It wasn't the Olympic Games in Sochi that raised awareness of Russia's rash of homophobic laws. It was actually the Olympics coming to Putin's playground that sparked an outburst of gay hate.
It was a frigid, grey day like every other in Russia. The Kremlin's spires reached up towards the murky skies as if outstretched arms asking heaven to save it from its stifling censored existence.
In reality, the Kremlin was trying to reach the electrical wires in order to send a signal through the interwebs and out to the whole wide world because it had secrets so volatile it could no longer hold them in. Inside its gold dusted walls lived the best stuffed cabbage of that side of the Atlantic. But also, the overly ornate walls also absorbed the whispers of Cossacks preparing to carry out orders from the ghosts of Soviet past and present.
The landscape had shifted but the fiefdom had not. No longer were the Jews or the Chechnyans the target of the Soviet's suffocating grip. It was the gays who presently posed the largest threat to Putin's power and had to be defeated. What with their stylish hair and panache for interior design, Russia's homosexuals threatened to usurp the nation's long history of crude and gaudy standards. They ate their herring with a knife and fork, and wiped their greasy fish hands not on their unwashed track suit pants, but on a linen napkin, embroidered with the initials of their sodomy partners in crime. They sipped like sissies on mysterious liquid concoctions they called cosmopolitans, abandoning the tundra territory's manly tradition of sucking down shots of pure rubbing alcohol.
"They must be destroyed," said Putin with red knuckles raised to his faux-faithful-but-actually-just-forever-fearful-followers. "We cannot allow vodka to be mixed with cranberry juice!"
More than his hatred for triple sec though, Putin blamed the gays for bringing the Olympics to his sacred Siberian climate.
Figure skating viewership in Russia had increased exponentially since the new gay bar, "Rainbow Kreplach" had opened in the capital, and he blamed homosexual fascination with skintight costumes and triple axels as the raison d'être.
Putin hadn't counted on winning the Olympic bid. "No one will want to live off of sour milk fish soup and sit in gridlock traffic in subzero windchills," he thought when the G20 Summit members pressured him be a contender for the 2014 games. The other rich white men sitting around the table thought that hosting the games would help with Russia's foul reputation as a totalitarian bully that knocks around its own people and sells weapons to the West's most notorious enemies.
Putin reluctantly agreed and filled out the Olympic paperwork, but figured Russia's dystopian sociopolitical and geographic climate would be an automatic disqualifier. When he learned that French President François Hollande slept with every single member of the Olympic Committee and their husbands, wives, children and grandparents to help Russia win as host, his anger turned into rage that erupted first in front of his six-year-old poodle Babushka and then imparted to the people of his country.
And so the Don Corleone of Moscow unleashed a public war on its own citizens.
There were secret plans made to rip gay parents from their children and grab gays as they were leaving bars and beat them in the streets. Law enforcement was advised not to protect gays from bashings that happened with increased frequency in the streets.
But that wasn't enough to satisfy Putin.
He added a "gay propaganda" law that arrested anyone who appeared to be promoting the homosexual lifestyle. Grandmothers who kissed their granddaughters on the lips were arrested in broad daylight on Moscow's crowded streets. Little boys who preferred dolls to trucks were whisked off the playground and thrown behind bars. Yuppie businessmen who believed pink is the new black were strip-searched and detained in steamy, all-male, cement-walled cells with obligatory male-on-male group shower time.
The icing on the propaganda cake was the theme song Putin chose to reflect his "The Olympics Are Gay" campaign, the ever-eloquent Antoine Dodson in, "Hide Your Kids, Hide Your Wife." He deployed the Cossacks to ride through the streets of Moscow blasting the song via loudspeakers outfitted on surplus USSR tanks to maximize the culture of fear.
It was ugly.
Despite Putin's best attempts to punish the gays for bringing the Olympics to his home, he received the ultimate F-you. Elton John, the king of the gays, came to perform in Russia. Putin had no choice but to put down the battle gear and belt out a mournful rendition of "Sorry Seems to be the Hardest word."