J. Lester Feder

The Queer Face of War | Lester Feder freelance journalist

Ukraine wasn't perfect for a couple like them, Adam said, but "at least in Ukraine, they won't kill us for being who we are."
More stories and portraits of queer people resisting authoritarianism at thequeerfaceofwar.com

They grew close.
They fell in love.

They were afraid to stay in Russia because of its anti-LGBTQ+ laws.
Leaving wasn’t easy — Adam was still a minor and couldn’t travel alone.
With help from Adam’s former teacher, they snuck back to Ukraine.

Adam had witnessed the destruction of Mariupol.

Sasha’s family believed Russian propaganda and believed they’d been “liberated.” Adam told him what he had seen.
Adam spoke about the siege that destroyed his home and killed his grandmother.

Slowly, Sasha began to question what he’d been told.

Adam and Sasha met as teenagers in Moscow.
Both are trans.

Both are from Ukraine’s occupied south.

Russia has forcibly deported tens of thousands of children from Ukraine. Putin has been indicted for this war crime by the International Criminal Court.

POLITIES AND PROSE PRESENTS J. LESTER FEDER W/CHRIS GEIDNER THE QUEER FACE OF WAR FRI, FEB 6 7PM THE WHARF

So, @politicsprose.bsky.social doesn't post on here, but I'll be joining Lester Feder — who I don't think is on here — tomorrow night at their Wharf location to talk about his new book, The Queer Face of War, out of his reporting on Ukraine.

Join us! politics-prose.com/j-lester-fed...

lol hi @chrisgeidner.bsky.social I’m here!

Looking forward to seeing you tomorrow!

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.

Ukraine: The Queer Face of War - All Out As the war enters its fifth year, queer Ukrainians defend their country without basic legal protections. Read their stories and stand for equality.

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.

The Queer Face of War | Lester Feder freelance journalist

Available now: thequeerfaceofwar.com

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.

Today, The Queer Face of War is published in the US, the UK, and worldwide.

This book tells the story of queer Ukrainians living through Russia’s invasion—and how homophobia was used as a weapon against democracy itself.

DC Friends! Please join me to launch my new book, The Queer Face of War: Portraits and Stories from Ukraine at Politics and Prose's Wharf location. I'll be in conversation with the extraordinary @chrisgeidner.bsky.social discussing homophobia and the global assault on democracy.

A dynamic on the ground here in Minneapolis that's been hard to wrap my head around: Local law enforcement, while trying to lower the temperature, have vanished. So it's really just protesters vs ICE. And ICE does not give a shit. They're laying siege to the city. Existentially horrifying.

Beyond the discourse, though, it also convinced a lot more people to play the game. Data from SteamCharts shows that after the awards, the game’s concurrent player count went from a daily average of 14,000 to 45,000 within a few days. Sales estimates from SteamDB show that the week after the awards, Expedition 33 went from Steam’s 12th best-selling non-free game to number two, behind Arc Raiders. This is exactly what awards are supposed to do. Whether or not you think Expedition 33 counts as an indie game, The Game Awards are accomplishing their most basic goal of giving attention and distinction to their winners. This wasn’t always the case — from the records we can find, there wasn’t any comparable bump back when the awards were called the Spike TV VGAs.

As @ryanhatesthis.bsky.social reports from on the ground in Minneapolis, I'm holding the fort at @garbageday.email with our monthly Garbage Intelligence issue.

We have all The Game Awards numbers, including how much attention all those wins gave Clair Obscur.

www.garbageday.email/p/the-oscars...

"Intense video" Fox News' Matt Finn writes as he smirks and laughs while filming protesters being arrested by ICE agents as he does his little state-sanctioned ride-along with them this morning.

Garbage Day A newsletter about having fun online

I need 30 people to subscribe to @garbageday.email right now. Please. We're so freaking close to 100,000. Please 😭🙏🏻❤️
www.garbageday.email

Subtle @

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. 🕯️

The Queer Face of War | Lester Feder freelance journalist

📩 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.

thequeerfaceofwar.com

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.

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.