Sochi has one gay club. It is called Mayak, or “light house,” and it is located behind an unmarked door right off one of the city’s lush parks. You have to buzz to be let in.

Once you’re in, though, you’re just as likely to encounter a foreign journalist as a local.

As Olympic preparations have ramped up and now that the Games are in full swing, Mayak has been mobbed by foreign journalists eager to capture how the local gays live now that Russia has passed a law banning gay propaganda among minors and is now internationally known for hating gays. The foreign journalists buzz about the place. “Have you been to Mayak yet?” we ask one another.

“Too many,” Zhanna the butch cashier says rolling her eyes when I ask her how many foreign journalists have come through here. “Questions, cameras. And always with the same questions.” Are gays being persecuted? Beaten? “I always tell them that we observe all the laws. No one bothers us and we don’t bother anyone.”

The only people who bother them, it seemed, were the foreign journalists. Pointing cameras in their faces, asking questions. “People are annoyed because they don’t want to be on screen,” Zhanna explained. Though some people don’t realize they’re being taped—like one gentleman who did a drunken birthday dance recently only to find himself in an American news segment.