'The Queer Face of War' chronicles hardships for Ukraine's LGBTQ+ community during war

Geoff Bennett:

It has been more than four years since Russia launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine. And while the war has affected the daily lives of nearly all Ukrainians, life has been especially challenging for members of its LGBTQ community.

Author and photojournalist J. Lester Feder recent book chronicles some of those lives. Here's our conversation with him.

J. Lester Feder, Author, "The Queer Face of War: Portraits and Stories from Ukraine": My name is J. Lester Feder. I'm a reporter that's primarily been a foreign correspondent. And I'm the author of "The Queer Face of War: Portraits and Stories from Ukraine."

LGBT people have been targeted in wars in well-documented ways going back at least as far as World War II. But we don't have a lot of stories about what actually happened to them, because, in most wars, it hasn't been safe for LGBT people to speak publicly.

So, when the war in Ukraine began, I immediately went over there to begin interviewing people to find out what issues they might be having. And we were particularly concerned, because Russia had used so much anti-LGBT propaganda, that they might be targeting queer Ukrainians on the ground.

I did not plan to do a book or to do a photo project. I assumed, like the reporting I'd done in Afghanistan or Iraq or Syria, that people would not want to be photographed or even necessarily share their full identities. And I asked people if they could be photographed really as an afterthought.

But people started saying yes. And when a number of people had said yes, I realized that I was building what I think is the first visual history of a queer community in war. So there isn't one LGBT experience of war. There are many.

And one of the reasons why I chose to do the book as a series of vignettes of individual people was to capture this range. I talked to one guy who was in the Army as a cook. And I talked to drag queens in the military administration supporting armed forces. And then there are the soldiers that are in the trenches and really fighting directly.

And that's everything from Viktor Pylypenko, who founded the LGBT military organization, has spent most of the war on the front lines, and has been quite accepted and celebrated for his work, to a woman named Emilia, who is transgender, joined the military initially because she thought it was the only way that she could afford gender-confirming surgery.

And then when she did finally start transitioning after being an intelligence officer and spending 10 years in the armed forces, her commanders stripped her of her security clearance, and ultimately she was forced to leave the military altogether.

And this made me think a lot about the fights over gay people being able to serve in the military when I was a teenager, and today the Trump administration's efforts to remove trans people from service.

It's really important for marginalized groups to be able to serve in the military, because it is a way of demonstrating that there is an ability to bear the full weight of citizenship, and therefore they're entitled to the full rights of as citizens.

And that denial of service is saying that marginalized people are somehow less than other citizens, they're not truly equal, and, therefore, can't make those demands. And it's not just the queer community that has recognized this, but I also think about the civil rights movement and African American soldiers coming back to the United States and that being a real spark that helped mobilize the civil rights movement here.

The treatment of queer people, like the treatment of all marginalized groups, is a real measure of the health of a democracy. One of the values of democracy and pluralism is that it can -- has room for many different kinds of people, and everybody can still be full citizens, even though they're not the same.

Ukrainians are not different from Americans or Europeans, in that the fight that they are having to remain safe as a queer community in a democracy that supports their rights is a global struggle, because the model that Putin has perfected of using homophobia to attack democracy is something that we are seeing in otherwise healthy democracies all over the world right now.

One of the activists that I spoke to said there's really only two options here. Either Ukraine will be a democracy and LGBT people will have rights, or it will be a dictatorship and no one will have rights. And I think that really captures the stakes for today.