In March, a member of the Russian senate asked the prosecutor general to look into the issue of yoga in pretrial detention. Yoga classes, organized on the recommendation of human-rights activists, had been offered to a limited number of inmates since September. But then Alexander Dvorkin, a man who is considered the country’s preëminent expert on cults, wrote a white paper warning that yoga can lead to sexual arousal, which in turn can lead to homosexual contact between inmates. Yelena Mizulina, a parliament member who has proposed a variety of anti-gay bills in the last seven years, immediately contacted the prosecutor general’s office, and this past month, yoga classes for detainees were suspended.

I left Russia with my family five and a half years ago. The parliament had just voted unanimously to ban what it called “propaganda of nontraditional sexual relations” directed at minors and, on a separate day, adoptions by L.G.B.T. people. Mizulina publicly pledged to create a mechanism for removing adopted and biological children from the homes of same-sex couples. The country was tumbling into some black hole of homosexual panic, and getting out seemed to be the only sane option.

Even if the decision to leave seemed inevitable to me—even if, like many émigrés, I need to believe that I had no other option but to uproot my family and run—most of my queer friends have stayed. I know many people whose situations are substantially similar to mine but for whom the choice wasn’t nearly so clear-cut. These are people with the resources, financial and otherwise, to enter into the legally complicated and often expensive process of emigration—they would be able to move more easily and smoothly than many of the L.G.B.T. asylum seekers I know in the United States, who have had to start their lives anew with next to nothing. Their relative affluence and social connections both make it possible for them to carve a life for themselves in Moscow and make them feel like they have a lot to lose by leaving.

The decision to emigrate is unlike other life decisions. It is a leap into the unknown; in this, it’s like having a first child, and it can be like marriage. But, with marriage or having children, one can witness the lives of loved ones who have already taken the leap. Even in the Internet era, people who emigrate disappear from the daily lives of their friends and families. They pursue lives in a new language, form connections in a new society, and shape careers in a new framework, and the more they do this—the more they master the art of immigration—the less intelligible their lives become to those left behind. As life’s passages go, in other words, emigration is a bit like death.

Most of the people I interviewed for this article have been talking about emigrating for a long time. There was a point, in 2013–14—as Putin’s political crackdown intensified, the Kremlin’s anti-gay campaign revved up, Russia invaded Ukraine, and the Russian economy crashed—when all of them were looking for ways to at least secure the option of moving abroad: a second passport, a residence permit in another country. But during the past five years or so, they have stayed in a state of fragile equilibrium, ready to leave but not leaving. One couple even returned after four years of living abroad.

“There was one morning in 2014 when Israel announced that same-sex couples could now move there under the Law of Return,” Nina, who is thirty-eight, recalled. Earlier that year, Nina had got married to Katya, now thirty-five, in Argentina. “We called the Embassy that day. We were the first. We filed our application, I submitted proof that my father was Jewish, and we waited.” The wait lasted more than a year. By the time the Embassy called, Nina was seven months pregnant. “They said they had good news and bad news. The good news was, I was eligible under the Law of Return, and the bad news was, as a couple, we couldn’t apply through the Embassy. We had to enter the country and apply there and wait, and the wait could be anywhere from four months to five years.” During that period, Katya wouldn’t have been able to work. With Nina pregnant and planning to stay home with the baby while she breast-fed, the couple decided to stay in Moscow.

Now Nina, Katya, and their three-year-old daughter live on the first floor of an old apartment building in central Moscow. It’s a funky, stylish space, with painted-brick walls, exposed ceiling beams, and rough wooden floors. I asked whether Nina and Katya had renovated the apartment themselves when they bought it, about three years ago. “It was all the old owner,” Nina said. “I just added the pull-up blinds on the windows. It was the first thing I did.” The significance of adding the blinds became clear later in our conversation. “We haven’t kissed in the street since 2013,” when the Duma criminalized “propaganda of nontraditional sexual relations,” Nina said. “And we didn’t kiss in the apartment until I put up the blinds.”

A particular source of concern is the head of the building owners’ association. He sounds like a quintessential Russian state-television viewer. When a new bookstore opened on the block, he hypothesized that it must be funded by George Soros (it wasn’t) and started organizing to have it shut down. For fear of having him find out that they are a couple, the women have hired a nanny from the Philippines. (There is a considerable number of Filipino migrants in Moscow, many of them engaged in domestic work.) “She doesn’t speak Russian,” Katya explained, “so she is not going to hang out and chat with other nannies on the block. For the same reason, we are not going to send our daughter to the state preschool on the block—we are going to a private preschool farther from the house.”

Both women say that they assume that they will leave the country eventually. “But not until Putin barges into the apartment brandishing a Cossack whip,” Katya said.

“But we have done everything to insure that, if he does, we can keep the door locked and, the next morning, board an airplane,” Nina added.

By “Putin brandishing a whip” the women actually mean social services, which, in some cases, have attempted to remove children from same-sex households, argued in court that following a divorce children should not remain in the custody of an L.G.B.T. parent, and prohibited visitation for L.G.B.T. parents. At the same time, Mizulina’s plan for creating a legal mechanism for removing children from same-sex households has not come to pass. “I watch all cases of child removal very closely,” Katya said. “The most recent one involved a straight woman and her five kids, and I actually thought to myself, Heterosexuals get it, too. There aren’t that many cases where they’ve gone after gay parents. So our fears may be exaggerated. Still, we live in anticipation of the apocalypse.”

That anticipation has pushed the couple back in the closet. This past year, after Katya read that vigilante gangs were tracking down gay people by following them on social media, Katya quit all of her accounts and, she said, “forbade Nina” to be out in publicly available posts. Nina is out at her job as a television executive, but Katya, who is a high-powered tax attorney in the Moscow office of a multinational company, is closeted at work. “The office is full of homophobes,” she said. “It’s like living in Channel One.” She was referring to one of the Russian state’s main propaganda channels, which constantly spews homophobic rhetoric. Being in the closet means, among other things, that no one at work knows that Katya has a child. A few months ago, when their daughter had a medical emergency and Katya had to leave work in the middle of the afternoon, she lied that something had happened to her mother. In her agitation, she forgot about the lie and was caught off-guard when, upon her return, colleagues asked after her mother’s health and which hospital she had been taken to.