Yelena Goltsman is founder and co-president of RUSA LGBT, the association for Russian-speaking LGBT people in the U.S., and a leading voice speaking out for LGBT Russians. She didn’t plan to be an LGBT activist, though — and in fact came to the U.S. in 1990 because of anti-Jewish, not anti-LGBT, persecution, when she was still married to a man.
Tablet Magazine has more of the story of this “warm, motherly 51-year-old Soviet Jewish émigré with a penchant for floral patterns and pearl earrings.” She and her husband were living in Brooklyn with their two kids, when Goltsman, questioning her sexual orientation, saw a television segment about Rabbi Sharon Kleinbaum, head of New York’s LGBT synagogue Congregation Beit Simchat Torah (and herself a lesbian mom). Tablet tells of how she came out, founded RUSA LGBT with Kleinbaum’s encouragement, married a woman, and sprang to the forefront of resistance to Russia’s anti-LGBT propaganda law, working as a liaison between Russian and American LGBT groups. It’s a great two-page profile — go read the whole thing.
Goltsman isn’t the only Russian-born lesbian mom to make headlines by standing up for LGBT Russians. Russian-American journalist Masha Gessen, a mother of three, fled Russia last August, fearing not only the anti-propaganda law, but also a pending one that would allow the government to take children away from a parent who is LGBT. She is continuing to speak out from the U.S. against Russia’s anti-LGBT policies.
Kudos to these brave moms fighting for their families and others’.