When I first lived in Russia in 1991, during a leave from my job at The San Francisco Chronicle, life was falling apart and cracking open simultaneously. The Soviet state was collapsing under the weight of its own terrible history. But gays and lesbians were, for the first time, breaking through the decades of silence imposed on them by the regime.

Gay clubs and bars were sprouting up like mushrooms in large and small cities. Some brave men and women emerged as outspoken leaders of this newly visible minority. One of them, a provocative young man named Roman Kalinin, made headlines by announcing his intention of running for president. (He intended it as a joke; the Russian press took it seriously.)

Sex between men was still a crime in 1991, but it hadn’t been in the early years of the Soviet Union. After the revolution, the new regime abolished the Tsarist legal code, which criminalized homosexuality. But in 1934, Stalin introduced new anti-sodomy legislation. Many gay men were swept up in the purges of the late 1930s. Homosexuality disappeared from public discussion. That didn’t mean, of course, that gay and lesbian life disappeared — it survived underground, like everything did, in friendship circles that had weathered the decades of Soviet repression.

By 1993, when Russia finally repealed the sodomy law — the much-hated Article 121 — the situation finally seemed to have reached an irreversible turning point. It felt like people had generally recovered from the shock of learning that homosexuals existed, and even lived next door. Besides, in the turbulence of the Boris Yeltsin years, people had so much to worry about — and in particular scraping together a living — to spend much time thinking about anything else.