Singer Elton John and his husband, film producer David Furnish, have supported the photo project ‘Diamond Coating on a Blade’ by British photographer Jesse Glazzard, which focuses on Ukrainian LGBTQ+ soldiers. The couple purchased one of the photographs from the series for their private collection
The report on Ukrainian queer soldiers was created by Glazzard specifically for the winter print issue of the British magazine THE FACE, in collaboration with the initiative ‘LGBTQ+ Military and Veterans for Equal Rights’. The text for the cover story was written by Serhiy Morgunov, and the photo project was produced by Eugenia Skvarska.
The story features three 25-year-old Ukrainian servicemen: Oleh, Oleksandr, and Vlad. For their collection, Elton and David chose the photograph titled ‘Oleh, 2024’.
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About the subject of the photograph
The day before the full-scale invasion, Oleh went on his first-ever date at a gay club. On February 24, he was awakened by calls from friends informing him that the large-scale war had begun. He went out to buy beer and walk his dog — and came back home with the decision to join the fight.
In the first month of the full-scale invasion, Oleh took part in the battles near Hostomel, where he and his fellow soldiers came under artillery fire.
‘The shells were landing about 30 meters from us. At that moment, I thought I might die there. That’s when I decided to come out and posted a tweet admitting that I’m a gay soldier. And I didn’t receive a single hateful comment’, the young man recalls.
How the project is described in THE FACE
‘Most of the soldiers depicted in this project were barely in their twenties when the full-scale war began, — the editor-in-chief of THE FACE writes. — They were born in the final year of the past millennium, arriving in a world where dreams of freedom for Ukraine were just beginning to take root. After generations marked by suffering, it seemed they might be the ones to break these cycles. Now, they find themselves living out the destinies of their grandparents, carrying the same burden of war — but with an added pressure. All of these men are queer. All of them have been thrown into a fight for national survival. But they’re also on the frontline of another fight: that of civil rights, tolerance and acceptance’.
In May, an exhibition featuring photographs from the ‘Diamond Coating on a Blade’ project was held in Kyiv.
