Today I want to tell you about the photo on the cover of The Queer Face of War.
But first, a little history: Nazi Germany sent as many as 15,000 queer men to concentration camps. But not one told their story publicly until nearly 30 years after Hitler’s death. The first account of a gay survivor was published in West Germany in 1972, and even then the survivor, Josef Kohout, kept his identity hidden behind a pseudonym for almost another decade.
The invisibility of queer Nazi victims had real consequences: Hitler’s sodomy law was one of the only Nazi codes left on West Germany’s books after World War II, and historians estimate that West Germany’s government arrested more gay men than the Nazis did. Gays were not recognized as Nazi victims—and denied survivor benefits—until 1985.
Kohout’s memoir, The Men with a Pink Triangle, broke that silence, and its publication was a major boost for the nascent Gay Liberation movement. German queer groups embraced the pink triangle—the symbol the Nazis forced gay men to wear—as an emblem of queer rights, and it quickly spread around the world. As another gay Nazi survivor remarked after deciding to tell his story in his late 80s, “I’m living proof that Hitler didn’t win.”
This photo reminds me of these men.
This is Oleksii Polukhin. Russian soldiers detained and tortured him for more than two months, demanding he identify other LGBTQ+ activists in his city and people working for the Ukrainian resistance.
When I first wrote about Oleksii for The New York Times in 2024, he was the only gay survivor of Russian persecution to report his abuse to war crimes prosecutors. Though Ukraine is making progress toward supporting queer people’s rights, homophobia remains deeply entrenched. Many queer Ukrainians have experienced abuse from police in the past and are afraid to give testimony to the authorities. Now there are seven that have agreed to talk to prosecutors, according to the Odesa-based NGO Projector—only a fraction of the 250 queer victims or witnesses to possible war crimes Projector has identified in its research.
That’s why it is important to me that Oleksii’s face be seen and his story known.
Queer visibility is power.
This has become my mantra for this project, a lesson I learned from Ukrainians like Oleksii. Many queer soldiers have come out on Ukrainian social media during the fighting, which helped ignite a groundswell of public support for partnership rights.
Opponents of queer rights know this too.
It is why they want to drive queer history from libraries, restrict queer performers from public spaces, and make it impossible for trans people to exist at all.
Queer people fight every day for the right to be visible, and visibility is a weapon of resistance. That’s why portraits like Oleksii’s are so important.
—Lester
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