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.

The Queer Face of War: Portraits and Stories from Ukraine publishes today in Germany and is now available across the EU. It will be available in the US, UK, and worldwide in February 2026

This project is the culmination of my journey as a journalist, activist, and photographer over the past 13 years. In 2012, I made the scary decision to leave my job at Politico to begin reporting on LGBTQ+ rights worldwide. When BuzzFeed News hired me as a global queer rights correspondent in 2013, my first assignment took me to Kyiv, where I wrote about how Russia was trying to scare Ukrainians away from alliances with western democracy with slogans like “Association with the EU equals same-sex marriage.”

I was back in Ukraine again in 2022, this time as a human rights researcher interviewing queer Ukrainians to learn how the Russian invasion was affecting them. I met a gay man blinded in a previous hate crime now struggling to flee the fighting. I met trans soldiers who wanted to join the fight but were pushed out by their superiors. I encountered queer teens who made a risky escape back to Ukraine after their home towns were occupied and they were taken to Russia.

These stories and dozens of others became The Queer Face of War, which is now on sale in the EU (US and UK readers will have to wait until February). Nearly every testimony is accompanied by a portrait I made after an interview—only one or two people requested their faces not be shown. I was initially floored that so many people agreed to be photographed. I’ve interviewed queer people from many war zones—Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan—but they never felt safe revealing their identities.

After a few trips to Ukraine, I realized I was building a historic collection of portraits and oral history, giving a broad look at a queer community in war. Together, they tell the story about how Putin weaponized homophobia in his crusade against democracy and how queer Ukrainians organized to defend their country and their rights. These testimonies also resonate with me as an American watching the MAGA Right target queer people as part of a broader assault on democracy.

If you’re in the EU, you can order the book now. Otherwise, you can learn more about the project at my website, TheQueerFaceOfWar.com, and I’ll be sharing more about the project, exhibitions, and events soon.

Please help me get the word out about this project by forwarding this email and sharing on socials! (I’m @jlfeder on Instagram and other platforms.)

After a long, challenging period, I’m happy to share that the book version of The Queer Face of War will soon be going to press with the photo book publisher Verlag Kettler. It will be available in the EU in October and in the U.S. in early 2026, distributed by one of the country’s largest art book distributors. I’ll have more details on the launch soon, including plans for exhibits, book talks, and more.

It’s incredible to see this work come together in a collection and to share the stories of Ukraine’s queer community with the wider world. There have been many challenges in bringing the book across the finish line—and honestly, there were moments when I worried it might not happen. Challenges still lie ahead: institutions where I had hoped to exhibit the work are facing financial crises due to Trump-era cuts, which also led to my layoff from CUNY’s Gender Justice and Human Rights Clinic.

From the book’s back cover: The stories of Ukraine’s queer movement remain urgent and inspiring at a time when Ukraine continues to fight bravely for its independence and queer people around the world are fighting for their rights. The Queer Face of War tells the story of how Russia developed a strategy—since adopted by authoritarian leaders around the world—of attacking queer people to undermine fundamental principles of democracy and human rights. It also celebrates how LGBTQ+ Ukrainians fought back, mobilizing as part of the pro-democracy movement, fighting for their rights while defending their country. Today I’m excited to share the book’s cover, which features a portrait of Oleksii Polukhin. You can pre-order the book in the EU here; more information on U.S. orders will be available soon.

Last weekend NLGJA: The Association of LGBTQ+ Journalists awarded an Excellence in Journalism Award for an essay adapted from The Queer Face of War and published in The New York Times last year.

The piece told the story of Oleksii Polukhin, a survivor of queer persecution by Russian forces, and argued that targeting queer people in armed conflict should be prosecuted as a crime against humanity. NLGJA recognized the essay for excellence in opinion writing.

Read the full essay here.

The case for treating queer persecution as a crime against humanity in The New York Times:

Oleksii Polukhin’s 64 days in detention began when Russian soldiers stopped him at a checkpoint. They found that he’d been gathering information about Russian military positions to share with Ukrainian forces; they also discovered he was gay.

One of the guards called him an anti-gay slur and forcing him to strip naked on the street. 

Read the full essay here.

Russian bombs brought Stepan and Maxim together. Now Russian bombs have driven them apart.

The men, now both in their early thirties, were living almost 20 miles apart in the eastern Ukrainian region called the Donbas, where Russian-backed separatists went to war in 2014. They likely would not have met if not for a bomb that exploded in Maxim’s yard, blowing all the windows out of the house he shared with his parents.

Read the full story here.

At the beginning of the war, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky issued an order forbidding men ages 18 to 60 from leaving Ukraine and ordering them to register for military service.

While many LGBTQ people did so enthusiastically, some gay men and trans people don’t feel serving is an option. Like many straight people, those without military experience worry they will be forced to put their lives in danger without being able to contribute to the fight. Some queer people worry about homophobia and transphobia in the Ukrainian military.

Some said they were afraid of being singled out if captured, given President Vladimir Putin’s crusade against LGBTQ rights.

Read the full story in Teen Vogue.

The Queer Face of War in Politico Magazine.

Russian President Vladimir Putin has said repeatedly that he attacked Ukraine last year partly to protect “traditional values” against the West’s “false values” that are “contrary to human nature” — code for LGBTQ people. Perhaps he hoped this would rally conservative Ukrainians to Russia’s side — it’s a tactic Kremlin allies have tried repeatedly over the past decade. But this time, it instead appears to be convincing a growing number of Ukrainians to support equality and reject the values Putin espouses.

Read the full essay here.