Ukraine’s Queens of Resilience
J.T. Blatty/Redux
I have a binder of black and white prints saved from a darkroom class that I audited years ago at Georgia Tech. Most memorable are the photographs I took of drag queens seated and standing in front of mirrors, applying makeup and giving final, approving stares of their reflections before exiting for the evening’s event. In a tiny, backstage dressing room in an Atlanta club, bending into contorted shapes to make space for the angles I wanted to capture, I felt as if I had won a magic ticket into their world. That somehow, with a camera, I might unravel some mystery of this underground culture, of men who have invoked fascination, curiosity, and admiration in so many who have found their way to a drag show.
In essence, this is the primary stance of a drag queen: to be viewed on a platform, observed from an external perspective, which for decades has left them as the subjects of simple stigmatization. But nothing is so black and white. Simple doesn’t fit into the lexicon of words to describe a drag queen. Much like the few hours I spent backstage with a camera in hand in Atlanta did not bring me any closer to understanding the questions I wanted to answer.
It would be nearly 20 years later that my interest resurfaced, and possibly in the most unexpected of locations, if not the most unexpected time. In Ukraine, where I’d been covering the war since 2018 as a U.S. Army combat veteran turned photojournalist, and where I’d simultaneously found a home among the soldier and veteran community.
One could say that Russia’s full-scale invasion impacted me far more than that of a photojournalist on the ground from another country. It was comparable to the intensity I felt after the 9/11 attacks, that hurricane of emotions that had faded from conscious and visceral memory over twenty years. Not only because Ukraine and Kyiv had become home, but also because of the people—a community that inspired me to grow roots in their soil and who became the impetus of my documentary work within the war since the day I arrived years before. I have been photographing the revolutionary soldiers, the men and women who had been fighting for freedom since the EuroMaidan revolution’s end and the beginning of the war in 2014, when Russia illegally annexed Crimea and then invaded eastern Ukraine. They hitchhiked, took trains, buses and even walked to the coal factories and mining refuse mountains of the Donbas, all to fight for a purpose that came from within, and not a purpose handed to them by a higher entity, as mine was given to me in the wars I served in. They risked everything to protect their home and their dreams of a future free of civil rights violations and government corruption. A dream that they are still fighting for—and dying for.
Struggle bridges divides, and without a doubt, the full-scale invasion in 2022 did more than this. It woke a society that had become disconnected to the war, and it rekindled a fire of hope in the revolutionaries that the years of fighting and loss weren’t in vain, that the escalation and scale of global support it attracted might finally bring it to an end.
Back then, “We will have victory this summer,” were the words any Ukrainian would respond with when asked, “When will the war end,” as if they each were wired into classified information that only Ukrainians were privy to. They declared the same thing and without a shred of doubt. Victory by the summer, and with this victory, all the land that Russia illegally annexed and occupied since 2014 would be returned to Ukraine, including Crimea. There was no other option. But by 2024, entering the third year of the invasion, a dark and grim outlook was beginning to embrace many in Ukraine, including myself. After countless deaths of friends and family members, the conflict of views on conscription ages and mandatory service in a war that for many didn’t appear to have the same, clear victory in view anymore, I felt that there was nothing left in the dark for my camera to capture and share with a world that had already become numbed to the terror. I was ready to shift away from the shadows, to instead find light in the blackness, to capture what’s still alive and living, to show the color that makes war worth fighting.
That search for the light may have led to my last-minute decision to join Sasha, who I knew to be a 2015 volunteer veteran of the war from Kharkiv, on his journey from Kyiv to Berlin’s gay pride festival, where he was invited to speak to the public and stand on the lead float as his near 20-year drag queen persona, “Marlen Scandal.”
At a flat on the outskirts of Berlin, I watched his hands shake through a three-to-four-hour preparation ritual, a possible byproduct of his anxiety over running late to the event and not enough rest the evening before, coupled with a lingering, residual anxiety from our journey there, or the unknown fate for all men at the Ukrainian-Polish border, whether leaving was authorized or not.
Mirrors, lights, palettes and tins of colors, tones and shades, brushes, the red twine woven through his black hair to symbolize the colors of Ukrainian nationalism. A shot of tequila to precede the uncomfortable squeeze into a black and red dress to match, covered by a black corset adorned with silver chains before the painful zip up over a silicone breastplate that had seen better days. Halo crown and tiara in place, a black, vertical line painted against the red lipstick on the center of his lower lip, Ukrainian crest clasped over the cleavage and feathered, black and red Valkyrie wings mounted to his shoulders, Sasha, now Marlen, was nothing less than a goddess of war, gripping an Excalibur style plastic sword pierced through a rubber Putin mask stuffed with newspaper and bleeding red fingernail polish. The queen had arrived, but without royal transportation to the center of the city as she carefully squeezed through the door and sprawled out across the entire back seat of a compact size EU Uber, trying to keep her costume intact while fanning herself to avoid sweating away her makeup in the July, Berlin humidity.
It wouldn’t be until well after the parade that Marlen, exhausted and seemingly defeated, revealed the source of my confusion over the day’s events. I wondered why she never climbed up to the main stage to make a speech at the end of the parade, or why she marched the entire route on foot, behind the lead float instead of standing on it as the guest of honor. Perplexed and in awe, I had watched her walk for hours in a suffocating, sweatbox of a costume, carrying the Ukrainian flag and Putin’s head with pride, only stopping once to secure a high heel with duct tape that had broken off during the unexpected journey on foot. Her explanation left me even more perplexed: Someone within the planning organization was offended by her costume, in particular, Putin’s head on the sword. Such symbols of violence would not be tolerated.
A Ukrainian war veteran arrived as a drag queen to advocate for freedom and what Russia’s invasion threatens to erase in Ukraine if the war is lost. And there in Berlin, in an EU country, she was stripped of those same rights.
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“And what is a drag queen?” Dima had asked before I departed Kyiv for Berlin. He was responding to the rundown of my latest project endeavor, to document Ukraine’s culture of drag in a time of war, and no doubt feeling out his interest level, if it was worth his time and energy to join me on another project adventure as a volunteer interpreter.
I didn’t know if his confusion was solely a product of the language barrier or not, but my simplified answer, that a drag queen was a man who dressed as a woman and performed on stage, was laced with uncertainty. In intuitively knowing that language, if anything, would only be a secondary source of confusion.
In the United States and in most of Europe, it’s not uncommon for the public to find their way through the doors of a gay club to see a drag show, sexual preferences aside. In Ukraine, it was essentially unheard of. Police routinely conducted raids on bars and clubs in Kyiv (and occasionally country wide, at least until the 2022 invasion), targeting and threatening gay establishments, the primary hosts of drag shows, with fictitious violations in exchange for bribes or monthly pay offs to avoid harassment. Consequently, while Dima was a good friend, I also felt that he somewhat embodied a patriarchal, post-Soviet view on masculinity, so I wasn’t expecting an adrenalized jump from him onto the drag story train with me.
“Why do they do it?” he followed. The expression on his face told me that he was really asking himself, and that he had already reached his own, undebatable conclusion: a mix of identity issues and the absence of masculine influence. So, let’s just say I was beyond shocked when Dima agreed, not only to meet me at club 4B in Kyiv’s historic Podil district when I returned from Berlin, but also that two other friends, male soldiers whom I had known for years, dropped in to share a few drinks, fully cognizant of where they were going.
I served in the Army during the days of “don’t ask, don’t tell.” I vividly remember my first years as a Lieutenant in Savannah, hitting downtown on the weekends and often escaping to Club One, home of the infamous drag queen, “the Lady Chablis.” This was my youth, my time of freedom, and unlike my four years at West Point, I was free to live without constraints on the weekends. I didn’t identify with a specific label of sexual identity, nothing could be so divisive, but in that place, I was free to live without a label. It didn’t matter who you were, just as my friends, the three “straight” men who arrived at club 4B that night in Kyiv, walked through the doors without judgment, and if anything, were embraced.
It's possible that mentioning Arthur Oserov, the drag queen I was there to meet that night, was also a service member in the Ukrainian Armed Forces, had recalibrated preconceived notions for my fellow soldiers, if any were to be had. Or maybe I was the one carrying preconceived notions, and I simply underestimated a history that I knew was ingrained in my friends. All three of them were standing together at the Euromaidan Revolution in 2014, fighting against Russian influence, government corruption, the abuse of power and human rights violations. And they rose even higher through the government’s sudden passing of anti-protest laws, banning the freedom of speech and assembly and employing violent force to silence the cause. They were fighting for everything Putin and the Kremlin detest and are still trying to erase from Ukraine. So how could they possibly stand with Russia’s tyrannist views on drag queens?
As Marlen wrote to me weeks after Berlin: “In war, we are Ukrainian first. If before the war we had disagreements in society, then after, only one mark remained as an important characteristic. Are you with Ukraine or not? Are you an enemy or an ally? If you are with me in the trenches and fight for freedom, then you are my brother. The rest is unnecessary noise.”
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Having become normalized to the new war in Ukraine—the air sirens, the rockets and drone strikes in peaceful cities like Kyiv, away from the front line—I had forgotten how easy it was for many on the outside to assume that a post-Soviet country at war would not only be a country void of a drag queen culture, but also a country without the space and time for a night life. That every bar and restaurant would be shut down, abandoned, or boarded over with plywood until there was a declared ending in sight. Yet, night life does go on, even if shortened to the martial law’s midnight curfew and despite the air alarms, the Shahed drones stalking, air defense lighting up the sky, and the ballistic missile strikes on residential buildings, museums and hospitals. And it became clear that within the four walls of clubs such as 4B in Kyiv, the drag queens and their patrons embrace these hours more than ever.
My memory of the dressing room in Atlanta went from small to spacious as Dima and I walked into the back room where Arthur sat in front of one of the two mirrored walls among five other drag queens preparing for the evening’s event. It didn’t take long to send him back to the bar area—truth be told, I only brought an interpreter at Arthur’s request that night, intuitively knowing that it would be more excessive than helpful. Interviewing, the formality of asking questions and listening to answers, and photography were never meant to share a table for a meal at the same time, no matter how many times I have tried. There was a time for each, and this night was reserved primarily for seeing, for moments. I was there to witness Arthur without “unnecessary noise.” To visually understand and capture the world of the first Ukrainian drag queen who welcomed me to photograph him inside Ukraine while transforming into his image, the first Ukrainian drag queen who was also serving in the Ukrainian Armed Forces.
I passed Arthur a question translated on my phone: were there any boundaries regarding what I could shoot? I wanted to know if it would be overstepping to photograph him setting his breastplate into place, or strenuously pulling up the multiple layers of stockings over hip volumizing foam padding. “Everything,” he reassured me. It was all on the table. These were intimate moments unraveling before my eyes, snapshots of vulnerability, imperfection, of questioned masculinity lingering and half immersed in femininity. Moments I was never invited to capture in Atlanta, where I walked into a dressing room of drag queens who seemed to have already reached their final images, only adding minor makeup and hair touch-ups before my lens. But here was Arthur, in a country where I understood drag queens have predominantly been in hiding for decades, completely raw and exposed and brazenly open not only to me, but to the Ukrainian public as well, invited via his phone, mounted to the wall above the mirror, recording a live stream on social media.
“She’s American,” Arthur said in Ukrainian, words I easily understood without language fluency. It was clearly a response to the nervous inquiries coming from a few of the others, which I understood, knowing that I couldn’t assume Arthur’s openness was a collective position among them all. I felt it the moment I gripped my camera, a mix of caution and curiosity in the room. But with his words, a calm set through the space, the cigarette smoke clouds of anxiety slowly dissipating under what seemed like a new sense of assurance, in knowing that my story was not to be published in Ukrainian media. It allowed me to move forward with ease that night, to reach an unspoken understanding with each of them in the moment.
Vladimir, Lastivka on stage, danced in front of my camera with an inviting smile throughout the night. Artem, who sat in the far corner burning through cigarettes in between shots of liquor, made it clear through hand signals to avoid any shots of his transformation—it was either him as a man or him as his drag queen, alter ego under the stage name Biology. A performer darted from the room the moment he saw my camera; I needed to avoid taking a photograph that came remotely close to letting him perceive he was in the background.
Watching Arthur transform into Aura, then watching all of them enter the main floor of the club to greet and mingle with the arriving patrons in a smoky basement barroom that within two hours would challenge claustrophobia, it was clear that my story wasn’t about “why” drag queens do what they do. It was about what drag became to these men in Ukraine in the face of war.
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“The war changed me. I stopped being afraid. Before, I didn't talk about myself, I was afraid of how people would react. Not what my neighbors would say, but what my colleagues would say. I was closed to everyone as Aura, only a few of my friends knew about this image,” Arthur explained the following day at his home in the forested outskirts of Kyiv. We were sitting under a gazebo that he built with his own hands, sipping on tea at a table offering two varieties of honey crafted from his beehives and a cake he had just baked from the apples he harvested in his garden.
This was the time for interpretation, and I suddenly had two of them—Dima, and my friend Vika. Vika was originally my backup plan at 4B the previous night in my anticipation that Dima wouldn’t walk through the doors of a gay club. But ultimately, she arrived on her own, driven by her fascination over what I described to her of drag queens, a culture that she also didn’t realize existed, and a culture that she became even more fascinated with after the club. Now sitting at the table with the two of them, it almost felt like a competition as I watched them fighting for airtime with Arthur in what seemed like their own personal interviews, sometimes losing themselves in the conversation and forgetting to interpret on my behalf.
Clearly, we had a shared intrigue over this man, or the other side of Aura at least five days of the week, if not more; 35-year-old Arthur Oserov, a 10-year forester for Kyiv’s municipal government and a drag queen in the shadows until Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022. When only two months later, after the Russians retreated from the Kyiv region in April, leaving a trail of destruction and death in their wake, his unit of foresters was reassigned to the Ukrainian Armed Forces and immediately tasked with supporting the clean-up efforts in war-ravaged Bucha. This included building hundreds of coffins for the dead, making up for a supply shortage that was never expected by the mortuaries or the death industry.
“When the war began, you understand that you can die at any moment,” he continued. “And I have missiles constantly flying over my house, even now. And if you die, there will be no trace left of you, no one will know who you were, what you did, what your story was. I just wanted to contribute to the history that Ukraine is now creating,” he continued.
Arthur’s motivation reminded me of the Euromaidan revolutionaries,many of whom became the 2014 volunteer soldiers of the war in eastern Ukraine that I had been documenting over the years. They were unified by a shared experience, one where the unimaginable becomes reality and permanently recalibrates the way we walk through life, leaving the person we were before in an alternate universe and distant memory. When the tanks rolled through the streets of Independence Square, when the riot police used live ammunition to silence the crowds, when university students witnessed the bludgeoned heads of their friends bleeding out and staining the cobblestone streets in the same place where they once gathered for beer and coffee, they shared an experience that set all differences aside without cognitive effort in a collective fight for change.
I couldn’t help but wonder if this was Arthur’s second chance to make a difference, to make up for not standing with them at the Euromaidan, fighting for the civil rights he still dreams of and against the atrocities that were unfolding only 20 kilometers from his home. Being accustomed to the severity of propaganda in post-Soviet countries, he first couldn’t imagine that any of what he was seeing in the media was real—the cloud of black smoke from the fires and chemical grenades blanketing Independence Square, the masked riot police and law enforcement officials beating and shooting protestors in an apocalyptic, urban battlefield that left over 100 protestors dead by the time the then President Victor Yanukovych and his team of corrupt officials exiled to Russia.
“When they started shooting people, when they started showing how they ran away, in what luxury they lived in, it was hard for me to believe. When it began to die down a little, I began to come to the square to see with my own eyes whether it was true or not. Everything was smoked, broken. I thought it was all a set-up, but when I got there, I realized it wasn't a show. My world turned upside down and I understood that this was irreversible,” he explained.
“It's the same as with Bucha in 2022. You understand that there is a tragedy, but you don't understand the scale. And when you get there and see these columns of burnt equipment, houses destroyed to the ground, when you walk down the street, all the dead bodies had already been removed, but there were red flags in their place. And you walk and see that everything around is in red flags.”
A forest of red flags in the city he called home, placed by the public as visual reminders for each of the tortured and murdered Ukrainians in Bucha, was enough for Arthur to internalize that life is too short to hide. But even his description barely touches the scale of the tragedy I know he walked through and absorbed with his five senses. In the same way media footage poses the danger of downsizing devastation, containing it into a visual box, void of what lies beyond and stripped of the emotions attached to a first-person experience.
“We have no right to remain silent or be afraid when we have a war and people are dying every day,” he concluded.
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“The war changed my outlook on life and my attitude towards people. I began to value the time I have,” Artem wrote to me on Telegram, responding to just one in a list of questions I continued to throw at him during the weeks following our meeting in Kyiv. I had a feeling that the less rushed answers would come from him at a distance, rather than on a park bench in the Solomianskyi district under an air raid siren, passing a phone equipped with a translation application back and forth, or in the cramped dressing room at 4B the month prior, when he requested to only be photographed as a man or in his complete drag image, but nothing in between.
My expectations preceded me, once again, and this time with Artem. Not only that he agreed to meet me in a personal space, outside of his image and the drag scene, but that he extended a personal invitation to photograph him backstage for one of his events, and in the same fashion Arthur had allowed.
Artem’s transformation was one of the most striking I observed. If I hadn’t witnessed it myself, I never would have recognized him as Biology, the larger-than-life drag queen commanding the energy of the room inside of club LIFT while hosting a Wednesday karaoke night. That this sharp-witted, theatrical and powerful woman, caped under a jeweled, medieval robe and walking at ease in heels that I wouldn’t be able to take two steps wearing, was the same shy and somewhat melancholic 23-year-old man who I sat with on a park bench just a few days later.
It was a surreal moment to watch with each of the drag queens I photographed. Nearing the final segment of what was sometimes a three-hour transformation, I realize that I am no longer photographing the same person. I am nowhere in the vicinity of their former presence, and by this I’m not speaking of just a visual alternation. It’s the energy, the spirit, a moment when all insecurities are liquidated. A moment when Artem, who only seconds before struggled to speak without a stutter, becomes Biology, a vocal powerhouse of song and satire, untouched by a speech impediment.
He has left the room, and now she owns it. My camera clicks multiple times, but only the first frame captures the point of combustion, when their eyes flash into the eyes of another, a subtle flaunt of the lips as they give an approving and mischievous smile at their mirror’s reflection. It’s as if their drag, once the final detail is in place, metastasizes into top-grade, nuclear resistant body armor of confidence.
“When I go home after the club, I do not feel alive, but more like dead,” he continued. “The club and the people take all my strength. But when I am in the image, the world changes for me completely. These couple of hours I can forget about problems and just give people happiness, understanding and support. Many are against clubs and parties during the war, but I think it is necessary. People should at least for a while be distracted from the missiles and explosions and given hope, given a break from everything that is happening in the world.”
I witnessed his words in action on the floor at Club LIFT as Biology captivated a crowd of faces that I was beginning to recognize from each of the venues I attended with the queens. Neon lights, comedy, Putin satire and song filled the room as she bounced her way to each of the guests in between stage time, embracing them under her cape in laughter and moments of life when one is only living, protected from the realities outside.
This was in essence a vital organ, these savored hours of nightlife before curfew in Kyiv, pumping blood and life into the grim of war, giving many a reason to keep on living.
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“At the beginning of the war, we all united. I have never seen Ukrainian people like this. Everyone helped each other, supported each other. But the more time passed, the more people began to get used to the war and live for themselves. As for me, our rights and our opinions began to be condemned more than before,” Artem described.
It was a familiar theme, much like the years following 2014. As the experience that unifies drifts further from our memories and the collective fight begins to feel swallowed by political endeavors beyond our control, differences find a way to slowly settle back in for many who are not actively fighting on the front line in combat. Especially in Kyiv, a city that was home to millions who had never experienced the realities of war until February 2022, when the first missiles struck, when occupying forces terrorized and murdered the civil population in quaint neighborhood streets, when the city became a front line for the first time over eight years of the ongoing war. But years later, with the Russian tanks and ground troops and around-the-clock, fast-moving horrors removed from immediate and visual proximity there, some have found a way to normalize what remains––the air sirens, the drone and missile strikes—until the moment it all falls back into first-person experience again.
Yet, there was still a hidden force in Kyiv who hadn’t let the collective fight slip away. In a post-Soviet country still lagging on the path towards human rights, there was a platoon of men, painted and feathered, thriving and wearing their drag like body armor, fighting a shadowed front line in Kyiv through embracing their freedom of expression. Whether they were publicly outspoken or preferred to keep their drag within the walls of the club, they were all advocates for change through their perseverance to exist, each one of them finding a new purpose within their art of performance in the face of war. Despite the unwelcoming response it could bring, despite the accusations of hiding from conscription, their persistence was an act of protest, defying Putin’s regime, defying sexual stigmatizations, and reminding us of the values and freedoms that the people of Ukraine have been fighting for, and dying for, for over a decade.
As Vladimir, or Queen Lastivka, explained to me so perfectly, “Today, I feel like not just an artist, but a warrior in the battle for freedom—personally, culturally, and nationally. Every time I step on stage, it’s an act of resistance, a testament that even in the darkest times, we continue to shine, continue to be ourselves, no matter what. My art has become a weapon with which I fight for the right to live in a free, strong, and independent Ukraine. I feel that now, more than ever, it’s important to be visible, to be the voice for those who cannot speak, and to carry light even when darkness surrounds us.”
J.T. Blatty is a U.S. Army combat veteran, documentary photojournalist, and author of Snapshots Sent Home: From Afghanistan, Iraq, Ukraine—A Memoir (Elva Resa, 2024).