The Russian criminal code of 1832 made the act of “muzhelozhstvo” or men lying with men a crime punishable by exile to Siberia for up to 5 years according the Wikipedia. The police rarely arrested men for this crime against nature, since the hunger that dare not speak its name was reserved for the upper classes of Tsarist Russia, however homophobia has been deeply engrained into the national psyche and a third of the population think that homosexuals should be executed and another third call for their exclusion from society. That draconian attitude had slightly improved since the collapse of the USSR, but a gay men or boy are regularly persecuted by their countrymen.

According to www.pinknews.co.uk a Moscow teenager recently escaped from a rehab clinic after his traditionalist father locked him up after he came out to him aged 16.

“I’d rather have you disabled or a vegetable than gay,” the father told the son according to local Ekho Moskvy radio.

The more things change the more they stay the same.

The situation has worsened under Boris Putin.

In 2009 I attended a gay protest in Moscow. Thousands of cops encircled the Kremlin to prevent any demonstrations before the Tsarist palace. Two hundred protestors shouted out slogans. The police dragged the more boisterous into vans. The cops’ grim faces promised more disorder.

I retreated from the chaos and sought sanctuary in the baroque confines of Sandunovskye Bani.

I disrobed and entered the heated chambers of the famed banya naked. Straight men were beating each other with oak branches for their health. None of them were ashamed by this act of S&M, then again hypocrisy is the more profound blindness and there is nothing more relaxing that a good whipping.