The wider culture was also opening to and themes, with Roman Viktiuk's drag-production of Jean Genet's The Maids taking Moscow audiences by storm, and pop singers such as Boris Moiseev and Sergei Pankin recapitulating the entire history of glam-rock and gender-bending camp in their video releases.

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Since that optimistic time community activism has declined almost to nothing, and no gay or lesbian periodicals or magazines are commercially published and distributed in Russia. The longest-running gay man's review, 1/10, ceased publication in 2001, apparently the victim of a Moscow city "anti-pornography" drive. Triangle closed its doors in 1997 when its European funding ran out. A major lesbian and gay archive, "GenderDok," was transferred from Moscow where it was harassed by police and civic authorities, to Homodok in the Netherlands.

Many activists of the 1990s generation have either emigrated or abandoned community politics, some for business ventures. The single most significant development in queer life observable in President Vladimir Putin's Russia has been the rise of large gay nightclubs, bars, cafes, and gay-specific saunas (as opposed to traditional bathhouses) in Moscow and to a lesser extent St. Petersburg. For affluent gay men in the country's richest cities, the commercial scene offers a glimpse of the high life in Amsterdam or San Francisco, but without the infrastructure of community to nourish solidarity or to protect people from unsafe sex.

The only alternative to the commercial scene has been a "mini-boom" in queer academic book publishing. Fueled by intelligentsia curiosity about sexuality in general, and a fashionable lurch toward post-modern theory, there has been a stampede to translate and publish the works of Genet, Burroughs, Foucault, and Wittig. A small number of scholars and authors outside the academy have written books for this audience on queer themes, with titles like "The Other Love," "The Other Petersburg," and "Russian Amazons." The liberal intelligentsia of Moscow and St. Petersburg is catching up on a century of queer studies.

Russian politics took a homophobic detour in 2002 during a little-noticed debate on sex crime legislation in the Duma. While a package of amendments to the law (including a rise in the age of consent to 16, and new penalties for internet pornographers) were introduced and discussed, a member of parliament with ties to the Kremlin tabled a bill to re-criminalize consensual male homosexuality. A colleague from a competing party offered his own draft legislation, to outlaw all lesbian relations. These proposals were hailed by religious leaders, Soviet-minded doctors, and other conservative forces who view the population decline as the gravest issue facing Russia, and blame a "women's birth strike" and sexual perversion for "the desecration of the national gene pool."

The future of these legislative proposals remains unknown, since the entire package of sex-crime laws is stalled in parliament until the elections in late 2003. Yet the Russian military in July 2003 issued a decree formally banning homosexuals from serving (even as conscripts), along with alcoholics and drug addicts. This homophobic move was entirely facilitated by the Duma debate on homosexuality in 2002.

Nevertheless, officialdom may have realized that it has cracked down too hard on queer self-organization, and risks looking illiberal to world public opinion. In 2002 Moscow city authorities granted official registration to a queer community group publishing a website in Russian and English (www.gay.ru). The "Together" group has announced plans to establish an advice and counseling center and to publish a national queer newsmagazine. Perhaps with support from the emerging coterie of indigenous gay businessmen, "Together" will succeed where its predecessors of the 1990s failed.

Cross-dressers have often been misunderstood and maligned, especially in societies with rigid gender roles.

Like other Nordic countries, Finland is liberal in regards to gay rights, though it has been slower than its neighbors to assure glbtq equality.

The Gay Left refers to a cluster of positions on the political spectrum that has existed within the lesbian and gay rights movement at least since the Stonewall riots.

Intersexuality (formerly referred to as hermaphroditism) is a congenital anomaly in which an individual's external genitalia or internal reproductive systems fall outside the norms for either male or female bodies.

Attitudes toward gay and lesbian personnel in European militaries vary widely, from the acceptance of the Dutch to the laissez-faire policy of the French to the rejection of the Greek and Turkish forces.

The confusion of queer identities and possibilities presented by Moscow owes much to its rapid growth and village origins of its inhabitants.

The capital and largest city of the Czech Republic, Prague is the hub of the country's gay and lesbian life and the center of its glbtq political movement.

Since the eleventh century, Russian literature has included treatments of homosexual themes.

St. Petersburg, Russa was once the crucible of one of history's liveliest and most articulate homosexual cultures.

Both in his life and his novels, American writer William S. Burroughs was an outlaw and a provocateur, focusing on sexual repression as the fundamental element of social control and writing in a surrealistic and bitterly satirical mode.

One of the greatest filmmakers in the history of cinema, Sergei Eistenstein chafed under the restrictions of Stalinism.

One of the leading philosophers of the twentieth century, Foucault has had an enormous influence on our understanding of the lesbian and gay literary heritage and the cultural forces surrounding it.

Jean Genet's work has left a powerful legacy to post-modernity and remains a provocation to questions of gay identity.

Nikolai Gogol's repressed homosexuality is reflected obliquely in nearly all of his works, especially in the fear of marriage that permeates his stories and plays.

The Russian writer and translator Mikhail Kuzmin wrote poems and novels that present sympathetic, often idealistic, portrayals of gay love and desire.

The creativity of Russian poet Sophia Parnok was closely linked to her lesbianism.

One of the greatest composers in the history of music, Pyotr Ilich Tchaikovsky inspired a cult of gay admirers who detected in his work themes of forbidden love.

A lesbian theme runs throughout the works of Marina Tsvetaeva, widely considered one of the four greatest twentieth-century Russian poets.

The controversial lesbian author and theorist Monique Wittig has produced some of the most challenging fictional and theoretical work of second-wave feminism.