Shining a light on ‘The Queer Face of War’: J. Lester Feder on LGBTQ+ Ukrainians fighting for freedom

Journalist J. Lester Feder discusses his new book about the LGBTQ+ Ukrainians fighting for freedom and justice – both for themselves and their country.

There is a line about war that has always struck me: “I do not love war, but I love the courage with which men face war.” In recent weeks, you have probably seen various observers opine on the state of the war in Ukraine following another year of Russia’s marginal advances on the battlefield and increasingly brazen attacks on civilians. Certainly, we must not lose sight of the enormous challenges facing Ukraine, now and for the foreseeable future. But, I think it is similarly important to remind ourselves just how humbled we should be by the incalculable courage and sacrifice that have sustained Ukraine’s improbable defence from the very first hours of Russia’s full-scale attack. Recall President Volodymyr Zelenskyy choosing to stay in Kyiv when many thought he faced imminent death, and delivering a calm, awe-inspiring pledge to his besieged nation: “We are all here protecting our independence.”

But of course, Ukraine’s survival is not the story of any single man or moment; it is a million different stories of Ukrainians demonstrating physical and moral courage in myriad ways. It is a collective struggle encompassing a diverse political and demographic spectrum, including – notably – Ukraine’s queer population.

In 2024, J. Lester Feder wrote an award-winning essay in The New York Times about the unique position of Ukraine’s LGBTQ community in the country’s ongoing efforts to resist Russia militarily and culturally; push for meaningful legal accountability; and determine their own future as a free people. 

This was part of a project he designated The Queer Face of War, which became a newsletter (available on Beehiiv) and now a book (published by Verlag Kettler and available for order online). Described as “the first in-depth visual and oral history of an LGBTQ+ community in war,” Mr. Feder said that this project represents the culmination of a journey he has been on since 2012 as a journalist, activist, and photographer focused on LGBTQ+ rights worldwide.  

Mr. Feder recently joined me (remotely) from New York to discuss the book and his related advocacy work. Our conversation (lightly edited and condensed) is presented below:

Jared: As I said when I first wrote to you, I was interested in your work because, like many people, I’ve read so many stories about the war in Ukraine over the last several years, but I cannot recall that many about its impact on the LGBTQ+ community. I know you’ve covered this issue in Ukraine even prior to the war Russia launched in 2014. Can you talk a bit about that background experience which led to this project?

Lester: Yeah. You know, I’ve gotten asked a few times about why I focus on this relatively ‘narrow’ piece of the story, and there are a couple of reasons. One is because LGBT rights have been unusually central to the war. As you referenced, I first went to Kyiv back in 2013 to do a story about efforts to bring a Russian-style gay propaganda law to Ukraine. That law was only a couple months old in Russia, but it provoked this massive outcry in part because of the [upcoming Sochi] Olympics. Russia really detected an opportunity amidst that backlash to define itself on the international stage as a defender of so-called traditional values and to use homophobia to discredit the very idea of democracy and human rights in Western countries, where LGBT rights have been embraced as part of a broad human rights agenda. 

And then Ukraine was kind of the proving ground for that strategy where allies of the Kremlin were specifically using homophobic slogans and advertisements to try to scare Ukrainians away from the association agreement with the EU. And that continued to escalate up until the full-scale invasion itself. In Putin’s speech announcing the ‘special military operation’, he made reference to its necessity as a way to stop Western nations that were trying to destroy Russia and its traditional values. And so that drumbeat has been very important. 

The other reason I felt it was important to do this project was that we’ve seen LGBT people targeted in a variety of ways in a number of conflicts over the past hundred years. Probably most famously was in the Holocaust when an estimated 15,000 gay men were sent to the concentration camps by the Nazis. Then in Iraq and Syria, you had people who were accused of homosexuality and a spectacle was made of throwing them off of buildings as a form of execution. But we’ve never really gotten a comprehensive view of all the different ways that being queer affects people’s experience of armed conflict. 

Ukraine was the first place that I’d reported on where people were able to be out and not just tell their stories, but actually show their faces. I like to say that it’s easier to ignore someone’s story if you never get to look them in the eyes. And this was a way to not only make [the LGBTQ community] visible as Ukrainians, but also hopefully act as a proxy for all the queer people who are experiencing armed conflict.  The rest of the world doesn’t really understand how they are uniquely vulnerable in that circumstance. 

Jared: That gets me to one of the great quotes I had flagged from your New York Times essay, which was, “While many Ukrainians remain hostile to queer rights, LGBTQ people have been highly visible in Ukraine’s war effort, leading to real progress toward the protection of LGBTQ rights in Ukrainian law. Ukraine is the first conflict in which queer people are likely to be victims of persecution in an environment where they could be protected if they come forward.” For those not as familiar as you are with geopolitics and the internal politics of Ukraine, I wonder how much of an evolution you’ve perceived with this issue, particularly since the full-scale invasion. 

Lester: So, it’s worth talking just for a moment about LGBT soldiers and particularly [Ukrainian LGBT+ Military and Veterans for Equal Rights]. They did an incredible job really early in the conflict of using their social media just to make queer people visible. You know, there was a right-wing Ukrainian politician who said something not long before the full-scale invasion to the effect of “a queer person could never be a patriot.” [The organization] was not literally an answer to him, but conceptually it was showing the patriotism of queer people, understanding that it was important to tell that story so that Ukrainians would understand the stakes for queer people in this war. 

Also, in the case of people in same-sex partnerships, their partners had no legal protections…I include one story in the book of a gay man who married his female friend just so somebody could claim his body because he had no living family. But he had a partner of 15 years. So [this organization] wanted to make those stories and faces visible. In some cases their identities were concealed, but they told their stories and it had a really big effect; the group tripled in size during that period and it did seem to have a very real effect on public opinion. There’s polling that shows an increased support for protection of LGBT rights under Ukrainian law. 

And there was also a kind of groundswell of support when someone who was not an LGBT activist launched a petition to demand partnership rights in Ukraine during the first couple months of fighting and it quickly got 25,000 signatures. Under Ukrainian law, this forced Zelenskyy to respond. He sent it to parliament where a lawmaker proposed legislation to create partnership rights, but it never got a vote. 

Actually, right now Ukraine is in a really interesting moment where they’re overhauling their civil code as part of the process of Europeanization, but the draft that was introduced included even more restrictive language around partnership rights. But at the same time there was just a ruling from the Ukrainian Supreme Court that recognized, for the first time, a family relationship between two gay men. So it continues to be a complicated environment but it’s moved very far along since the start of the full-scale invasion. 

Jared: I think that’s a good segue into the book itself. For those, myself included, who haven’t gotten our hands on a physical copy yet, can you give us an example of the kinds of stories that are in there? 

Lester: I guess one I would highlight, if I had to choose, would be Viktor Pylypenko, who founded the LGBT organization I mentioned. Actually, he initially joined the military hoping that it would make him a ‘real man’ and turn him straight. It did not do that. After getting out of the service the first time – this is before the fighting that began in 2014 – he spent some time abroad and got into his first relationship. When the [Maidan Revolution] happened in 2014, he left that person behind to come back and support it. Then when Russia invaded at the beginning of 2014, he volunteered for the military and spent two years in some of the bloodiest fighting zones of that conflict. 

Viktor wound up coming out in 2018. He initially participated in a photography project for queer soldiers where all their faces were covered. Over the course of the press for that project he decided to come out and founded this LGBT military organization. And it really changed the whole trajectory of his life, with him being able to reconcile his patriotism and his love for serving in the armed forces with being a queer person and a queer activist. 

And interestingly, he didn’t get a lot of bad reactions, which he was very afraid of. He said the only time anybody said something directly to him was when he ran into a former commander of his during a deployment in 2023 I think. That guy went to his supervising officers and said, ‘you know you have a faggot in your battalion.’ They were like, ‘he’s not a faggot, he’s gay.’ And they basically told him to get lost. So I think that really shows the importance of that service in changing minds. 

I’ll say one other thing about that. You know, I think about the fight that we had over gays being able to serve in the military [in the U.S.] in the 90s. And now we have the Trump administration’s efforts to force trans people out of service and also to marginalize women in the [armed forces]. Often military service is sort of held up as the high-water mark of patriotism in the U.S. and many other countries. 

Denying certain groups the ability to serve in the armed services is a very effective tool for saying they don’t deserve the full rights of citizenship; because if they’re barred from the full obligations of citizenship then they should not get all the rights. This is an issue that’s often very uncomfortable on the left, which has a kind of anti-military reflex, but I think it’s worth appreciating the impact that service has on changing the conversation about who deserves full rights in a country. We can see this in the U.S. going back to the civil rights movement, when it was black soldiers coming back from World War II who really began the conversation that led to the end of segregation. 

Jared: That ties into another quote I really liked from your essay, where you wrote, “While Russia is far from the first state to persecute LGBTQ people, it is the first superpower to deploy homophobia as a major justification for invading another country.” I think people are probably broadly familiar with Russia’s crackdown on LGBTQ+ rights over the last few years. I saw a story just recently about an LGBTQ+ rights group called ‘Coming Out’ being labelled an ‘extremist organization’ by a Russian court.

Lester: Yeah, actually I did an essay in my newsletter that talked about that case. And I did some reporting on the ‘extremism’ issue for Foreign Policy a couple years ago as well. It’s important to understand that there’s a deep connection on multiple levels between Russia’s attack on its own queer citizens and its attack on Ukraine. First of all, like we talked about before, it’s part of this broader ideological project for Putin in his later terms as president, which have been built on this foundation of him holding up Russian values. 

My former editor at BuzzFeed wrote a great essay back in 2013 about this, how Putin came to power without a lot of ideological definition. As his popularity started slipping, he embraced this kind of ‘neotraditionalism’ and drew very close to the Orthodox Church. So it’s from that environment that the anti-LGBT politics come out of. And then it serves two functions: it fortifies his own regime internally, and it projects a certain ideological justification for Russia’s adventurism abroad. 

The second piece is that [these policies] were part of a broader attack on any kind of civil society movement. The gay propaganda law was not really used to persecute gay people per se, but it was one of the many tools that were used to target any kind of activism. With that law, along with the foreign agents registration requirements and the ban on foreign funding, Putin was trying to just gut any kind of infrastructure for political resistance of any kind. 

And after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine began, lawmakers started ratcheting up the anti-LGBT legislation very fast. Really, the gay propaganda ban as it was initially conceived, at least on paper, was about prohibiting talking about homosexuality with minors. Then they extended the ban to include [speaking about it with] adults as well, but with relatively minor penalties. Afterwards, they passed legislation that banned gender transition, and even criminalized providing support for the trans community, such as doctors providing treatment for trans people. Then there was this really big move by the Supreme Court at the tail end of 2023 declaring the ‘international LGBT movement’ to be an extremist organization, which is essentially what we call terrorism in the U.S. And so it went from a minor administrative penalty for violating the gay propaganda ban, to facing as much as 10 years in jail under the terrorism laws.

And it was also the first time that we were seeing not just the arresting or targeting of activists, but also average queer people. So, ‘Coming Out’ immediately realized after the full-scale invasion began, that their ability to work safely in Russia was going to vanish really fast. And Alex, who was then the director, relocated the organization outside of Russia. So, I don’t think there’s anybody in imminent danger of going to prison as a result of this [new ruling].

But, you know, they were not the only group. There were two others that were declared extremists at the same time, as I wrote about back in 2024. If I remember correctly, it was something like 300 activists had gone abroad after the extremism declaration, and I would assume that [number] continues to grow. So it’s really terrifying…and Alex said something really smart which was, that after the war started going badly for Putin, he needed to identify a target that he could easily beat, and LGBT people were an easy enemy [to target] internally. And that’s also something that we see in a lot of places – the tolerance for difference inside of a society radically diminishes during war because of this desire to strengthen control internally and also project a certain idea of citizenship. 

Jared: Lastly, without spoiling the whole essay, I love the way it concludes with a meditation on the importance of international law and institutions in seeking justice and accountability, even if it can seem a bit performative if wrongdoers are not actually brought to justice. One of the Ukrainian websites I read had a piece recently about why it’s taking so long for Europe to commit to funding a Special Tribunal for the crime of aggression against Ukraine. This, despite the fact that Kyiv sees this as a non-negotiable in any settlement. So maybe you can leave us with a thought about why we should still have some faith in the relevance of international law whenever this war ends, particularly with respect to some of the cases you have documented in your reporting. 

Lester: Maybe I’ll start with your comment that it feels performative, and I guess I would say that the performative aspect of a legal case is important, right? Like, one of the things that prosecutions do is they tell a story about what happened and they provide a very clear way to make a declaration as a society that certain things are wrong. So, anybody who thinks that the power of law comes from putting people in jail or arresting people or that it stops future wrongs, is frankly going to be very disappointed by international law. 

But what it’s very good for, and important for, is upholding global principles of right and wrong, which can sound kind of ‘idealistic’ in a derogatory sense. But, of course we have the legacy of the Holocaust to say otherwise. Even with the Nuremberg trials, the genocide charges were seen as the lesser charges at the time…but the fact that the Holocaust was named a genocide completely transformed the way states reacted to antisemitism around the world. So, I think that’s a really important precedent to look at. 

And you can contrast that with the situation of gay men coming out of the Nazi era – not only was it not named as a crime that the Nazis put gay people into concentration camps, but gay people were taken from the camps and put back into prison… It was not until the 1960s that consensual sex between same-sex adults was decriminalized in West Germany, and gay people were not recognized as victims of the Nazis until 1984. There was complete silence among gay survivors of the concentration camps until 1972 with a book called The Men with the Pink Triangle, published by a man named Josef Kohout. He was the first to speak out about what had happened to him and it’s the reason that the pink triangle became an international symbol of gay liberation. 

The recognition of the victimization of queer people in World War II was really central to their claiming rights in the latter part of the 20th century. So that’s why I find the picture [of Oleksii Polukhin] on the cover of the book so powerful. You know, it took 30 years before the first gay survivors of Nazi Germany spoke out. Oleksii is speaking out while the war is still going on – that’s a very different world. And the discussion around queer rights in Ukraine, and beyond, is very different because those stories are being publicly told.

Featured image: J. Lester Feder, Oleksii Polukhin, (2025). © 2025 J. Lester Feder.