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That’s why I’m partnering with Ukrainian organizations and All Out on a campaign supporting partnership rights and hate crime protections. The stories in The Queer Face of War are still unfolding.

Stories are a tool for action — and international solidarity matters when queer people and democracy are under pressure worldwide. In Ukraine, even after growing public support for partnership rights, conservative politicians are pushing to reverse that momentum.

Today, The Queer Face of War is published in the US, the UK, and worldwide. As Russia’s full scale invasion enters its fourth year, the book documents how homophobia was weaponized during the invasion—and how queer Ukrainians fought back. Available now: https://t.co/VXflNkKKFv

His loss is deeply felt in Ukraine’s LGBTQ+ community and beyond. But his legacy — of beauty, defiance, and courage — lives on in everyone who refuses to disappear.

We first met at a joint Pride march between Warsaw Pride and Kyiv Pride, where Marlen presided over the Ukrainian float like a guardian angel — radiant, fearless, larger than life.

I was saddened to learn of the death of Marlen Scandal shortly before The Queer Face of War was published. Marlen was a veteran, an activist in two revolutions, and a drag performer who carried Ukraine’s story across the world. 🕯️

📩 Subscribe to The Queer Face of War newsletter to read more stories like Oleksii’s — and to see how queer visibility continues to shape Ukraine’s fight for freedom.

Opponents of queer rights know this too — that’s why they try to erase queer history from libraries and queer people from public life. Visibility is a weapon of resistance.

Queer visibility is power.

Like Kohout decades before him, Oleksii chose visibility despite the risk. Many queer Ukrainian soldiers have come out during the war, igniting public support for partnership rights.

When I first wrote about him for The New York Times in 2024, he was the only gay survivor of Russian persecution to report his abuse to war crimes prosecutors. Now seven have come forward — still just a fraction of the 250 queer victims identified by the Odesa-based NGO Projector

This is Oleksii Polukhin. Russian soldiers detained and tortured him for more than two months, demanding he identify other LGBTQ+ activists and members of the Ukrainian resistance.

As another gay Nazi survivor said after telling his story in his late 80s: “I’m living proof that Hitler didn’t win.”

When Kohout’s memoir The Men with the Pink Triangle finally broke that silence, it was a turning point for the Gay Liberation movement. The pink triangle — the symbol Nazis forced gay men to wear — became a global emblem of queer rights.

Gay men were not recognized as Nazi victims — and denied survivor benefits — until 1985. Nearly forty years after the war ended.

This invisibility had real consequences. Hitler’s sodomy law was one of the only Nazi codes left on West Germany’s books after WWII. Historians estimate West Germany arrested more gay men than the Nazis did.

The first account by a gay Holocaust survivor was published in West Germany in 1972. Even then, Josef Kohout kept his identity hidden behind a pseudonym for almost another decade.

Nazi Germany sent 15,000 queer men to concentration camps. Not one told their story publicly until nearly 30 years after Hitler’s death. Here’s why that silence — and one man’s decision to break it — matters for my book cover. 🧵

There’s never been a project like this, since queer people usually have to stay hidden in war zones because they’re targeted for violence.