MOSCOW, June 2 (UPI) -- Violence was down at this year's Gay Russia parade in Moscow, but activists still endured verbal abuse and were pelted with garbage, a report said Monday.
Instead of one big parade as in the past, this year's event was broken into a series of separate protests around Moscow attended by dozens of marchers and headed by Gay Russia leader Nikolai Alexeyev, The Moscow Times reported, adding the group staged a march just blocks from the Kremlin in defiance of a City Hall ban.
Those protesters endured taunts from screaming anti-gay onlookers who hurled rotten eggs and garbage at them, the report said. But it was a far cry from the beatings marchers took in full view of the police in recent years.
"We wanted to make this pride (day) different from the last two years," Alexeyev told the newspaper. "We didn't want to have any more beatings in the street. We just want to show everyone that we are normal people."
With a massive security presence in place, police arrested about 15 anti-gay protesters, the Interfax news agency reported.
