'House' Actor Urges Vodka Boycott Over Putin's Anti-Gay Views

Jason St. Amand READ TIME: 2 MIN.

British actor Hugh Laurie, know for his role as curmudgeon doctor Gregory House on Fox's "House," took to Twitter this weekend to urge for a boycott against Russian vodkas due to President Vladimir Putin's anti-gay views, the AFP reports.

"I'd boycott Russian goods if I could think of a single thing they made besides the rest of the world depressed," Laurie, who has more than 300,000 followers on Twitter, wrote Saturday. "Russian vodka is OK if you need to clean the oven. For drinking, it must henceforth be Polish."

The actor's call for a boycott comes after Putin's Friday remarks, where he said that gay people need to "leave children alone." Putin, however, later took back his comments and encouraged "good, kind Russians to stand up to the slab-faced goons who deal in this kind of poison."

As the AFP reports, "House" was very popular in Russia and Laurie's comments made waves on Russian social media.

"I want to officially send Hugh Laurie to hell along with his opinion of our goods and his plans to boycott them," popular blogger Ilya Varlamov wrote.

"Hugh called for a boycott of all goods produced in Russia, in passing insulting one of the main brands of our country, Russian vodka," sports journalist Stepan Chaushyan wrote on the website of the Argumenty i Fakty mass-circulation weekly.

"That's right, go ahead and boycott us, but you'll have to start with gas, not vodka," wrote one commentator, Savva Mirosh, on the website of state television channel NTV.

Some LGBT activists lauded Laurie's tweets, however.

"With what irony and how correctly he noted everything. Thank you, Hugh," wrote Matvei Alexandrov on the Gay.ru website.

Last summer, members of the LGBT community urged a boycott against Stoli Vodka, resulting in a protest in New York City, where demonstrators poured vodka down street drains in order to protest Russian's highly controversial "homosexual propaganda" laws.


by Jason St. Amand , National News Editor

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