Russian TV Presenter Comes Out on Air, Gets Fired

Russian television anchor Anton Krasovsky has been fired from his job after coming out on the 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.

Krasovsky also spoke to CNN from Lisbon this week and said he knew he would lose his job for coming out.

"Somebody should do it," he said. "I decided it's time to be open for me. That's it."

He told Snob.ru that he felt like a hypocrite after covering the so-called gay propaganda law on a show.

"The meaning of this whole story we are discussing now is that throughout my whole life, I've been struggling with myself," Krasovsky said. "And this -- as you call it -- coming out is just another battle with myself, with my own hypocrisy, my own lies, and my own cowardice."

He said after making the announcement at the end of the show, Angry Guyzzz, the audience and the crew applauded. He said he then 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."

While his firing occurred earlier this year, his story is catching the attention of international press now that Russia's antigay law has passed and is clearly being enforced. In February, he told the Los Angeles Times that he had kept trying to persuade himself that working with the government to launch the network would keep him secure.

"I kept trying to persuade myself all the time that working for the Kremlin also gives me a better chance to combat idiots and idiocy at all levels," he said. "But they soon found a way to show me who ran the show as I was trying to stop short of turning into a Kremlin propaganda tool."