In Soviet Ukraine, the law was clear. Article 121 of the criminal code — “muzholozhstvo” — made sex between men punishable by up to five years in prison. Police raids, blackmail, and the occasional trial kept the threat alive. For women, there was no statute, but erasure served the same function. While the law did not criminalize women directly, sexual relationships between women were pathologized, often punished with psychiatric detention. To deviate from the state’s rigid gender and family norms was to invite surveillance, humiliation, and exclusion.
“It was a forbidden subject,” recalls Andrii Kravchuk, “You could not find a single book, a single article, not a word on television.”
Kravchuk is an expert on LGBT Human Rights at the Nash Svit Center. Like his organization, he is from Luhansk, the easternmost part of Ukraine. Growing up during the Soviet period, Kravchuk never heard the word “gay” or “homosexual” mentioned anywhere — neither in the media nor even in private conversations — because there was a complete taboo on the subject.
Queer people were virtually erased from public life in the USSR, cast as alien to the Soviet system. Often, anti-gay laws were used to prosecute writers or artists who were seen as suspicious by the Communist leadership. Even if there were no formal reasons to imprison them, as their works still went in line with the partial censorship, accusing them of homosexuality was a way to silence anyone perceived as too creative and free in their thinking. The renowned cinematographer Sergei Parajanov was imprisoned for five years under Article 121, although it is widely understood that this was an excuse to censor him.
Yet, even the stories of these cases were hushed across Ukraine, and most people never knew or heard of them.
“I knew I was different, but I couldn’t name it. I searched encyclopedias. Nothing,” Kravchuk says, “It was only around the time the USSR was collapsing when you started hearing certain things being spoken more freely, but it was still a very hushed subject. Like in every totalitarian society, people learned to survive by building secret circles, by knowing whom to trust.”
Survival required ingenuity. Some entered marriages of convenience — for instance, gay men married gay women, which gave them protection in public. Others frequented pleshki, queer cruising spots known within the community but invisible to outsiders. In Kyiv, the country’s capital, one was the hundred-meter strip of Khreshchatyk near the city hall. In Lviv, it was the promenade in front of the opera house.
“Everyone knew, but only in our circle,” Kravchuk says, “You could meet someone wonderful, or you could meet a police informant. You learned of those places from people who were already in the know, so it was a slow process of building the community.”
The law criminalizing sex between men was unevenly enforced, but its shadow was constant.
“If a gay man was murdered, the police would interrogate everyone he knew,” Kravchuk says, “If someone confessed, it could ruin a whole family. They didn’t pursue every case, but the fear — it was always there.”
When Ukraine became independent in 1991, it abolished Article 121. It was the first former Soviet republic to do so.
“The nineties were like an explosion,” Kateryna Farbar says, “There was hunger to meet, to organize. People were building a community in real time.”
Farbar is a journalist who collected oral histories of lesbians in Ukraine. As she explained, queer people held parties in rented basements and football tournaments improvised by lesbian groups. They often spent evenings in straight bars where gays claimed their own spaces.
“There was a need to find each other, to create their own spaces,” she adds, “But sustaining them was hard — women had fewer resources, less money. Gay men’s bars survived; lesbian spaces usually didn’t.”
The absence of the internet made presence essential.
“You had to show up,” Farbar says, “That created community. Now, it’s different — people connect online.”
The first LGBTQ organizations appeared in the late 1990s, often disguised as HIV-prevention projects.
“It was the only way to be recognized,” Kravchuk explains.
In Luhansk, he co-founded one of the earliest groups. In Mykolaiv, activists launched what became the largest queer NGO in southern Ukraine. The early years were chaotic. One of the first national organizations, Hanimed, collapsed in scandal after botching an international conference. Domestic journalism covered queer issues as Western corruption, something alien, even dirty. But by the early 2000s, things began to shift.
“Suddenly I realized journalists had become our first allies,” Kravchuk says, “They wrote less sensationally, more accurately. That mattered.”
Yet hostility endured. In 2012, deputies from every major party introduced a bill to ban “homosexual propaganda,” echoing Russia’s.
“It almost passed,” Kravchuk continues, “If not for Euromaidan, we might have gone down that road,” referencing the mass protest movement in 2013 in Ukraine.
The Russian invasion transformed queer life again. The war brought new visibility to LGBTQ soldiers and volunteers, many of whom had previously been forced into silence.
“I saw things I never imagined,” says writer and veteran Alina Sarnatska, author of Those Who United Love and Courage: LGBTQ+ Veterans in the Russo-Ukrainian War, a book on queer veterans.
“In one unit, there was a far-right history teacher, openly homophobic, fighting alongside a bisexual comrade,” she continues, “At first they argued constantly. But in the trenches, they had to live like family. Slowly, they learned to respect each other.”
For Sarnatska, the war revealed not just resilience but possibility.
“I saw ordinary guys, raised on Russian TV with all its homophobic clichés, learning to accept a comrade who was different,” she says, “Their openness to dialogue — that’s what makes us human. That’s what saves us.”
The full-scale invasion in 2022 accelerated the urgency. Civil partnership bills, long buried in parliament, now have soldiers’ lives attached to them. A gay soldier’s partner has no right to compensation, inheritance, or even to know where his body lies if he or she is killed.
“I’ve lived with my husband for twenty-seven years,” Kravchuk says, “We’ve survived everything. And yet, I still can’t marry him in my own country. That is absurd.”
Polls show growing acceptance, especially among younger Ukrainians. But many conservative politicians and religious leaders are fighting against gay rights.
“Ukrainian MPs are more conservative than the people they represent,” Kravchuk says, “Many admit privately they’d vote for partnerships, but they fear priests campaigning against them.”
The irony, he added, is that Russian propaganda has clarified the stakes. Russian Orthodox Patriarch Kirill frames the war as a crusade against “gay parades.” Putin declares Russia bombs Ukraine to defend “traditional values.”
“They said it openly,” Kravchuk says, “So now, for us, there’s no choice. Either we build a modern European democracy, or we disappear. Millions of Ukrainians now see that those who attack queer people are the same ones attacking Ukraine. The link is clear.”
“People abroad think Ukrainian activism started only yesterday,” Farbar says, “It hadn’t. There are dozens of organizations, some founded in the 90s. There are a lot of events. The visibility is real. And the need for equality, especially in wartime, is urgent.”
For Sarnatska, the lesson is simple.
“Love and courage,” she says, quoting her book. “That’s what unites us. That’s what carries us through.”
