In what might be called a clash of civilizations, British actor, writer, comedian, gay rights activist and blogger extraordinaire Stephen Fry met on Tuesday with a Russian MP who kicked off the ongoing crackdown on Russia's LGBTQ community.

Frye traveled to St. Petersburg this week, the city that enacted the notorious "gay propaganda" ban last March, to work on a documentary about "being gay everywhere," according to his account at Twitter, which has 5.5 million followers.

The actor, himself openly gay, met with members of the local LGBT organization Coming Out on Wednesday, and on Thursday continued his conversation with Vitaly Milonov, a member of the city legislature from the ruling United Russia party, the author of the ban.

'This naked dude'

Both men exchanged injections in each other's backs before the meeting: Fry called Milonov an "uneducated religious fanatic" and a "fool", and the deputy said that he only knew the British celebrity as "that naked dude from" Sherlock Holmes: [Shadow Play] " Guy Ritchie's 2011 blockbuster, in which Fry, who plays Mycroft Holmes, appears completely nude in one scene.

But ideological opposition was held back by reluctant personal respect: the duo shook hands before disappearing behind the closed doors of the legislator's office for a 75-minute one-on-one meeting, and Milonov promised to pray for Fry's soul after they parted.

However, mutual understanding was not enough. “Everything is very sad,” Fry tweeted after the meeting.

“I shall always love Russia and hope that its youth will not allow the toxic mix of nationalism and religious zealotry to destroy her,” he followed up in another Tweet.

Milonov, on his part, compared his experience of meeting Fry to “drilling a hole to some ancient Antarctic lake that was living an isolated life for the last 50,000 years,” Spbdnevnik.ru city news website reported.

Suffering denied

He also complained to RIA Novosti that Fry considered him “the worst man in Russia,” and spoke against Fry’s alleged “clichés about homosexuals, who are supposedly jailed, denied their rights and made to suffer here,” according to Metro newspaper.

The actor, whose deadpan British humor earned him a cult following among Russia’s Anglophiles, left for Britain on Thursday afternoon, the crowd seeing him off at the St. Petersburg airport being reportedly “bigger than for Shakira,” he wrote on Twitter. Fry gave no release date for his twopart documentary, “Out There,” which he is making for the BBC.

Controversial legislation

Promotion of LGBT values and lifestyle to minors is punishable in St. Petersburg with fines of between 5,000 and 500,000 rubles ($160 to $16,000). Several other Russian regions have similar bans in place, but the law lobbied by Milonov got the biggest media exposure, though it is rarely enacted. In the most high-profile case up to date, Milonov and his supporters attempted to sue Madonna for supporting gay rights activists during a concert in St. Petersburg last year, but the court dismissed the lawsuit.

Earlier this year, a federal bill to ban “gay propaganda” passed the first of three required readings in the State Duma, the lower house of the Russian parliament. The lawmakers are currently hard at work to give a legal definition to “gay propaganda” ahead of the crucial second reading, which is not expected before late May.

Elusive propaganda

According to a nationwide poll of 1,600 respondents conducted by the state agency VTsIOM in April last year, 94 percent of Russians have never encountered "gay propaganda," but 84 percent oppose it.