A video from Russia showing a gay male teenager being harassed by other young people has become viral in various video sharing sites.

The YouTube posting of the video has almost 500,000 hits as of latest count.

The physical bullying is a manifestation of the growth of homophobia in Russia where LGBT groups are banned from promoting the gay culture to residents under the threat of punishment and foreign gay couples are not allowed to adopt Russian babies.

Although there are no direct acts of violence in the video, it showed the 15-year-old Russian initially being forced to confess his real sexual orientation as well as more details about himself and his family.

The boy was lured to meet the group through a person who used the name Uncle Dima in VK, a social media site that is the equivalent of Facebook in Russia, in the guise of offering a sexual encounter in exchange for payment of money to gay teens.

But instead of a male Uncle Dima, who shows up is a gang of young men and women. Some showed their faces, while others had masks. The video ends with urine about to be poured on the face of the gay teen.

According to Spectrum Human Rights Alliance, an LGBT rights group, the harassment is part of the online campaign on VK called Occupy Pedophilyaj and Occupy Gerontilyah, launched by a former skinhead and Russian ultranationalist Maxim Martsinkevich to identify and report pedophiles.

Buy it seems their real targets are gay male teens who reply to same-sex personal ads in VK, whom the group members meet then bully and torture them while filming the encounter.

"Video recordings of bullying and tortures are freely distributed on the Internet in order to out LGBT teens to their respective schools, parents and friends. Many victims are driven to suicides, the rest are deeply traumatized," SHRA said on its Web site.

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