New book profiles LGBTQ Ukrainians, documents war experiences

Journalist J. Lester Feder’s new book profiles LGBTQ Ukrainians and their experiences during Russia’s war with their country.

Feder, author of “The Queer Face of War: Portraits and Stories from Ukraine,” interviewed and photographed LGBTQ Ukrainians in the capital Kiev and other cities. Among them is Olena Khloba, co-founder of Tergo, a support group for parents and friends of LGBTQ Ukrainians who fled their home in the Kiev suburb of Bucha shortly after Russia began the war on February 24, 2022.

Russian soldiers killed civilians as they retreated from Bucha. Videos and photos leaked from outside Kiev showed bodies with hands tied behind their backs and other signs of torture.

Olena Shevchenko, president of the Ukrainian LGBTQ rights organization Insight, wrote the foreword for the book.

The book also introduces Viktor Pirypenko, a gay man who was assigned to the 72nd Mechanized Black Cossack Brigade by the Ukrainian army after the war began. Feder writes that Pilipenko’s unit was “deployed in some of the fiercest and most important battles of the war.”

“This brigade was crucial in defeating Russian troops from Kiev in the first attempt to seize the capital, liberating territory near Kharkov and helping to protect the front lines in Donbass,” Feder wrote.

Pirypenko spent two years fighting “in Ukraine’s most dangerous battlefields, primarily as a medic.”

“He sometimes felt like he was living in a horror movie as he watched tank shells tear apart his fellow soldiers before his eyes,” Feder wrote. “He held many men in his arms as they took their last breath. Of the approximately 100 men who entered the unit with him, only six remained when he was discharged in 2024. He did not leave of his own volition, but returned home to care for his father, who had suffered a stroke.”

Feder points out that one of Pilipenko’s former commanders attacked him online when he came out. Pilypenko said another commander defended him.

Feder also introduced Diana and Oleksiy Polkin, two residents of Kherson, a port city in southern Ukraine near the mouth of the Dnieper River.

Ukrainian forces regained control of Kherson in November 2022, nine months after Russia captured it.

Cigarette sellers Diana and Polkhin told Feder that the Russian military was demanding that they release the names of other LGBTQ Ukrainians in Kherson. Russian forces also tortured Diana and Polkhin while in custody.

Mr. Polhim is the first LGBTQ victim of Russian persecution to report his case to Ukrainian prosecutors.

Feder, who is of Ukrainian descent, first visited Ukraine in 2013 when he wrote for BuzzFeed.

He served as Outright International’s Senior Fellow for Emergent Research from 2021 to 2023. Feder last visited Ukraine in December 2024.

Mr. Feder spoke about his book at Politics and Prose on February 6th at the Wharf in southwest DC. The Washington Blade spoke with Feder on February 20th.

Feder told the Blade that he began working on the book while at Outright International, working with humanitarian organizations on how to better serve LGBTQ Ukrainians. Feder said among the myriad challenges LGBTQ Ukrainians have faced since the war began, including mandatory military service, lack of access to hormone therapy and documentation that accurately reflects a person’s gender identity, and LGBTQ-friendly shelters.

“These are all components of a strange war experience that is not well documented and that we have never seen, especially in photographs,” he told the Blade. “I felt really called to do that as a way to bring to the surface not just what was going on in Ukraine, but the problems that we were seeing in Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan.”

Feder also spoke with the Blade about the geopolitical implications of the war.

In 2013, Russian President Vladimir Putin signed a law banning the “promotion of homosexuality” to minors.

The 2014 Winter Olympics were held in the Russian resort city of Sochi on the Black Sea. Russia annexed Crimea from Ukraine a few weeks after the game ended.

Russia’s anti-LGBTQ crackdown has continued for the past decade.

In 2023, Russia’s Supreme Court ruled that the International LGBT Movement was an extremist organization and banned it. Russia’s Ministry of Justice last month designated ILGA World, a global LGBTQ and intersex rights group, as an “undesirable” organization.

Meanwhile, Ukraine is trying to keep pace with Europe.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said after meeting with then-President Joe Biden at the White House in 2021 that his country would continue to fight discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity. (Relations between Mr. Zelensky and the United States have become even more strained since the Trump-Vance administration took office.) Mr. Zelensky publicly supported civil partnerships for same-sex couples in 2022.

In 2023, Oksana Markarova, then Ukraine’s ambassador to the United States, praised Kyiv Pride and other LGBTQ and intersex rights organizations in her country when she spoke at a photo exhibition focused on LGBTQ and intersex soldiers at Ukraine House in Washington, D.C. Lenny Emson, the then-secretary general of Kyiv Pride, who Feder introduces in his book, was among those who attended the event.

“Thank you for your work in Kyiv, and for all you are doing to fight the discrimination that still exists elsewhere in Ukraine,” Markarova said. “Everything is not perfect yet, but I think we are moving in the right direction. And together we will not only fight foreign enemies, but also achieve equality.”

In response to the Blade’s question about why he wanted to write the book, Feder said he “didn’t feel that the importance of Russia’s war against Ukraine” to LGBTQ people around the world was “fully understood.”

“This was an opportunity to tell that big story,” he said.

“The crackdown on LGBT rights in Russia is essentially a laboratory for strategies to attack democratic values ​​by attacking gay rights, and it was the laboratory in 2013-2014 when Ukraine was moving closer to Europe,” he added. “This was a strategy that they were using as part of their foreign policy, a strategy that they had been using not only in Ukraine but around the world for the past decade.”

Feder said Republicans are using “the same strategy to attack gay people and democracy itself.”

“I felt it was important for Americans to understand that history,” he said.