the queerness of choosing Ukraine.

Austrian archduke, military leader, unapologetically queer and ... an authentically Ukrainian?

here is what's in store for you this week:

(estimated reading time: 6 min)

• Identity: Throughout the centuries, some of the most powerful Ukrainian voices found their way into Ukrainian identity through their queerness.

• Ending the war: “It might be unbearable to hear this, but late-imperial wars, like the current one in Ukraine, do not leave us any safe exits from a catastrophic reality. Confronting it is the only option.”

• Academic blindness to russian colonialism: Why has russian colonialism been ignored by Western academia for this long? Not a coincidence.

• History: De facto slavery existed in the russia-occupied Ukrainian countryside until the late 1970s.

• Post-colonial future: why have Ukrainians earned the right to decide the fate and future of russian colonialism and the russian society at large?

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In the last four years, I have met so many foreigners who have chosen to become Ukrainian. Some moved to Ukraine during her darkest hour, despite never having any family ties here. Some risked everything to defend Ukrainian freedom with arms. Another handed over their old passport to take Ukrainian citizenship. Their paths were not defined by bloodlines. But by consciously nurturing love for the Ukrainian land, language, and culture. By embodying the freedom-centred values and collective responsibility for each other at the core of Ukrainianness.

A striking number of queer people are among them. And I stopped thinking of that as a coincidence a long time ago.

Queer belonging. Ukrainian belonging.

My own path to Ukrainianness was through my queerness. As I wrote in one of my 2022 essays, growing up in Ukraine in the 1990s, I was more ashamed of coming across as Ukrainian than gay. It took me half of my life to understand that these two experiences of marginalisation were the same line. Both acts of self-determination that the patriarchal russian empire cannot tolerate.

But this is also not new. Throughout the centuries, some of the most powerful Ukrainian voices found their way into Ukrainian identity through this same anti-colonial intersection.