The morning after Halloween, Kirill stepped out of a police cell into the frost in Yaroslavl, wearing only a dress and high-heeled shoes.
He had neither clothes nor a phone with him to call a taxi.
Kirill*, a professional drag queen, traveled three hours from Moscow to perform at a farewell party organized at the city's gay club before its planned closure.
Special police forces OMON decided to break into that party.
While another drag artist was singing the legendary rock group Leningrad's song "You're Beautiful as Jesus", policemen burst into the club and started pinning people to the floor.
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They lined up the performers and organizers, took them to the police station and refused to allow them to remove their make-up or change into ordinary clothes.
The police kept them there until nine in the morning, interrogating them and searching their phones.
They wanted to know "what we study, where we work, what we do in 'women's' clothes," Kirill said.
A month later, a judge fined Kirill 50.000 rubles ($500) in a hearing that lasted just 15 minutes.
The BBC arranged to meet with him again, but he deleted his Telegram account after the verdict.
In a way, Kirill was lucky to get away with no criminal charges.
Since the Supreme Court banned the "global LGBT movement" last year, owners and employees of gay clubs in four different Russian cities have been regularly prosecuted.
This happened despite the fact that such an organization does not exist.
Now security forces see the mere existence of gay bars as illegal, says Yevgeny Smirnov, a lawyer who works for the human rights group First Department.
The public seems to be fueling at least some of these raids.
On at least two occasions, in Orenburg and Chita, members of the nationalist movement Russian Community participated in searches along with members of the security forces, while in Kirovo, a local newspaper began to regularly write about the local LGBT club.
The first case of "LGBT extremism" was launched in March, when police raided Pouz, a club in Orenburg, on Russia's border with Kazakhstan.
The club owner was charged and sent to a detention center before being released to house arrest this summer, while awaiting trial.
Then, this fall, club owners and event organizers were charged in Chita, Kirov and Voronezh.
'Now you're just a club'
Many clubs had to make dramatic changes to avoid being the target of attacks.
A place in a central Russian city has actively stopped calling itself a gay club.
They removed all their LGBT symbols and BDSM gear, tore pictures from the walls and dismantled the dark rooms used for privacy.
The only thing left are drag shows.
"Nominally it's now a parody performance - a theater performance," says Oleg, who works at the bar.
But after the recent raid, the club's management decided that it was no longer safe even for drag queens to continue performing there, so they suggested that the artists dress as men instead of women.
"People who used to wear dresses and put on makeup are now drawing beards and acting like hyper-masculine men," says Mihail, another employee.
Many clubs across Russia use the same tactics to avoid closure, says Alexander Viltonov, who has worked on the Moscow club scene for many years.
For example, one club in a city of more than a million people has changed its name, hired female performers and only allows men to perform dressed as other men or in twisted costumes.
Across Russia, artists who used to perform like Lady Gaga are now doing parodies of popular Russian chansonniers like Valery Meladze and Philip Kirkorov, Viltonov explains.
At the bar where Oleg works, the decision to remove anything potentially incriminating paid off.
One night in October, the police came in and started throwing people to the floor and taking photos of their documents.
One policeman began to search the dark rooms.
"Where do people go for sex?" he shouted, according to Mihail.
The police allowed all the women to leave the club, and then he allowed film crews to enter.
"They did it to give the impression that only men were inside," said Oleg, another employee.
But the cameras did not record anything unusual - several videos and photos appeared on Telegram, showing only frightened men.
When the raid ended, employees say the police were angry that they found nothing — no LGBT flags or drugs.
The evening performances hadn't started yet, so the drag queens who were supposed to perform weren't in their costumes yet, says Oleg.
The cops were "mad as hell that we had a whole group of women in the club and kept asking, 'Where are the gays?' I said to them, 'Why did you think there would be gays here?'
They even tried to get a security guard to help them, asking him if gays were coming, Oleg said.
"He answered them by asking how he can tell if someone is gay or not just by looking at him."
The police officers took all the employees of the club to the police station, but did not ask them any detailed questions, Mihail said.
"During my interrogation, one officer turned to another and asked: 'Why are you asking them so few questions? Did we pick them up and bring them here just for that?'" Mihail said.
"They then forced us to unlock our phones and took pictures of a few things, but we had already deleted all business conversations from them."
Club employees were eventually let go without incident – a few were fined only for swearing or smoking.
"They didn't know what to do with us at the end," said Oleg.
"We had to write an explanation on a piece of paper that had no legal force. I'm sure they threw them straight into the trash afterwards."
But some clubs have gone further than Oleg's employer, Wiltonov said, ceasing to operate as gay bars entirely and making specific agreements with security forces to preserve business.
"They leave your club, your company alone, and you go with your sexual orientation somewhere else and stop presenting yourself as a gay club. Now you're just a club," he says.
Others play with nationalistic themes to show that they are "doing everything right," Wiltonov said, performing patriotic songs such as "Mother Earth" and even parodying the nationalist singer and emphatically pro-war propagandist Shaman.
'Dark'
Not surprisingly, customers and drag queens are not happy with this new approach, say Oleg, Mihail and Viltonov.
The number of people coming to the clubs began to decrease as the news of the raids increased.
"It is not clear how we can attract people here now, because everyone came for the atmosphere, funny drag queens and music scores," says Mihail.
"Now we have closed our main hall because there are very few people, so what is the point of opening it?"
The profession of drag queens is now dying out, "finished off" by raids, says Oleg.
Some of the best performers left Russia, while other celebrity queens refused to perform dressed as men, he says.
Artists who continue to perform often arrive right before the show and leave right after it.
"These people have been performing for more than ten years, developing as artists. That was their job, and then it got dark in an instant," says Oleg.
The drag queens who remained in Russia were forced to close or delete their social media accounts and now say they are not drag queens but "artists of the original genre, actors or impersonators," says Viltonov.
Many completely stopped performing - especially after the raid on the club in Voronezh, where journalists wrote that one of the most famous drag queens in Russia, Zaza Napoli, was performing.
But some other drag queens continue to perform and take risks, because it is their main source of income.
Club owners also know that they are taking risks, hoping that the security forces will not come for them and that they can keep the bars open.
"The world of drag depends entirely on enthusiasm. Clubs do not buy costumes, wigs and props for artists. They pay for it out of their own pockets, and many contractors who are fined have no way to pay," he says.
Viltonov himself decided to completely stop going to gay bars.
"I realized that I don't want to endanger my life, to lie face down on the floor and be subjected to violence by the security forces." It broke me psychologically," he says.
"Not only the police, but also nationalists can break into any club."
"Everyone always beat their chests that they don't care what we do as long as we do it behind closed doors," says Oleg.
"Well, now we're not even allowed to exist behind those closed doors."
"Our clubs used to be islands of safety, joy, the night of the eternal carnival. Now only melancholy remains," says Mihail.
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Proving membership in a non-existent organization
Little is known about the ongoing criminal cases, as none of them have yet reached court.
The names of the defendants are not public, and apart from the news that the cases have been initiated, there is practically no other information about them.
The authorities must prove that "the essential nature of the act is in accordance with the paradigm invented by the Supreme Court," says Stanislav Seleznev.
"Of course, there is no such centralized LGBT organization. So far, no one, except the employee of the Ministry of Justice who wrote the petition for the Supreme Court, has seen this secret organization."
The court decision, made in November last year, says that the LGBT movement "propagates the ideology of violating traditional values".
The court acknowledged that this "movement" in Russia is "decentralized," but said that organizations and individual activists are leaders of "cells."
Seleznev believes that the authorities do not know how to deal with cases of "LGBT extremism" because they concern "non-existent organizations" and cannot prove membership in them following the same patterns as when they attack Jehovah's Witnesses or Navalny's team.
Because prosecutors like to base their cases on precedent, investigations and trials are unlikely to proceed quickly until there is a "model case" they can follow, he said.
There have been at least 12 raids on LGBT clubs since the Supreme Court decision, but there is very little order and legality in how people are punished - some face criminal charges, while others, like Kirill, are fined for "LGBT propaganda".
"The same act can end up with a criminal report in Orenburg, but let's say an administrative one in Kursk. The way the law is formulated means that it is impossible to distinguish the limits of what is permissible," says Smirnov.
There have been at least 20 cases of criminal prosecution for LGBT propaganda, the BBC has learned using data from the independent news website OVD Info.
The cases are extremely different.
Sometimes security forces raid private parties – such as the one where a teenager was filmed wearing lipstick, or based on footage of a birthday party from 14 years ago in which a woman kisses the birthday girl on the mouth.
In other cases, people have been targeted for kissing in public or for posing in public for photos as a couple.
Fines were separately imposed for the use of an "extremist symbol": the rainbow flag.
The Sova Center, which researches extremism and xenophobia in Russia, found 36 such cases, mostly in which people were fined for sharing pictures of rainbows online.
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Smirnov says the Ministry of Internal Affairs and the FSB use a special program to search for him on the Internet - which could explain the unusual case in which police wrote a report six years ago about a Protestant priest who posted quotes from the Bible about how homosexuality is a sin along with with a picture of a flag with a rainbow and the title "Let's talk about homosexuality".
And while those cases have so far focused on the rainbow flag, Smirnov believes that the authorities could now step up interventions using the anti-Navalny manual, according to which even the letter "N" was declared an extremist symbol.
"We cannot rule out the possibility that things could end up like that in the future," he said.
But while LGBT institutions across Russia are buckling under the pressure of increasingly severe and stricter crackdowns, a few lone strongholds are managing to resist it all.
Mihail continued to work at the gay club even after the raid, pushing on in "silent protest and civil disobedience."
"I will stay working here as long as I can," adds Mihail.
"I want to help people like me who want to have a place to have fun and feel like people."
*The names of individual interviewees have been changed for their safety
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