EVGENY LYAPIN 

Activist Queer Peace 

Winner of the TV programme President 2042. Student at Moscow Art Theatre School and Queer Peace activist. 

"Since the age of 16, I have been advocating for the rights of people with disabilities. This has given me an unusual skill: I stopped seeing and perceiving people's individual traits that are commonly marked as a defect in our society. When you are, for example, playing the game Mafia in the middle of the night with your friends, you just take it for granted that one of them doesn't see well and the other is limping or, pardon me, is being a bit slow. You don't see the diagnoses relating to their sight, musculoskeletal system or a mental disability. You simply see people.

Throughout the development of our civilization, hundreds of concepts were created to divide people into all sorts of identities and social groups. And numerous dogmatists still see a human as a set of characteristics: gender/age/skin tone/religion/nationality/(dis)ability etc. But the world is more complex and beautiful. By alienating ourselves from people who aren't like us, we eventually end up cold and lonely with all these shelves. There is a very simple solution: break those shelves, take out this trash from your head, put it outside into a fire with your new friends and light the whole thing up with the heat of your inner freedom and finally feel the warmth, quietly singing Army of Lovers songs. And while the fire is crackling you can try to hear the sound of inevitably amazing future."

PRESENTER

ZOYA MATISOVA 

Activist

Activist, consultant psychologist and trainer at the LGBT Moscow Community Centre

"We live in Russia, and life in our country depends on us among other things. When I first visited Europe, I was astonished to see so many people with disabilities out in the streets, Braille notices, traffic lights with sound signals, buses that take wheelchairs on board so easily, and the overall accessibility of the city environment. Here all these people are invisible, just like LGBT people are. To make us visible, we must come out of our closets, of our houses, talk about the world being not black and white, about how many colors there are as well as there are many people who don't fit the random so called 'standards'. When we stop hushing the problem up, when we break the silence, the world starts changing. While it is often extremely hard to start, Side by Side events make it easier. So please, break that silence."