What Happens to LGBTQ Leaving Ukraine?
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| People in Kyiv, Ukraine, take part in the Equality March, organized by the LGBQ community in September 2021. A network of LGBTQ activists and organizations have sprung into action in recent weeks to support LGBTQ people fleeing the Russian invasion. (Valentyn Ogirenko/Reuters) |
· CBC
When Edward Reese, a queer activist who works with Kyiv Pride, decided to flee Ukraine on March 8, he knew it was going to be a long journey.
After leaving his home and walking for an hour in the freezing cold to the nearest working subway station, spending "one hell of a night" in a bomb shelter, catching a day-long bus ride to Lviv, and being escorted by aid workers to the Poland-Ukraine border, Reese was finally able to set foot in a small Polish border town.
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"We slept for like an hour or two in the morning in this big, big hall with tons of other people on these makeshift beds," said Reese in an interview with CBC News from Warsaw last week.)
A few hours later, he took a bus to Warsaw, where a local LGBTQ advocacy group connected him with queer-friendly hosts who could temporarily house him.
The whole journey took more than two days.
Although Poland has limited the rights of LGBTQ people in recent years, Reese, who is non-binary and uses he/him pronouns, said he feels safe in the country. But that's large because he was quickly welcomed and aided by Poland's LGBTQ community.
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| Edward Reese is a queer activist that recently fled Ukraine and is staying with hosts in Poland. He says he has had a warm welcome from the local LGBTQ community. (Submitted by Edward Reese) |
"Poland is not necessarily the best country for LGBTQ people to live," said Julia Maciocha, chairwoman of Warsaw Pride, one of the organizations helping connect queer and gender-diverse refugees to appropriate resources.
"So, we created a database of people that we know that are part of the community so we can match them with people that are in need of safe shelter."
Limiting LGBTQ rights
Since Russia invaded Ukraine just over two weeks ago, more than 3 million people have fled, with more than 1.7 million of them arriving in neighboring Poland.
A network of activists and organizations have sprung into action to support those among the refugees who are LGBTQ, facilitating access to safe, queer-friendly housing, transportation, and medical care.
"I was almost crying because European organizations like Warsaw Pride, like Budapest Pride, they reached out to us like in the first day of the war, offering their help, offering shelter, offering transportation from the border," said Lenny Emson, executive director of Kyiv Pride.
"This is … a very good feeling that really helps us to survive through this time."
Some of the neighboring countries refugees have to pass through have become hostile to LGBTQ people in recent years.
In Hungary, Radio-Free Europe/Radio Liberty reported that in 2020, lawmakers amended the country's constitution to define marriage as a heterosexual union and allow only married couples to adopt, de facto barring same-sex couples from adopting. It also limited the gender on legal and identification documents to the one assigned at birth.
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