By Ayman Eckford
“He is so cute; can I pet him? Please?” Katrin, one of the coordinators of Saint Petersburg’s Alliance for LGBT and Heterosexual Equality, asked me.
She was pointing at my cat who had the Arabic name, Karim, who was sitting on my partner’s lap, looking around with curiosity.
Katrin was a loud and proud bisexual woman and an outspoken queer rights activist. She was tough and sarcastic, but when she saw our cat, her face softened.
Our cat often has this effect on people. It was 2015, and Karim was just a kitten.
Very soon, he would become a part of Saint Petersburg’s community.
This is the story of my bisexual cat, which is inseparable from the story of my own queer activism in post-Soviet countries.
In 2014, when I was 19 years old and my hometown of Donetsk was under occupation, I became a Ukrainian refugee in Russia. Because of my status, I couldn’t have a proper job. Instead, I dedicated my time to disability and queer rights activism, and Karim was always around, inspiring me and the people around us.
1. The beginning of Karim’s story
This story began in Gavrilov Posad, a small Russian town in the Ivanovo region. You’ve probably never heard of this place. Dusty roads, wooden houses without central heating (very similar to ones that existed in the time of the Russian Empire), and a farmers market. My friend Lina and I were passing through this market when we first met Karim.
An old, tired woman was standing there with a tiny gray kitten. The kitten was extremely skinny; he meowed pitifully, looking for his mother.
The old woman begged someone to adopt him.
“I don’t want to drown him, but I’ll have to! I don’t need kittens! He is the last one left.”
It was a tricky situation: we were living in Saint Petersburg at rhe time, and we had a long train ride home ahead of us us after visiting grandparents in the neighboring village.
But of course, I couldn’t just walk away, dooming the poor animal to death.
I gave him an Arabic name after a character in a dystopian novel I’d been writing.
From the first day, this fragile kitten showed enormous self-confidence and boldness.
When we brought him back to Saint Petersburg, we had concerns that our older cats, brothers Vasya and Rushick, could behave abusively towards our new toddler cat. I shouldn’t have worried. Very quickly, Vasya became Karim’s mentor and, when Karim became older, his mate.
We soon realized that Karim liked both male and female cats. He was definitely bisexual, like nearly ten percent of cats.
Coincidentally, it happened at the same time as when I accepted that I’m attracted to women, and my now-wife and then-just-a-best-friend, Lina, realized that she is not heterosexual but bisexual. Lina and I became partners, and I instantly became an openly queer person and an LGBT+ activist, because I couldn’t live in hiding, ignoring injustice.
I started to use cat Karim as an example for my queerphobic relatives and everyone else who was saying that being queer is unnatural and a result of media propaganda. You couldn’t indoctrinate a cat to be bi, could you?
2. Karim the activist
Karim with pins from a Russian LGBT Center
One of the things that our Karim loved the most was human attention. He liked when everyone was fussing over him, and was annoyed if people didn’t pat him or talk baby talk to him.
Also, this cat used to “travel” a lot in his childhood, so he was fine leaving home with us sometimes.
This is why we started to bring him to different LGBT+ meetings and events. And folks from the Russian LGBT+ community adored it, especially the young people! He quickly became a source of comfort during a period of time when the situation with youth rights in Russia was devastating. Since 2013, Russia has had a law that prohibits any discussions about queerness with people who are younger than 18, the so-called “law for the purpose of protecting children from information that contradicts traditional family values.”
Still, LGBT+ teenagers in big cities like Saint Petersburg were going to queer events, and those were the ones who were especially interested in Karim. It’s a wonder how much Karim influenced teenagers, but especially autistic and neurodivergent queers, and folks from the local trans community. He was most loved by the most marginalized people within the queer community of Saint Petersburg.
Soon, our queer acquaintances with intersectional identities began to ask me about my cat, even when he was at home.
3. Karim the blogger
In a country where there is zero representation of queer people on TV and in popular media, the internet is essential for building community. And soon, our cat Karim went global.
At first, we just posted his photos to some LGBT+ flash mobs and projects—for example, for the local bi group on Bisexual Visibility Day—and those posts were extremely popular on the Russian-language queer internet.
Then he got his own page on the most prominent Russian-language internet platform at the time, the social media network VKontakte. Karim liked to “post” by typing text with his paw—kind of a “blogging” with funny stories that the cat (and T9 on the iPhone) created. Most of his readers those days were people who knew me from my activism.
4. What happened next?
Meanwhile, Russia drowned even deeper in dictatorship and homophobia.
Since 2023, transgender people in Russia have not had the right to transition or to access hormonal therapy, and in 2024, the international LGBT community was named an “extremist organization” by the Russian Supreme Court (whatever this means). Now, to be queer in Russia is the same as being an ISIS supporter. And most ordinary Russians believe that you can become gay only through propaganda, and that all queer people are not just perverts, but agents of Western interests and enemies.
When Russia attacked my home country, Ukraine, in 2022, one of the official justifications was the idea that Ukrainian people had become too LGBT-friendly.
“We have this war because people in Donetsk do not want Gay Pride!” the leader of the Russian Orthodox Church said about the region I was born in, using homophobic propaganda to justify bombing campaigns.
I wanted to end this story positively, but it doesn’t have a happy ending for Eastern Europe.
But it has a happy ending for Cat Karim.
My wife Lina and I are now living in Sheffield, U.K. as refugees, together with Karim!
Unfortunately, we couldn’t take him with us to the U.K. at first, and even after my friend brought him to me, Karim has lived in Sheffield for two years apart from us because we live in a government-provided accommodation that does not allow pets. It is heartbreaking. For us, Karim is not just a pet, but a family member. I hate how our society treats pets, like they are just some kind of commodity that could be easily abandoned or replaced, not living beings at all. And Karim misses us terribly.
Only when we have the opportunity to rent privately will we be able to take him to live with us. But for now, he is fine with his current family.
Karim with a sign: “Karim is bisexual”
Now it is 2024, and he has already been to Sheffield Radical Pride, where people loved him. But because of the weather and noise, he didn’t want to stay for long, and we had to take him home.
In such cases, it’s extremely important to listen to the animal. But in Sheffield, he is not alone! I noticed other people taking cats to different pride events, while in Saint Petersburg we were the only ones who were doing so.
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Of course, Karim was unable to change Russian politics and save Russian queers, but I’m sure that he helped some LGBT+ youth accept themselves, realize that their sexual orientation is something normal and natural, and feel safer at LGBT+ events, which is important. Because if we don’t care about individual people, how are we better than the bigots?
Ayman Eckford is a freelance journalist, an openly trans and nonbinary person, on the autism spectrum, and an LGBT activist. They were born in Donetsk, Ukraine, and now live in Sheffield, U.K., with their wife and two cats.