Before you dedicate your precious time to read this text, report or report, we can call it whatever we want, since the important thing is to highlight the conquest of this space for the LGBTQIA+ community, I want to say that we thought a lot about what to talk about in our subject of debut.
More than a month ago, the world stopped to follow the Russian army’s invasion of Ukrainian territory, and the question was inevitable: how is the LGBTQIA+ community in the middle of this conflict? When we started researching, we wouldn’t have imagined what we would hear.
After eight years without setting foot in Ukraine, his homeland, actor Alex Budin, 39, born in Crimea, and now resident in the United States, took courage and made the long-awaited trip. What he didn’t know is that Russia would invade his home country and that would make it difficult for him to return.
“When the war started I was in Kiev with my friends, most of them LGBTQIA+, and I had to leave the city. I spent two days trying to catch flights, but they were all cancelled,” she says.
The war scenario is frightening and worrying for anyone in the midst of a conflict, but for Alex, it seems even more complicated, being a gay and trans man. And I highlight this because Ukrainian society is still extremely homophobic and prejudiced.
Russia’s military strike, which Moscow called a “special military operation,” sent shockwaves through Ukraine’s LGBTQIA+ community, in part because President Vladimir Putin has known to restrict the community’s rights for a few years, and a possible Russian takeover of Ukraine could mean the incorporation of these anti-LGBT laws into Ukrainian territory.
“In Ukraine, we no longer have barriers to go to Europe [países da União Europeia] like before, before we had to get a visa from the Schengen zone to go, it was super complicated. Today, people can travel freely wherever and whenever, and from this simple cultural exchange people started to be more educated and became more tolerant with other people, with other nations, other ethnicities. And that helped the LGBTQ community within Ukraine to become part of society, with less pressure or aggression,” says Alex.
It is not today that the Russian government worries Alex. In 1999, at the age of 18, he left Crimea, a region taken over by the Kremlin, where he lived with his parents. From there, he moved to Kiev, to be able to transition his gender and get new documents.
“At that time, I didn’t have any information about the trans community, so I had no idea who I was or what was happening to me, and in the medical field nobody wanted to take any responsibility for something they didn’t know about. So I was transferred many times to different institutions until I was able to make the transition and get my documents”.
Afraid of persecution, she applied for asylum in the United States and now lives with her husband and dog in Los Angeles. When war broke out, she began a long journey to get out of the country. Soon after the first bombs, she had to hide in a bunker at a subway station and, little by little, she was getting close to the Hungarian border.
Arriving at the military post on the border between Ukraine and Hungary, Alex was stopped crossing. He then explains that, as a trans man, he had to enlist in the military after transitioning – and, interestingly, carried the document proving his military discharge (issued in 2006) with him as he tried to cross the border.
“They do everything they can to stop you from crossing the border and I had to spend a night there,” says Alex. “People out there, men who had similar discharge papers that I had with me, had to undergo further medical examinations on the spot.”
As soon as the Russian army invaded Ukrainian territory, Volodymyr Zelensky banned men aged between 18 and 60 from leaving the country and asked them to fight for the nation. Many people in the community, to our surprise, did not think twice and enlisted in the Army.
I make it clear that the surprise is the fact that the LGBTQIA+ population, which needs to fight daily to guarantee basic rights, is one of the first to be ready to defend the country.
“Even now on the battlefield there are LGBTQIA+ people who are fighting for our country and they are openly gay (…) They even have a specific branding on their sleeves which means they belong to the community so I think it’s progress for everyone us”, highlighted Alex.
A progress that is more than necessary, although Ukraine does not criminalize members of the LGBTQIA+ community, but little progress is made in the rights of minorities. Same-sex marriage is not allowed, let alone the adoption of children by people of the same sex.
Who also sees the presence of the community on the battlefront as an advance is the activist of the LGBTQIA+ movement Sofia Lapina, who has been at the forefront of LGBTQIA+ movements in Ukraine for eight years, including Kiev Pride and Ukraine Pride.
“Six years ago my friends and I were organizing a movie session, and the movie was called ‘Gay Propaganda’. A group of about fifty people from the far right came and turned off the movie screen. We called the police and they did nothing, that’s how I became an LGBTQIA+ human rights activist,” she says.
Sofia is a lesbian woman. The NGO in which she works today, Ukraine Pride, proposes to promote LGBTQIA+ rights in an alternative way, through the media and audiovisual pieces. This militancy, however, changed radically after the beginning of the war.
“My role now is to organize fundraising campaigns to help LGBTQIA+ in the military and refugees. For the military in the community, we are donating protective equipment and for the refugees we help with money, food, clothes, medicine and a safe place”, he adds.
For Sofia, nationalism and the will to defend the country from invasion have been breaking down barriers and bringing the community closer to society.
“Since the beginning of the war we have been helping each other, we are connected to protect our country, because both LGBTQIA+ people and the patriotic and pro-nationalist military are in the same place now, next to each other.”
Also taken by this nationalist sentiment is filmmaker Yura Dvizhon, 29, who works with Sofiia at the NGO Ukraine Pride as a co-founder.
“I lived my last ten years in Kiev and when the war started I woke up at five o’clock in the morning, took my boyfriend, we packed up quickly and moved to western Ukraine because it’s safer here,” he explains.
Today, Yura sees many LGBTQIA+ friends fighting in the army.
“I see how they are struggling and openly talking about their sexuality, and it seems to me that a lot of people are supportive. I hope that when this war is over we can live freely in our country”.
It is not new that Yura fights for the rights of the LGBTQIA+ community. Shortly before the Russian invasion, he tried to implement a law that guaranteed more protection for Gays, Lesbians, Trans, blacks and people of other nationalities in the country. He says that for years Ukraine has been a haven for people fleeing persecution from Kazakhstan, Belarus and Georgia.
“We are now helping LGBTQIA+ military and refugees and military in general. We are trying to talk and explain the situation and trying to raise money for people,” she says.
We went after an explanation for this commotion in the country. For the professor of international relations at PUC-SP Arthur Murta, the feeling of nationalism that unites Sofiia and Yura and so many other Ukrainians in the war has an explanation: “When you have a common enemy and this is put in international politics on several fronts, the The existence of this common enemy unites the population, because you are all united in favor of this enemy and other previous enemies stop looking like the enemy is what seems to be happening with the LGBTQIA+ population in Ukraine”, he explains.
Until their common enemy is defeated and Ukraine becomes a truly safe country for the LGBTQIA+ community, Yura only dreams of the day when she can just hold her boyfriend’s hand in public. A simple gesture, often overlooked by those who are not prevented from showing affection in public. And it makes a difference. And I speak for myself. How to do.
Source: CNN Brasil
