A scandalous story exploded in the Russian state media earlier this month. A teen-age boy from Moscow, according to news outlets such as TASS and RIA, had gone to the United States to participate in a high-school exchange program. At a local church, he met a gay couple, two elderly military veterans who were raising two adopted boys. As the teen-ager’s scheduled time in the U.S. drew to a close, he came out to the couple and asked them for help remaining in America. They promised to shelter him, to fix him up with a couple of gay lawyers who would handle his asylum case, and even, according to the Russian press accounts, to pay for him to attend Harvard. Back in Russia, his mother grew desperate. After contacting the Russian Embassy in the United States, she flew over to try to rescue her child. Unnamed U.S. authorities would permit her to meet with him only in the presence of Russian consular officials and the boy’s gay lawyers. He refused to come home. The officials were certain that his relationship with the elderly couple was sexual, but, the story went, American authorities refused to intervene, because the boy had reached the age of consent. From the Russian perspective, the boy had been kidnapped. Russia cancelled the student-exchange program, catapulting a heartbreaking story of sex, fear, and betrayal into headlines on two continents.
It’s a great story, and in its roughest outline it has some basis in reality. But the boy’s lawyers, Anna Hill and Susan Reed, with whom I have talked extensively, have a very different account of what actually happened in Kalamazoo, Michigan, earlier this year. According to Hill and Reed, who came to the case through the Michigan Immigrant Rights Center, the boy from Moscow told his host family—a heterosexual couple—that he wanted to stay in the United States. The family told him that he had to return to Russia: it was one of the requirements of his program, Future Leaders Exchange (FLEX). The boy had met a gay couple through a local L.G.B.T. resource center; the two men have kids, and at least one of them has served in the military, but they are not elderly. The teen-ager asked whether he could stay with them once the program ended, and they initially agreed, but then backed out after learning that his mother opposed the plan. (There was, the lawyers say, never any talk of Harvard.) So the boy ran away. Because he had effectively left the exchange program, his student visa was no longer valid.
He called the Michigan Immigrant Rights Center, which is affiliated with the Michigan Poverty Law Program. Hill and Reed, both of whom happen to be straight, took up his case. First they turned him over to the government. The Office of Refugee Resettlement placed the boy in a group home and notified the Russian Embassy in Washington, D.C., that he was in federal custody.
This was when Russian Embassy representatives first showed up in Kalamazoo. They went to see the boy’s lawyers and his host family, and may have visited other people with whom the boy had been in touch. It’s not clear how the officials thought they might wrest the boy from U.S. federal custody, but that is apparently what they wanted to do—at least, that's what they told the Russian media. Unsuccessful, they returned to Washington, where they requested a “health and welfare meeting,” which is generally understood to be guaranteed by the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations in such cases. The boy's mother flew in from Moscow. In Michigan, the boy and his mother were, contrary to Russian press reports, able to meet one on one at least twice, and they saw each other again, with his lawyers and the consular officials, at the health-and-welfare meeting.
That meeting, Hill and Reed told me, was like none they had ever experienced. “They were there to intimidate us and intimidate our client with possible criminal prosecution,” Reed told me. The officials spoke of kidnapping and illegal adoption, and of shutting down FLEX. If the boy refused to return to Russia, they said, he would be responsible for dashing hundreds of kids’ dreams of studying in America.
The purpose of a health-and-welfare meeting is to allow officials to make sure a citizen is healthy and well while in another country’s custody. The Russians, the lawyers told me, made it clear that being homosexual—which they believed the boy had become under the influence of Americans—did not fit their definition of “well.” At one point, according to Hill, the officials asked the boy to leave the room, “because, they said, they were going to speak Russian, and their language does not have a politically correct term for what he is.” She and Reed said that if their client left the room they would leave, too. The Russian officials stormed out, stranding the teen-ager’s mother, whom the lawyers later drove back to her hotel. “I have never seen anyone, in any setting, get so angry,” Reed said. “It was not the kind of health-and-welfare meeting the Vienna Convention envisions.”
That was in June. Reed and Hill have filed an asylum application on behalf of their client. He has moved out of the group home and in with the gay couple from the Kalamazoo L.G.B.T. center and their kids. The men are federally licensed foster parents, which qualifies them to take him in.
Then Russia announced that it was cancelling its participation in the FLEX program. Domestic media coverage of the decision was followed by a spate of stories in the American press, many of which focussed on the loss suffered by Russian high-school students aspiring to study in the United States. Some also repeated the basic plot of the asylum seeker’s story as it was appearing in Russian news outlets. BuzzFeed quoted a Russian official claiming that the boy had been “illegally put up for adoption.” The lead paragraph of the Washington Post’s article cited a “former participant’s decision to stay with a gay couple”—an assertion that the paper repeated the following day in an eloquent editorial on Russian homophobia, xenophobia, and corruption. A story in the Times stated that the program was cancelled “after a teenage Russian boy who befriended a gay couple sought asylum in the United States.”
The boy, Reed and Hill told me, had come to the United States with a fully formed sexual identity, and had been the victim of bullying and harassment at home. That, not the friendship of the men in Kalamazoo, led him to seek asylum. But such is the insidious power of framing: whoever tells the story first controls it. Russian propaganda outlets have this down to a science. They shape the stories, and Western journalists, even those who make a good-faith effort to unpack them, can fall into traps of narrative and terminology.
Journalists have to do something counterintuitive: follow the lead, but insist on disbelieving almost everything about it until it has been proved. BuzzFeed did publish an interview with Reed the day after its original story, and the Times contacted Reed for its story, but Reed didn't believe that she was at liberty to share what she knew, because doing so would require her to reveal personal information about her client. “I felt I had no right to talk about anyone’s sexual orientation except my own,” she told me. (She was unaware at the time that an American official had confirmed to the newspaper that her client was seeking asylum on the basis of his sexual orientation.) In the end, BuzzFeed noted that the lawyers were calling the Russian story a distortion, and Reed told the Times that she was straight, married, and Roman Catholic, contradicting a small part of the larger Russian narrative, which had spoken of gay lawyers. The Times printed that detail, but it served mostly to amplify the effect of watching a bunch of straight adults fight over a gay adolescent.
