A Ukrainian victory is crucial for global LGBTQ+ rights

Volodymyr Zelenskyy (left) Emmanuel Macron, and Vladimir Putin in France – 2019
Photo: Wikimedia Commons

Ukraine has made astounding progress on LGBTQ+ rights over the last decade, setting it apart from neighboring countries that are cracking down on gender and sexual minorities. If Russia is allowed to extinguish this beacon of progress, the damage to regional, and potentially even global, LGBTQ+ rights activism would be intolerable.

Hearing this may be surprising to some – but that’s only because most westerners haven’t been paying attention to the radical changes transforming Ukrainian society.

How Ukraine embraced the gays

LGBTQ+ activism has existed in Ukraine since the early 1990s, when homosexuality was decriminalized after the fall of the Soviet Union. Legalization may have spared queer people from overt state harassment, but it did not protect them from social hostility. For the ensuing two decades, being openly gay was dangerous. Hate crimes were always a concern, enabled by a Ukrainian media that habitually portrayed the LGBTQ+ community unsympathetically.

According to Lenny Emson, executive director of KyivPride, during this early period, local LGBTQ+ activists focused on..

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