Since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, the passing of the broadened version of the “anti-gay propaganda” law in December 2022, the total ban on gender-affirming care in July 2023, and the declaration of the “international LGBT movement” an extremist organization by Russia’s Supreme Court in November 2023, the study and teaching of Russian-language queer cultures in North American academia have acquired a new urgency and presented a new challenge. Russian-speaking queer people are undergoing a crisis that calls for a re-evaluation of the parameters for queer liberation in post-socialist spaces—as part of world-wide emancipatory projects. The course I piloted at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in the spring of 2023 and 2024 includes authentic and current-day materials in three modalities: art, activism, and academic analysis. Each week students engage with materials in all three modalities but organized into a single thematic module. Students prepare questions for discussions, participate in discussions, do a presentation on a topic of their choice at the end of the semester, and during the semester work on a portfolio paper. Among the objectives of the course is not only the raising of awareness of culturally specific experiences of queerness in Russian-speaking regions at this time in history, but also the opening up of the specifically Western/American narratives of queerness and generally the fluidization of various categories of normativity, even as they exist, and made to seem inescapable, in academic contexts.