3 American DJ Tasty Tim hosting a gay dance party at a Moscow club in 2003. Journalist Masha Gessen, who lived in Russia at the time, recalled, "I spent the '90s being pretty much the only publicly out person in the country, and by the 2000s it started getting a little bit better, and by the late 2000s there would be several openly gay people more or less anyplace I worked or went to. So it was a slow process, but it was moving in the right direction."