One day this spring, Artem Kolesov set up a video camera in the Chicago townhouse where he lives, sat down in a chair and started talking to the young gay people of Russia.
“Yesterday I turned 23 years old,” he began.
He went on, in Russian, to tell the story of growing up as the fourth of six brothers in a small town, an hour’s drive from Moscow, where his father was a deacon and his mother was a youth pastor at the Pentecostal church.