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.

📩 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.

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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.

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. 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.

I was back in Ukraine again in 2022, this time as a human rights researcher interviewing queer Ukrainians to learn how Russia had weaponized homophobia and how they were fighting back.

These conversations became The Queer Face of War, with every testimony accompanied by a portrait.

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. 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.

I was back in Ukraine again in 2022, this time as a human rights researcher interviewing queer Ukrainians to learn
how Russia had weaponized homophobia and how they were fighting back.

These conversations became The Queer Face of War, with every testimony accompanied by a portrait.

Order now in the EU; sign up for my newsletter for updates on the upcoming US/UK release and news about exhibitions and events. Info at my website, thequeerfaceofwar.com

The Queer Face of War features portraits and stories of more than 40 LGBTQ+ Ukrainians, telling the story of how Putin weaponized homophobia in his crusade against democracy and how queer Ukrainians organized to defend their country and their rights.

We millennials already started off our adulthoods at a retirement disadvantage. While my parents and their friends benefited from one of the longest periods of economic growth in American history, my generation has experienced one upheaval after another. www.businessinsider.com/rise-of-mill...