There was this very strange moment when the world discovered what was going on for LGBT people in Russia. It was very gratifying: I thought, there is a world out there, a saner world. It had felt sort of desperate and bizarre until that point.

Every day, there'd be somebody interviewing me as a "lesbian living in Russia." It got to the point where I would joke that I now have two jobs. I work as a writer and a journalist, and I also work as a lesbian. There's a big difference between being out and having that be your sole identity, the only reason that someone is talking to you. My twelve-year-old daughter said, "I have a new job as well. I work as the daughter of a lesbian," because she was also giving all these interviews.

As a gay parent I must flee Russia or lose my children

When you're part of the opposition you want to stay. It's part of your identity. You're useless if you leave. You feel like you have failed.

With Pussy Riot - this was a prank! It was a brilliant, artistically gifted prank. But they didn't expect to go to prison! They were college girls who became political prisoners for two years. That makes them very similar to the people who were "just going to a protest one day" and got arrested. They had no idea they were risking the rest of their lives. Because you're never the same after you've spent two years in a gulag.

You risk everything if you so much as join a legal protest demonstration in Russia. It raises the stakes.

For example, if you are a blogger who wrote something about a local official and you're going to prison for that, you're a political prisoner. If you're a businessman who has refused to cede his business to the local official and you're going to prison for that, you're not a political prisoner. In that second category there are hundreds of thousands of people in Russia.