Sergey is a journalist who has been writing for Moscow newspapers since the days of Soviet censorship. Eight other gay families live in the village nearby. Inside a privacy wall that gives the property a fortress-like quality are three identical houses, a communal sauna, a fish pond, and a chicken coop. I sleep through daylight’s afternoon cameo and drive an hour outside the city through a beaten landscape of shopping malls, scrap yards, gaunt birch forests, and a low sky to Ilya’s gay dacha compound for Sunday dinner. Winter always seems to come too early in Russia. That’s when I question my safety, when I use more discreet language in my emails, when I become suspicious of people. The fear only comes when I check the American newspapers and see headlines using words like “crackdown” to frame the violence here as a sort of government-driven bullet train to genocide, when I see my friends on Facebook raging about the tyrannous state of things in Russia. Granted, I have two things working for me: I’m a foreigner and I’m in a cosmopolitan city. Until this point I have not been frightened to be an openly gay man traveling through Moscow. I didn’t expect to return with an answer. I’ve come for a glimpse into the ordinary lives of gay Russians, to understand what should be done to help - if anything at all. With the West preparing to descend on Russia, determined to plant rainbow flags and deliver a message of solidarity to the country’s troubled gay population, I have come on a hunch, unnerved by the media coverage that is either overly sentimental or sensationally victimizing. There are only about a half-dozen such bars in this city of over 11 million, but that seems to be plenty. Storefronts are disguised as flower shops, trap doors lead to secret passages. The gay scene is a network of back-alley stairwells and unmarked doors.
To find a gay bar in Moscow without a guide is nearly impossible. Beyond the railway station, the vast concrete morass of Soviet housing blocks extends into the horizon from the outer rungs of the city to the far-flung suburbs.
It’s a night like any other in gay Moscow: some violence, some tears, and a cold rain. From 12 stories up I see the sign “Gay Bar Entrance” above the barbed-wire gates through which two gunmen have just fled.