Upper Donegall Street, where North Belfast begins, is cheerless at first sight. The heavy darkness of St Patrick's church frowns down on it, an elderly undertakers faces the staid premises of the city's aged Catholic daily, the Irish News, writes Fionnuala O' Connor.
Then a larger-than-life statue of Lenin momentarily confuses the eye, over the entrance to "the Kremlin" gay bar and leisure club.
Donegall Street residents who have weathered bombings and sectarian killings tend to shrug off the four-year-old newcomer. Visitors sometimes smile to see the old murderer Lenin blessing a playground of modern homosexuality.
But as a sizeable Belfast Telegraph feature last month headlined "Gay Life in Ulster" remarked, the Kremlin is the only gay bar in Belfast since a couple of business failures over the past few years. The upfront Kremlin is the exception. In most of Northern society, life is still uneasy for people who are noticeably other than white and heterosexual.
Belfast is not a big city. The benefit of urban anonymity just about accommodates the mildest social nonconformity: a crowded weekly gay disco, soft drug use, unmarried couples living together. In smaller towns and the countryside, many for generations have fled local revulsion towards their "difference", whatever that happened to be, to Belfast, England or America, some to Dublin. There is a cruel explanation for the comparatively small Northern death toll from AIDS at the peak of the illness's threat. As in small places from Mayo to Minnesota, the sick fled to live or die among strangers.
Still overwhelmingly conservative and Caucasian, the unchanged public face of Northern Ireland ignores private upheavals in many families over the past 20 years and presents a marked contrast to the transformation, however uneven, of life in the Republic. As official reports confirm, with statistics that bear out widespread experience and anecdotal wisdom, in one respect prejudice and bigotry are elastic. Many who are anti-Protestant or anti-Catholic are also racist and homophobic: the wrangling of traditional politics has yet to scratch that surface.
A report in July on homophobic violence and harassment called "An Acceptable Prejudice" found the percentage of people who had suffered such attacks was higher than in Britain or the Republic. The most peaceful marching season for decades across Catholic/Protestant lines also brought attacks on Filipino nurses in Co Antrim and on African students, nurses and asylum-seekers in Belfast, following accounts of racist abuse suffered by Portuguese workers in Portadown and Coalisland and the year-round reports of aggression by customers in Chinese takeaways and restaurants. A rise in the number of immigrants may be one factor in increased abuse, though some think that a kind interpretation: instead they suggest that the comparatively tiny ethnic minority numbers until this point stayed silent about the ugliness they faced. One African thought the rise in reported attacks might be due to the peace process. "When you are not fighting who you have been fighting, people like to turn to an alternative."
The Northern Ireland Equality Commission said recently that the incidence of racist attacks was much higher than in England and Wales. But many organisations had "yet to consider the issue of race in a serious fashion". Though legislation against incitement to hatred has had little effect, the commission is optimistic about the promise to prosecute "manifestations of hatred".
More than 14,000 Northern residents of an identifiable "ethnic minority" origin were counted by the last census: "Irish Traveller, Mixed, Indian, Pakistani, Bangladeshi, Other Asian, Black Caribbean, Black African, Other Black, Chinese, other ethnic group." In a finding which should probably strike a chord in the Republic, research notes "significantly more negative attitudes towards Travellers than any other group".
A study of Chinese, African, Indian and Traveller communities found that two-thirds of their schoolchildren had been taunted by other pupils: 14 per cent had been assaulted. The then education minister, Martin McGuinness, called this racist bullying and promised he would tackle it, to predictable mockery.
Daunting findings, but there are changes, too. Just around the corner from Upper Donegall Street, the Belfast Telegraph is no shining liberal light: yet their gay interviews across three striking pages three weeks ago were sympathetic and deftly written, albeit not advertised as usual on the front page.
In June the Irish News, launched by the bishops against the adulterer Parnell, ran a sizeable feature to publicise a new weekly clinic on sexually-transmitted diseases and contraception for boys and young men. On page 29, but, even so, the sympathy must have been a pleasant surprise for the Brook Advisory Centre, picketed throughout its existence by a mix of Protestant and Catholic fundamentalists - who agree on this if on little else.