“I remember the school days when some boys broke my lip with an elbow.”

“My coming out is the most positive result of my participation in a reality show. Having confessed to the whole of Ukraine that I was gay,”

“When your roots, your home, and what you identify with are taken away from you, and you can’t go back there, it hurts.”

“They tried to hack my accounts, wrote to me, and called me with death threats.”

“I’m a pansexual person and I had an inner biphobia.”

“My father and I almost cried when we saw the Ukrainian checkpoint, it was great happiness. We were just lucky. It was very scary – cars all around were burned to the ground, crushed by tanks.”

“At first she didn’t accept it, but as I grew up she decided to focus her love on who I really am and not on my orientation.”

“There was a situation in Kyiv when a girl with a rainbow flag was attacked; after that we realized that we had to be ready for anything and carried pepper spray with us.”

“I actually recently received some homophobic comments from my friend in Donetsk when I posted a story on my IG with a flagpole of three flags: Ukrainian, LGBTQ+ and European Union.”

“I would love to return to Kyiv. It’s my home.”