A new Russian website promises to tell worried visitors how many gay people live in any given city.
Travel site MyLinker started GayLocator in response to Airbnb's anti-discrimination policy prohibiting hosts from banning people based on their sexual orientation.
The site's owners said Airbnb's “western model of doing business” is not suitable for Russia because of “differences in mentality,” reports Pink News.
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In an interview with Russian tabloid Life, GayLocator representative Rodion Kadyrov said the company believes it should be everyone's personal choice whom they allow to stay in their home.
“To deny gay people – it's fine if we're talking about freedom of choice.
“It's simple. Airbnb's position on this issue was not close to us.
“We started thinking about this and somehow came to the idea – to find out how many actually gay lives in every city in Russia, and conducted research.”
However, according to Global Voices, that research was less that scientifically rigorous.
“The website's questionable methodology for ‘measuring gays' relies on tracking the number of online requests for pornography in a city and compares it to the number of Internet searches for gay porn, and then applies the differential to the city's total population and ‘calculates' the LGBT population
“In Moscow, for example, the website says there are ‘173,851 gays,' and warns visitors, ‘Oh my! That's a lot of gays! Danger!' while offering help in ‘fending off the gays.'
“Scrolling further, visitors…are told that ‘AirBnb cleaned up and deleted all the owners who refused to rent to homosexuals,' before getting the sales pitch: the homophobes re-registered with MyLinker, the website claims.
“You probably don't want to cradle your child in a bed where a bunch of gays were just frolicking about.”
Although some LGBT activists are said to be using the site to brag about the number of gay people in Russia, Kadyrov has denied that it promotes homosexuality.
https://twitter.com/AAA66746574/status/824267343912116227
“The promotion of homosexuality? I do not think,” he said. “We definitely did not have such a goal. Everyone decides for himself – to be gay or not (as would be unfortunate as it sounds), but we still are not for them. Infringes on the rights and break the law we do not want. We caution that the study results are exploratory in nature, the service is only available for persons older than 18 years.”
