After exciting US launches at MoMA PS1 in NYC and Politics and Prose in DC, I've received several amazing invitations to share the work at some of Europe's most important cultural events this summer, including:
Eurovision Song Contest, Vienna: QFW has been selected to be part of Eurovision’s official “Offstage” program, with a gallery show of the work promoted to the thousands who will come to the city for the contest’s finals in May.
Pride Month Exhibition, Kyiv: I’m thrilled to be working with the Ukrainian organizations Insight and LGBTQI+ Military and Veterans for Equal Rights to present a special exhibition of QFW in Kyiv to mark Pride Month in June.
World Pride, Amsterdam: A QFW exhibit will also be featured as part of the World Pride program in Amsterdam at the end of July and beginning of August.
This is an incredible opportunity to build solidarity with Ukraine and queer people everywhere fighting authoritarianism.
But I need your help to make it happen. Most of the costs of the exhibits aren’t covered by the organizers. I need to raise funds to cover expenses like printing and travel costs—which have skyrocketed in recent weeks.
Can you help me raise $5,000 by May 1 to support this trip by donating here?
I’m grateful to the German organization Queer Emergency Aid Ukraine, which has helped organize this tour and is raising an additional $8,000 to share the project across Europe. (If you’re in the EU, donate to their campaign here.)
As always, a portion of funds raised will also go to direct aid for queer people and women in Ukraine.
We had a standing-room only crowd for the NYC book launch at the Museum of Modern Art's PS1 on March 14. Thanks to everyone who came out!
It was very special to discuss the work with moderator Miriam Elder, CNN's executive editor for features, who was my editor at BuzzFeed News when I first began reporting on Ukraine in 2013. We discussed how the project came to be, some of the most powerful stories in the book, and why LGBTQ+ Ukrainians have been at the center of a global "Cold War" over human rights for the last decade.
NYC friends! Please join me to launch The Queer Face of War in New York at Artbook at MoMA PS1 in Long Island City, Saturday, March 14, at 4:00 pm. I’ll be in conversation with Miriam Elder, executive editor for features at CNN, followed by a book signing.
You can pre-purchase a copy of the book and RSVP here. Please do that if you’re planning on coming so the bookstore can be sure it has enough copies on hand.
Hope to see you there!
Tuesday, February 24, is the fourth anniversary of Putin’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
A lot will be written about the state of the fighting this week, and rightly so. But there’s another event happening this February 24 that will attract far less international attention. A court in Moscow is expected to ban the St. Petersburg LGBTQ+ organization Coming Out as an “extremist organization.” This could subject its leaders to prosecution under the country’s terrorism laws. Coming Out's lawyers told me it’s likely a coincidence that this hearing is being held on the war anniversary. But Russia’s war on Ukraine and its war on its own LGBTQ+ citizens are connected: Putin discovered that homophobia was a powerful tool to crush democracy within and undermine international norms....
On the fourth anniversary of the full-scale invasion, The Blade's Michael Lavers did a nice feature on The Queer Face of War. You can read it here.
Today, The Queer Face of War is published in the United States and globally. Here's how to order.
As debates over democracy, human rights, and authoritarianism intensify worldwide, Ukraine has become a frontline—not only militarily, but ideologically.
This book documents how queer Ukrainians experienced Russia’s invasion, and how homophobia was deliberately weaponized as part of that war. It also shows something else: how visibility, even under fire, becomes a form of resistance.
The book arrives at a precarious moment. As the war enters its fourth year. Russia’s hitting Ukraine harder than ever, international attention has drifted, and conservative politicians in Ukraine are making a push to reverse public support for same-sex partnerships. The people in these pages are still in danger and fighting for their rights, while we’re fighting for own democracy in the US. These stories matter even more now than when I first heard them.
Tagesspiegel, one of Berlin's leading newspapers, published a beautiful feature about The Queer Face of War just ahead of its worldwide release next week.
Here's a bit from the intro (translated from German):
The US journalist and photographer J. Lester Feder has reported on the fates of queer people in wars on several occasions, for example in Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan. But he was never able to use their names or show their faces. This relative invisibility of queer people in war zones often meant that they were overlooked in peacekeeping, humanitarian aid, and legal post-war processes. When Russia began its war against the whole of Ukraine, Feder traveled to the country and neighboring states to interview queer people about their experiences, initially through local NGOs.
Update: You can listen to the full event on Politics and Prose's podcast.
DC friends! Please join me and Law Dork's Chris Geidner for the DC launch of The Queer Face of War at Politics & Prose @ The Warf, February 6, 7:00 pm.
Hope to see you there!
Today I wanted to share a note from Yevheniia Kvasnevska, who I profiled in The Queer Face of War and is now helping me promote the project from her home in Odesa—when she has electricity and a working internet connection.
The air raid sirens now sound almost constantly. Every evening I listen to the shelling, and every morning I read the news about hits, casualties, and the number of shells fired. As winter approaches, the Russians are launching targeted attacks to leave people without heating, electricity, mobile communications, the internet, or drinking water. These days I'm lucky if I have power for more than an hour.
I was 16 when Russia first invaded in 2014. I grew up and came out with this threat hanging over me, while also battling my city and far-right groups for the right to hold Pride in Odesa. When the full-scale invasion began in 2022, I volunteered with Gay Alliance Ukraine, helping get supplies to queer people behind the front lines—many of whom were too afraid of being discovered by the Russian occupiers to even leave their homes.
That summer I visited Prides across Europe, explaining why our fight was their fight. Russia doesn't just want to conquer Ukraine with weapons; it wants to use homophobia to make people fear democracy itself. If Russia succeeds here, it will inspire other authoritarians to do the same. We're already seeing this as the war drags on—even in the US, once our strongest ally.
I was already burned out when Lester visited me three years ago, and we'd only been in the full-scale war for nine months. I felt powerless, like nothing I did mattered, like we'd been forgotten. I almost canceled my interview with him.
What convinced me: I still had hope that our stories—our determination to live as our true selves in a free country—would connect with people around the world who know the same struggle. Queer people everywhere understand what it's like to be targeted, to have powerful forces determined to erase your existence.
So I want to ask you to help us in our fight. And I want you to be inspired by our ability to fight back, even when the battle feels impossible.
Even on these cold, dark days, I am holding onto that.
Today I want to tell you about the photo on the cover of The Queer Face of War.
But first, a little history: Nazi Germany sent as many as 15,000 queer men to concentration camps. But not one told their story publicly until nearly 30 years after Hitler’s death. The first account of a gay survivor was published in West Germany in 1972, and even then the survivor, Josef Kohout, kept his identity hidden behind a pseudonym for almost another decade.
The invisibility of queer Nazi victims had real consequences: Hitler’s sodomy law was one of the only Nazi codes left on West Germany’s books after World War II, and historians estimate that West Germany’s government arrested more gay men than the Nazis did. Gays were not recognized as Nazi victims—and denied survivor benefits—until 1985.
Kohout’s memoir, The Men with a Pink Triangle, broke that silence, and its publication was a major boost for the nascent Gay Liberation movement. German queer groups embraced the pink triangle—the symbol the Nazis forced gay men to wear—as an emblem of queer rights, and it quickly spread around the world. As another gay Nazi survivor remarked after deciding to tell his story in his late 80s, “I’m living proof that Hitler didn’t win.”
This photo reminds me of these men.
The cover features Oleksii Polukhin. Russian soldiers detained and tortured him for more than two months, demanding he identify other LGBTQ+ activists in his city and people working for the Ukrainian resistance.
When I first wrote about Oleksii for The New York Times in 2024, he was the only gay survivor of Russian persecution to report his abuse to war crimes prosecutors. Though Ukraine is making progress toward supporting queer people’s rights, homophobia remains deeply entrenched. Many queer Ukrainians have experienced abuse from police in the past and are afraid to give testimony to the authorities. Now there are seven that have agreed to talk to prosecutors, according to the Odesa-based NGO Projector—only a fraction of the 250 queer victims or witnesses to possible war crimes Projector has identified in its research.
That’s why it is important to me that Oleksii’s face be seen and his story known.
