Love in Putin's Russia

Life for gays and lesbians in Russia is clandestine and convoluted. But the country is inscrutable to the West, so it may be impossible to seek civil rights advances like anything we'd imagine.

From 12 stories up I see the sign "Gay Bar Entrance" above the barbed-wire gates through which two gunmen have just fled. It's a night like any other in gay Moscow: some violence, some tears, and a cold rain. 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…