"This confrontation," I say, referring to the shooting, "is that crossing the line?"

"It is," says Artyukh. But only slightly. "If the government doesn’t act, other methods will be used. There are going to be fists, and then there are going to be shots."

The last man we talk to that night is the Cossack. Or rather, we listen. Artyukh’s lieutenant fetches him for us. He’s a big man with sallow eyes and a mighty mustache, his head shaved on the sides and a sweep of black hair falling over his shoulders in a style traditional to Cossacks for hundreds of years before Canadians invented the mullet. His uniform is black with red piping, cinched at the cuffs and above his big black boots.

"Homosexualism is a war against Cossacks," he tells us. So by rights homosexuals should be slaughtered. He recounts some of the ways Cossacks murder homosexuals. Historically speaking. "Of course, I cannot say this officially." He cracks his first smile. "Cossacks," he says, "are known for their humor." For instance, gay men "like to put their cocks in the ass, so we put the shit on their cocks for them." In fact, he says, sometimes they hold a man down and smear shit over his whole body. He chortles, waits for me to laugh. Do I not think this is funny?

"Tell me about your outfit," I say brightly. He shows me his whip, weighted with a sharp lead block. He puts its thick wooden grip in my hand. "Feel," he says. He unsheathes a wide black blade as long as my forearm. He says nothing about the handgun at his side.

"What kind of gun is that?" I ask.

"A good one," he says. He releases the clip to show me it’s loaded. He pushes the clip back in. He points the gun at me. Very casual. Just in my direction. Cossack humor. Do I not think this is funny? I lift my notebook off the table. It’s time to go. He reaches across and thumps it down. "Pishi," he says. "Write."

The Future, Vandalized

In Russia, things are not falling apart, they’re coming together, isolated attacks developing into a pattern, the id of the street ever more in line with the Kremlin’s growing ego. My last day in Russia began with the news that Cossacks had vandalized two theaters in the night, neither of them gay but guilty of showing plays with homosexual characters. One got graffiti; the other got a bloody pig’s head at its door. Humor. Russia’s first queer film festival was to open that night—Gus Van Sant was coming to show Milk—but it was shut down by a bomb threat. In the afternoon, Artyukh just happened to be having a coffee at a café next to the theater. He got into an argument with a gay activist. Artyukh ripped out the man’s earring.

By then I was with Timur again, pressing him about the picture of the gun and about Artyukh’s words. Were they true? Was he a "heated man"? Timur was furious. He called Artyukh and put him on speaker phone. Artyukh declared Timur innocent. He declared me a liar. He said he had never heard of the attack at LaSky. Timur grew angrier. What right did I have to dispute him? "Whoever did this"—shooting Dmitry—"it’s not your place to judge!" He said I was a guest in his country; he said I have no rights. A warning. My flight was midmorning, but I left and went back to my hotel and packed and went to the airport. It was 4 a.m.

I tried not to think about Timur. Instead, I thought about a boy I’ll call Peter. He’s 8 years old, the son of a lesbian activist, Sasha, and her partner, Ksenia. I’d met Sasha at the LGBT organization where she worked. Peter was watching a cartoon, waiting for his mother. He invited me home with them. Peter’s skinny and pale, with rosy lips and big bright eyes, and he does not like to stop moving. As we walked, he bounced back and forth between us, a game he called "white blood cell."

He was born HIV-positive. He’s healthy, but when Sasha met him, volunteering at an orphanage, he weighed half as much as a 3½ year-old boy should, and his hair was falling out. The only word he knew was Russian for "Don’t do that." The nurses told Sasha not to touch him. Not because of the HIV. It was love they were concerned with. If he received any, he’d want more, and none would be forthcoming. He was aging out of the ward, and now they were going to send him to another one, more hopeless still, where he would be thrown in with lost causes of all ages. And there he would remain, as long as he remained.

So Sasha took him. She lied to the orphanage, claimed she was single, and took him home to Ksenia, and they hugged him and told him they would love him, even though they didn’t know him. Six months later, he said the second word of his life: his name. He has a name. It breaks my heart that I can’t tell it to you.

My last day, in between the pig’s head and the bomb threat, I met Sasha and Peter at the park, where Sasha told me about growing up in a city without a name, one of the Soviet Union’s secret closed military cities, left off the map and known only by a number. Sasha is built like an elf, with freckles and red hair pulled back in a ponytail. She was a shy and dutiful girl until she saw Ksenia on the day of her college exams. They marveled over each other. Neither of them knew what to call this feeling. They had never heard of lesbians. Literally—they did not know the word. When they kissed, Sasha wondered if they were inventing something new and wonderful. They knew they could tell no one.