningly doing what others wanted.”

As a young woman, Elena entered a relationship she did not want because she wanted to please others.

When she was 17, she was close to a 34-year-old parishioner at the church she attended with her mother. At first, she thought his interest in her was friendly, but when she realized he was romantically interested, she refused to date him because of the large age gap.

The man, however, decided it was because Elena was attracted to women. “Back then, I’d often say things on autopilot like, ‘I only ever fall in love with women, but of course I’m completely heterosexual — that’s a conscious choice I’ve made,’” Elena says. “Basically, classic ‘tell me you’re not straight without telling me you’re not straight’ stuff.”

He began threatening to repeat her words to other parishioners. She even stopped going to church for a while to avoid seeing him. One of the choir directors stepped in and talked to the man, after which he left the parish and stopped trying to contact Elena.

Elena says she had depression at 17 and 18. On top of her other problems, she did not know how to set boundaries. She has also been diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder, which can make it difficult for her to understand what other people want from her.

Elena says another man she knew, then about 45, took advantage of her vulnerability.

“I said no several times, but he kept pushing, and I gave in and agreed to a relationship I didn’t actually want,” Elena says. “The logic was simple: A normal person should say yes to someone who makes the first move and has feelings for them. I decided that if I did that, other people would think well of me, and it would help me live up to society’s expectations.”

The relationship lasted several years and was difficult for Elena, she says. After ending it herself, she no longer tried to pursue relationships with men. Explaining her pansexuality, Elena says she is attracted to a person’s “intelligence, empathy, and passion” rather than their gender; she says she sees these qualities in women far more often.

For years, the church’s condemnation of people who are not heterosexual troubled Elena, but she gradually came to believe it was wrong to reject herself because of religious dogma. “I’m sure the Lord loves me and has no issue with me. That’s the first thing I have no doubts about. And the second is that no one in this world has the right to tell me how to live.”

She has come out only to her mother, who, Elena says, fully accepts her. Once, while they were on vacation abroad, her mother even went to Pride with her.

Elena suspects her godfather realizes she is not heterosexual, but they have never discussed it.

Elena has always been happy in her romantic relationships with women. She says all her partners have respected her religious beliefs.

One of Elena’s ex-girlfriends was a pagan. Elena says they never tried to impose their beliefs on each other and are still friends.

Before 2022, Elena attended both Old Believer churches and churches affiliated with the Russian Orthodox Church, but her attitude toward the church changed after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine began. Elena says she is “disgusted by the idea of praying for the Russian army to kill everyone”:

Elena now visits a church only if she is sure its head priest, other priests, and parishioners share her opposition to the war.

Finding like-minded people is difficult, though. “Finding a quiet, private little group where they don’t pray for the war takes some serious social skills. It’s practically forbidden these days,” she says. “And that’s where I just throw up my hands. It’s easier not to go to church at all.”

Elena says she now feels closest to the Chasovennye branch of the Old Believers, a tradition in which laypeople hold services themselves, without priests. Some Old Believers, Elena says, are willing to pray with Christians of other denominations, and she likes being part of a community that “doesn’t divide people into us and them.”

But the Chasovennye are one of the most insular and least publicly visible branches of Russia’s Old Believers, making it difficult to find a community to join. So Elena mostly prays at home and reads canonical texts several times a week.

Her aversion to the Russian Orthodox Church’s support for the war also means she cannot receive Communion, which deeply upsets her.

“But overall, I live a truly happy life — and I thank God many times a day for everything I have,” Elena says. “I seriously doubt that being attracted to people of your own sex is a sin. I don’t think it goes against our fundamental purpose as human beings: to deepen our love for God and our neighbors.”

‘I was very surprised to see that an atheist could be moral’

Mikhail (not his real name), a philologist, researches theology with a focus on religious poetry. He told Meduza about one branch of it, erotic religious poetry:

Mikhail says there are many such works. For example, the “Ancient Paterikon,” a collection of biographies, stories, and sayings of Egyptian desert hermits, includes passages in which an elder instructs ascetic monks not to give in to temptation with other men: “Do not share a bed with youths if you yourself are young — neither with your brother nor with an abba — and do this out of fear, not contempt; do not draw attention to yourself when putting on your clothes.”

Mikhail says that before the fourth century, theology did not stigmatize homosexuality at all: It was considered a sin on roughly the same level as theft, drunkenness, or pride.

Mikhail’s interest in religious literature and poetry did not come out of nowhere. He had been a believer since childhood and often visited a national park in his native Tatarstan with his parents. There was a church there that he visited on every trip.

Once, when he was 11, he told the local priest during confession that he liked both boys and girls. The priest replied that liking girls was “normal” and that “even masturbating to girls is acceptable, but to boys — absolutely not,” Mikhail says.

“That’s how I developed an interest in the forbidden and went over to the dark side,” he says jokingly. “From 5 to 11, until someone told me I shouldn’t jerk off to boys, I thought of myself as bisexual, though I didn’t know the word back then. But after that conversation, I started identifying as gay.”

Around the same time, Mikhail began attending Sunday school. He later began serving as a sacristan and singing in the choir. At 17, he decided to apply to seminary. Young men usually attend seminary in the same area where they went to Sunday school because admission requires a character reference from their local parish and a bishop’s recommendation. But Mikhail did not want to attend Kazan Theological Seminary because many people had told him teachers there regularly sexually harassed students.

One such case drew public attention. In 2013, Deacon Andrey Kurayev spoke out about sexual harassment of students by the leadership of Kazan Theological Seminary. Following complaints from students, the Russian Orthodox Church’s Education Committee conducted an inquiry that led to the removal of one vice rector; the seminary’s entire leadership was later replaced. But the church’s official comments were evasive, and the details of the inquiries were not made public.

“I didn’t want to be raped,” Mikhail says. “The more religious I became, the more I suppressed not just my homosexuality but my sexuality altogether.”

He enrolled in a seminary in another region. Over time, however, he began to notice that teachers there, too, gave some seminarians expensive gifts and organized trips outside of class where they could spend time alone with students away from the seminary.

Mikhail says the young men were invited to country houses and even to sketes — small monasteries for hermit monks, with much stricter rules than seminaries. “In practice, though, they function more like country retreats where wrongdoing takes place,” Mikhail says. “Monks invite seminarians to their cells to drink and be alone together.”

He recalls an incident involving one of his classmates. According to Mikhail, an archimandrite who served as an archimandrite in charge of student affairs invited the seminarian over for a drink. The student fell asleep in the monk’s cell and woke to find the inspector stimulating his penis. Soon afterward, Mikhail says, the classmate withdrew and transferred to another institution.

Mikhail says he also experienced sexual harassment. He was a first-year student at the time and had traveled with a group to an Orthodox mission in Siberia:

Mikhail says that several years later, he learned the deacon had been “caught and tried for sexually abusing children.”

Also during his first year, Mikhail told one of his teachers about his homosexuality during confession. The teacher replied that it was nothing to worry about — “prayer can fix everything,” Mikhail says. His mentor even introduced him to his daughter.

“It was a good experience: We dated for three years, and I lived with their family. Of course, it was all chaste; we didn’t even hold hands,” Mikhail says. “At the time, it didn’t occur to me to look for a justification for my sexuality in Scripture. I thought I was fixing myself. Though I was still drawn to male beauty. But I channeled that into studying hard.”

After his fourth year, Mikhail decided to complete the remaining 10 months of seminary through independent study and examinations. He also began studying at a secular university’s philology department, which he chose because he had loved literature since childhood. “My aunt had lots of religious books at home, audiocassettes of theology lectures and seminars. I read all those books and looked through albums of photographs of monasteries.”

A year later, however, Mikhail’s military deferment expired, and he had to serve in the army. There, to his surprise, he discovered that “atheists can be moral people, with a sense of duty and honor,” and “stopped seeing the church as the only sacred thing”:

After returning from military service, Mikhail fully accepted his homosexuality. Shortly before that, he had broken up with his seminary mentor’s daughter. Although the breakup was painful, it also helped him feel more at ease with his attraction to men.

In the early 2010s, Mikhail came out to friends and acquaintances from seminary.

Mikhail is familiar with alternative theology and its proponents’ attempts to reinterpret what Christian texts say about homosexuality. But the approach does not appeal to him.

“I think it’s a human weakness — tying your sexuality to a desire to stay within a system that rejects you from the outset,” Mikhail says. “Individual people may understand and accept you, but the system itself will still point out your ‘defect.’ I still think that.”

After losing interest in Christianity, Mikhail initially avoided “anything religious.” “But my academic adviser told me, ‘If you have solid expertise, invest in yourself, write about the subject, don’t be shy.’ And I realized that was good advice. I’m interested in it, I can do it — and make a living,” he says.

Mikhail now researches theology and sees Christianity as part of culture and his personal experience. He still goes to church at Christmas and Easter out of an interest in the history and aesthetics of worship, rather than religious belief:

‘The very concept of “sexuality” emerged long after the sacred texts were written’

Alexander Khmelev, a priest from St. Petersburg, became religious at 10. He says he immediately knew the priesthood was his calling. Khmelev began attending church and Sunday school, and later became an altar server. He then took catechist training courses but did not finish: He was asked to leave because of his “pro-Western views,” he says.

Khmelev later studied remotely at a seminary in Mexico and was ordained first as a deacon, then as a priest in the True Orthodox Church, which the Russian Orthodox Church considers schismatic and “unworthy of official dialogue.”

Khmelev first noticed his attraction to men while still in school but fully accepted himself at 19, after his ordination. The priest says he found answers to his questions in the brochure “Na puti prinyatiya khristianstva i kvir-soobshchestva” (“Toward Acceptance of Christianity and the Queer Community”), published by the Moscow LGBT Christian Community — an informal group popular in the 2010s, created to support queer believers in Russia. The community’s social media accounts are now inaccessible, and it is unknown whether it continues to operate amid the repression.

One focus of the Moscow LGBT Christian Community’s work was inclusive theology: studying texts that affirm equality and the church’s acceptance of various minorities, including queer people. This was what drew Khmelev to it.

“I was particularly interested in answers about the passages in Scripture traditionally considered homophobic. The ones where the Lord is said to condemn homosexuality,” the priest says. “Inclusive theology discusses homosexuality in Old and New Testament times in detail and shows that God doesn’t actually condemn us. That was when I realized my world would never be the same, and it would be hard to keep hiding.”

In 2015, Khmelev came out to everyone he knew except his parents. Clergy in the True Orthodox Church disapproved and began threatening to bar him from ministry.

Khmelev then left the True Orthodox Church and Orthodoxy itself of his own accord, converting to Catholicism and joining the Association of Christian and Eucharistic Communities. Within the association, he formed his own community in St. Petersburg, Mother of Solidarity. He held services and married LGBTQ couples until June 2025, when Russia’s Justice Ministry declared him a “foreign agent.”

Mother of Solidarity parishioners usually gathered in members’ apartments.

“People came to us struggling with a conflict between their sexuality and their faith. After spending time in the community, they began to feel different — at home. That made me very happy: It meant we’d managed to create an atmosphere where people were healing from the trauma of religious fundamentalism,” Khmelev says.

The priest believes many queer people are traumatized by their parents’ or society’s intense religiosity and reject faith as a result. Khmelev says society tells LGBTQ people they should not “mix identity and faith” — “but everyone has the right to practice any religion, regardless of their orientation or identity.”

In July 2025, a court fined the priest for “discrediting” the army, and he decided to leave Russia. “I thought I’d stay to the end, until I’d married everyone. But life worked out differently,” Khmelev says. Because the Association of Christian and Eucharistic Communities is an international organization with a presence in several countries, Khmelev continues his ministry in exile.

During services, the priest often recites lines from the Epistles of Paul: “In Christ there is neither Jew nor Greek, neither male nor female, but all are one in Christ.” For him, this is important evidence that Christianity is open to everyone, without exception.

Khmelev also believes the Bible should be interpreted in light of its historical context and the languages in which it was written: Hebrew, Aramaic, and ancient Greek.

“Many pagan cultures at the time [around the 15th century B.C.] practiced male temple prostitution. Sexual relations between teachers and students were accepted in ancient Greece,” Khmelev says. “The authors of Scripture may have known about and condemned those practices, but they couldn’t possibly have meant today’s relationships between adults based on love, partnership, and consent. The very concept of ‘sexuality’ emerged long after these texts were written. Once you understand that, everything falls into place.”