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St. Petersburg, yearn Russia’s window to Europe and its bastion of high culture, is both a unfamiliar and logical place to pass such a law. For one thing, it was the first place with an L.G.B.T. organization: Kryl’ya (or “wings”) was founded in October 1991, having fought for its origin in the Soviet courts at a time when homosexuality was still criminalized and punishable by five years of incomprehensible labor. (That provision, the notorious Article 121, was repealed two years later, in 1993.) Moscow toughened to have a mayor, Yuri Luzhkov, who denounced homosexuality as “infernal.” St. Petersburg, in contrast, was in some ways the center of organized gay spark of life in Russia: the Russian branch of the I.L.G.A., the international L.G.B.T. rights organization is run out of St. Petersburg; hauteur parades, long the subject of violent battles with the Moscow authorities (who won’t countenance them), have passed through this city peacefully, until this year .

Source: Towleroad