“I met my true love during the war. However, the state does not recognize our right to be a family.”

_{Photo: Khrystyna Pashkina}

Lel is a volunteer. Joined the territorial defence battalion right after the beginning of the full-scale invasion. Now, he is a veteran, retired due to the health condition and death of his older brother near Donetsk.

Andrii says that he was lucky. People in his unit knew he was gay, but never brought it up. The commanders knew as well. In his opinion, it is the adequate attitude of the commanders that determines the behaviour of their subordinates.

“The fish is rotting from the head. If the commanders do not understand and show a negative attitude towards the LGBTQ+ community, of course, everyone below in the vertical will see it normal to bully those who are different from them. In war, the main thing is what kind of soldier I am — my private life has nothing to do with it.”

At the beginning of the full scale, many different people with different backgrounds joined the territorial defence. Andrii says that he would like to treat them primarily by how they behave, sitting next to him in the same dugout or trench, and not by what happens in their lives outside the war.

“When I was discharged from the service, I told directly to the closest circle of my comrade brothers that I was gay. A week later, they came to visit me with their families — so think about it.”

Andrii says that he wants to feel support from the state. His partner is a conscript who can be called up at any moment. And, of course, Andrii is afraid he will not be able to help if something happens to his partner because, formally, they are nobody to each other. Therefore, he sees the issue of registered partnerships to be urgent.

In the future, Andrii wants to have the opportunity to get married and adopt children. The war has taken away the parents of many children, and he believes that there are many people in the community who can take care of a child or two and raise them in love. Children will definitely be better off in a family, even an “unconventional” one, than in an orphanage.

He emphasizes that the state should take more care of the military in general. When people come back from war and they and their families have no protection, it does not matter if they are straight or LGBTQ+, they are just traumatized and angry people, and there are a lot of them. He believes that at least it is necessary to train military psychologists to somehow work with this tension.

“No one will return from there the same as they were. When the full-scale invasion happened, I could not do otherwise. However, I now realize that I went to war to meet my kitten, my one true love. I have been looking for it all my life, but sometimes, it turns out, for this, you have to defeat yourself, feel pain and learn what war really is.”

_{The information campaign was created by Різні.Рівні and ХарківПрайд in support of об’єднання ЛГБТК+ військових for the RFSL.}