Portraits and Stories from Ukraine
J. Lester Feder
The Queer Face oF War
View from Chernivtsi-Kyiv train, June 6, 2019.
Viktor Pylypenko
Artur Ozerov, who works for Kyiv’s military administration, became one of the most visible queer people supporting the war effort after the Ukrainian media reported that he also performs as the drag queen AuRa. Here he prepares to take the stage at a Kyiv nightclub on December 10, 2022.
Andrii Kravchuk and Yurii Ochichenko stand outside their old apartment, where the door destroyed by the far-right group still sits in the hallway.
Drag queen Marlen Scandal looks out from the Ukrainian float at the head of a joint march for peace held by KyivPride and the organizers of Warsaw’s Equality Parade on June 25, 2022.
A blown-out vehicle in the aftermath of the June 2023 bombing of the Odesa Polytechnic National University, photographed October 2023.
Diana stands on a war-damaged street near her cigarette kiosk with a pack of stray dogs that she has befriended.
Stanislava Petlytsia and Alina Shevchenko’s wedding performance. Photo by Christina Pashkina.
Olha Polyakova, director of Gender Stream, received this flag from soldiers defending Mariupol from pro-Russian forces in 2014. She hung it in the basement of the shelter her organization operated in Zakarpattia, which became an important refuge for trans people and other queer Ukrainians trying to cross the border into the EU at the start of the full-scale invasion.
Expanded from the acclaimed New York Times essay, winner of a 2025 Excellence in Journalism Award from The Association of LGBTQ+ Journalists
The Queer Face of War is the first-ever in-depth visual and oral history of an LGBTQ+ community in war. Award-winning photographer and journalist J. Lester Feder has crafted an unprecedented collection of moving portraits and gripping profiles of queer people in Ukraine, capturing the many ways they can be vulnerable in armed conflict—and the many ways they feel especially called to fight.
This is a war of values. We are fighting to live in a free country.
Viktor
Pylypenko, founder, Ukrainian LGBTIQ+ Military and Veterans for Equal Rights
In its siege of Ukraine, Russia forged a strategy that has since been adopted by authoritarian leaders around the world: attacking queer people to undermine fundamental principles of democracy and human rights. Vladimir Putin justified his war in part as a crusade to protect “traditional values” from the LGBTQ+ movement.
But queer Ukrainians have been fighting back, demanding equal rights while defending their country. Queer Ukrainians have come out in unprecedented ways—as soldiers, humanitarian volunteers, refugees, and survivors of war crimes—speaking out and taking up arms to defend democracy.
For LGBTQ+ people, visibility is power. The portraits and profiles in this book are rare because recent wars have been fought in places where it is unsafe to come out. The Queer Face of War is a crucial record of queer history—and a powerful testament to resistance and resilience.