Do you remember Dan Choi? You know the very vocal U.S. lieutenant who was discharged under DADT, who had a habit of chaining himself to the fence of the White House?

He is just one of many gay activists arrested and detained by Moscow police as violence broke out during the banned Moscow Pride March near the Kremlin Wall yesterday.

A large group of gay rights activists, which also included British human rights campaigner Peter Tatchel, waved rainbow coloured flags and carried signs reading slogans such as “Russia is not Iran” and were attacked by ultra-Orthodox campaigners who had gathered to purposely disturb the Pride march.

This was the sixth year in a row that the march had been banned by the Moscow authorities.

An AFP correspondent reports that they saw the Police move in and violently wrestle people from both parties to the ground before taking them away in waiting security vans.

“We have come here to prevent this event from happening,” Orthodox group member Leonid Simonovich-Nikshich is reported to had said as the violence erupted around him.

“God burned down Sodom and Gomorrah and he will burn down Moscow too if we let things like this happen,” he later told AFP.

Moscow’s former mayor Yury Luzhkov once compared gays to the devil, and had banned gay pride parades for six years running citing public discomfort with behaviour that was considered illegal in Soviet times.

Last October the European Court of Human Rights ordered Russia to pay one local rights leader damages for banning earlier marches.

Moscow activists said what they feared most were not the arrests but attacks from Russian nationalists who had already vowed to disrupt the event.

“What we are really afraid of are the homophobes and the neo-Nazis who have been promising to come down to beat us up,” Russian activist Nikolai Bayev told AFP.

“But instead of arresting the groups threatening to create violence, the police are promising to arrest us.”

“Gay rights are human rights, and human rights are universal,” Peter Tatchell told reporters before his arrest, while his fellow international marchers argued that their arrest would only prove a point about the current state of freedoms in Russia.

“Our methods are nonviolent,” Dan Choi said. “My hope is that this will be the last Pride prohibited by this country.”

Dramatic footage of Dan Choi’s arrest appears below.

As we celebrate Pride events in cities around Australia this year, I think it is important to remember how fortunate we are that we are able to celebrate the diversity that is our LGBT community, and spare a thought for those less fortunate who continue to face violent oppression for simply celebrating who they are.