WASHINGTON, November 26 (RIA Novosti) – US gay rights activists have staged a “guerilla photo shoot” at an Ikea store in New York to protest the Swedish furniture titan’s recent decision to drop a story about a same-sex couple from the Russian edition of its global in-house magazine, the Huffington Post has reported.
Images from the shoot published by the Huffington Post on Monday showed gay couples posing and kissing inside an Ikea store in Brooklyn, while one photograph depicted two apparently same-sex puppets in close physical proximity.
“Ikea calls themselves the ‘life improvement’ store, but we decided they have some major room for improvement after they deleted a lesbian couple from the Russian version of their catalog,” Joseph Huff-Hannon, a co-organizer of the shoot, told the Huffington Post.
“Ikea should stop insulting their LGBT customers in Russia and around the world, show some backbone, and publish the story in Russian,” said Huff-Hannon, whose boyfriend is Russian.
The canceled story described a house shared by a lesbian couple and their baby son in the picturesque UK county of Dorset. It will appear in 25 countries in the December issue of Ikea Family Live magazine, though not the Russian edition, Buzzfeed.com reported last week.
Ikea removed the article because of Russia’s recently enacted law against promoting non-traditional sexual relations toward minors, a company spokeswoman said last week.
“We have two guiding principles in communication that we want to project at Ikea. The first is home design, the second is that we follow the law,” the spokeswoman said.
The Kremlin maintains that the new law is aimed at protecting children and does not prevent adults from making their own choices, but critics claim that the legislation is part of a much wider crackdown on homosexuality in Russia.
