Pride under the sirens: how the LGBT movement survives in southern Ukraine

On the one hand, it is easier to work with LGBTIQ+ issues in the Odesa region because there is a brand of Odesa as a very tolerant city. If you google Odesa, it will literally be the third or fourth item on the list - multiculturalism, tolerance, and many, many other things. But, again, as a historian, I can say that this is the same brand as Russian-speaking Odesa. Odesa is not as tolerant as we would like it to be. Indeed, this region is a city that combines different cultures. It is a city that combines different subcultural groups and communities. But all of these communities had to make very strong efforts to win their place, to fight discrimination. Well, because we cannot escape the history of the same Jewish pogroms that took place and to which the authorities of the time did not react very much. On the other hand, I believe that the Odesa region is one of the most attractive for the community because it is a tourist mecca. It's a place where people go on vacation. It's a place where it's always quite easy to find some kind of job, some kind of place to live and, well, somehow build your own home.

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"We did not hold any events in '23, '24, we could not cope with the consequences of the shelling, with the constant power outages. And we were worried about what would happen. We didn't go out for two years, we were worried about how the police would react, what would happen. Everything went very well. It's not just about how the police worked, it's also about how the community worked. I was very, very impressed with the people who volunteered to be part of the argumentation committee. It was 20 people who were very involved, despite their workload, despite the circumstances. People found the opportunity, people came, people got involved, and it was sincere involvement. In terms of security, the police worked well, of course, there were opponents. We were criticized a little bit by our colleagues from the human rights movement for announcing the events rather late, but we proceeded from the fact that it was important for us to be sure that the police would cope. And we saw that the police coped with those 30-40 aggressive people. If we had announced the event 10 days earlier, they would have had time to bring some forces from Kyiv and Kharkiv, and we would have had about 100 opponents. And, of course, it would have been perceived differently.

Our politicians are no longer ashamed to talk about LGBT people, because it used to be a highly taboo topic. It was discussed only in terms of a scandal, a conflict, some political story that would definitely have negative consequences. Now, our politicians at the level of the Verkhovna Rada and at the level of local administration, for example, in the Odesa City Hall, are absolutely calmly talking about what it is, why some Odessans face discrimination, hate crimes, and that something needs to be done about it.