It was the poems that gave it away. Heartfelt writings about a man’s love for a man and a woman’s love for a woman found on the family computer sent Olena Globa into a seething rage when she confronted her then-teenaged son about his sexuality.
“I sat down on the sofa next to him. I remember I was looking straight at the door, and I — very sharply, very angrily — asked him: ‘Are you a faggot?’” said Globa, sitting in her apartment in the outskirts of the Ukrainian capital, Kiev.
“My ideal family turned into a nightmare,” the 54-year-old English language teacher told reporters.
It took eight years for Globa to accept her son’s sexuality and the battle to overcome her prejudices set her on a new path: helping other Ukrainian families accept their gay children, too.
Homosexuality has been legal in Ukraine since 1991 with the authorities increasing their support for gay rights since a pro-Western government took power in 2014, and in 2015 passed a law banning workplace discrimination against the LGBT+ community.
However, human rights group say many people in the former Soviet Union still find it hard to accept anyone being lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender, and homophobia is widespread.
Globa also began campaigning for LGBT+ rights — and not just because she thought it was the right thing to do.
Her only son’s life depended on it.
A gay activist, Bogdan fled to the US in 2016, fearing for his life. If her son is ever to come home, his mother knows his rights and safety must first be secured.
LGBT+ people are often harassed by strangers and by their own relatives, and face stigma, discrimination and sometimes violent attacks, charities say.
The country scored 21 out of 100 points in an analysis this year by EU-funded Rainbow Europe ranking LGBT+ people’s rights in Europe, coming 36th out of 49 nations.
“We can talk freely and openly here about almost anything, except this group of people,” said Janthomas Hiemstra, head of the UN Development Program office in Ukraine, which advocates for LGBT+ rights.
“We’ve been observing that there have been subliminal, but also explicit notions that ‘lifestyles like that’ should not be tolerated in the country,” Hiemstra said in a telephone interview.
Yet tolerance is what Globa is hoping to spread, founding TERGO in 2013 to educate Ukrainian families of LGBT+ people.
“We know that society is homophobic and it’s difficult to change society in one moment. It’s easier to change a mother or a father who raised their child. It’s easier to change their attitude first and then we’ll start with society,” she said.
“The biggest homophobic person in Ukraine was me, but I’m not contagious anymore,” she said.
Apart from providing social support, TERGO uses psychologists to run training sessions to help parents understand what their LGBT+ children are going through.
Yet what began in secret is still, to this day, controversial in parts of Ukraine, with protesters commonly disrupting TERGO meetings, vandalising LGBT+ poster campaigns, or flooding their social media with hateful comments.
Still, families from all over Ukraine — and beyond — turn to the organization for guidance, with its members reaching 1,000.
“These training sessions make you think about who we are, and who our children are,” said Nina Mikhailova, a 72-year-old Russian mother of a transgender person.
Mikhailova has come to accept her child, but said her biggest challenge was persuading her other children to accept their 33-year-old trans sibling.
“I find myself between a rock and a hard place. I will leave soon and what will happen with them in the future?” she said in an interview, after a Kiev training session with families from former Soviet nations, including Georgia and Kyrgyzstan.
Psychologist Maryna Didenko, who works with TERGO, said she has observed an uptick in the number of parents seeking help, although many still hoped their child could be cured.
Concerns over what neighbors will think, misinformation or grief over dreamed-for grandchildren hinder acceptance, she said.
“The topic of sexuality and sexual orientation has been a taboo for a long time,” Didenko said. “Parents will say: ‘When my child says that his sexual orientation is different, for me it’s like a world collapsing.’”
However, when people do finally accept their LGBT+ relative, many end up taking up the fight, Didenko said.
Globa is no exception, and campaigns tirelessly for LGBT+ rights to make amends for the years lost when she rejected her son a decade ago.
“LGBT people [have] had very unhappy lives in Ukraine. They have to hide to their identity, they have to hide their life, they have to pretend, they have to live someone else’s life every day, but I’m quite confident that sooner or later ... Ukrainian LGBT people will obtain their rights,” she said. “Same-sex marriage will be legal and I think that Ukraine will be a safe place for LGBT people to live and realise themselves.”
Additional reporting by Shanshan Chen
The Thomson Reuters Foundation, the charitable arm of Thomson Reuters, covers humanitarian issues, conflicts, land and property rights, modern slavery and human trafficking, gender equality, climate change and resilience.
When US budget carrier Southwest Airlines last week announced a new partnership with China Airlines, Southwest’s social media were filled with comments from travelers excited by the new opportunity to visit China. Of course, China Airlines is not based in China, but in Taiwan, and the new partnership connects Taiwan Taoyuan International Airport with 30 cities across the US. At a time when China is increasing efforts on all fronts to falsely label Taiwan as “China” in all arenas, Taiwan does itself no favors by having its flagship carrier named China Airlines. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs is eager to jump at
The muting of the line “I’m from Taiwan” (我台灣來欸), sung in Hoklo (commonly known as Taiwanese), during a performance at the closing ceremony of the World Masters Games in New Taipei City on May 31 has sparked a public outcry. The lyric from the well-known song All Eyes on Me (世界都看見) — originally written and performed by Taiwanese hip-hop group Nine One One (玖壹壹) — was muted twice, while the subtitles on the screen showed an alternate line, “we come here together” (阮作伙來欸), which was not sung. The song, performed at the ceremony by a cheerleading group, was the theme
Secretary of State Marco Rubio raised eyebrows recently when he declared the era of American unipolarity over. He described America’s unrivaled dominance of the international system as an anomaly that was created by the collapse of the Soviet Union at the end of the Cold War. Now, he observed, the United States was returning to a more multipolar world where there are great powers in different parts of the planet. He pointed to China and Russia, as well as “rogue states like Iran and North Korea” as examples of countries the United States must contend with. This all begs the question:
Liberals have wasted no time in pointing to Karol Nawrocki’s lack of qualifications for his new job as president of Poland. He has never previously held political office. He won by the narrowest of margins, with 50.9 percent of the vote. However, Nawrocki possesses the one qualification that many national populists value above all other: a taste for physical strength laced with violence. Nawrocki is a former boxer who still likes to go a few rounds. He is also such an enthusiastic soccer supporter that he reportedly got the logos of his two favorite teams — Chelsea and Lechia Gdansk —
RSS