My name is Yen. This is my friend Ania. We’ve been friends for about 6 years. We met at a party, one of those private ones, by chance — at some mutual friends’ place.

How we met

Basically, I found out about his orientation right away. It didn’t surprise me in the least. I’d had people from the LGBTQI+ community in my circle before that, and I’ve probably been very accepting about it my whole life.

And how did I react to her hetero orientation? You know, for me it was actually unexpected, because I had never met people like that in my life. I’d heard that such people exist, heteros, but, you know, as they say — it’s a person’s choice, they chose that life. The main thing is that… — We didn’t choose to be born this way. — Oh, is that so? Good content there, right? Okay, fine.

Orientation is not a choice

They say the question really comes up when you have a child of your own. So you ask those people: and if you find out your child is going to be homosexual — what will you do? And it’s not just a handful of people, it’s genuinely reasonable people, women and men, Ukrainians, who say: “I’ll give up my child, I’ll put him in an orphanage.” But that can’t be — because this is my son.

And for me that’s… it genuinely scares me sometimes, you know, because I immediately remember my own childhood. I understand how hard it will be for a child like that to grow up in that family, you understand?

We have to keep talking about this — I don’t know how much longer we have to say it, how much longer we have to get through to people that orientation is not a choice, that it’s completely normal. And people of that old school, who were raised by people just like them, were brought up on those very attitudes, that these are sick people and so on. In reality — no. And that has been thoroughly proven by now. And those people who say it isn’t so, that no — they haven’t even read anything, they’ve never even opened a book.

And I want to say this to you: if you have some doubt — about any question at all, any of them — just go and look up some information. Not only what your grandma, your grandpa, your mom, your dad or the friends from your neighborhood, the guys from the block, told you, but what the people who have actually researched these questions say.

The people around us

It so happened that in my life I’m surrounded by people who don’t judge others by some set of markers — race, skin color, orientation, religion and so on. Because everyone in my circle judges a person first and foremost by their values and their qualities, first and foremost. And that’s how Ania and I ended up with the company we have — accepting, open-minded.

But all sorts of things happen. And Ania — for as long as I’ve known her over these 6 years — for her it’s not just words. She can go so far as to stop talking to a person altogether if she hears that “ew,” excuse me, or “they’re sick people,” or something along those lines. In our context, in our circles and with the people around us, that is simply unacceptable. Ania always goes hard for this.

And even when a person is just voicing an opinion, you know, like: “no, I mean, basically, I’ve got nothing against it”… Meaning — so what do you have, then? What is it you have against it? And that’s exactly how she reacts, and she doesn’t care whether it’s a guy, a girl or even a grown adult. And for that, of course — come here, let’s hug, keep backing me up like this.

Well, look, for me, basically, a person who has some negative attitude toward someone — judging them by their orientation, their skin color or some other factor — that’s already a red flag. And I don’t accept people like that, I don’t surround myself with people like that.

Even family changes

If you take Ukraine, Kyiv, for example — five years ago, then over these five years a much more accepting attitude has grown, a more accepting society in Kyiv. It’s still not as big as we’d like, but it exists, and it grows every year. If you even take my own family — they all know Yen, they love him very much. And there was a time when they, too, had that murky attitude, because they simply knew nothing about it.

— Let’s not tell this story. — No, let’s tell it. We won’t say who or what — we’ll just tell it. In Ania’s family there was this belief, one particular person had this belief, that people with a homosexual orientation get AIDS.

And when Ania came to visit me — I was living in Lviv back then, I had only just enrolled in a medical college — her family raised the question: so you’re living there with Yen, you’d better watch out, because you could catch AIDS. And that’s, well, you know — the Soviet Union.

— And how did I even find out about this? — Because it was all on speakerphone. I put it on speaker thinking: well, what is my relative going to say, what could she possibly come out with? “Good afternoon”… And there I am sitting, you know, thinking: oh my God. But now they don’t think that way anymore, because we had some conversations.

Why it matters to talk about it

Well, first of all — the more we talk about it now, the more people will know about it. That’s logical. Maybe some percentage of those people will change their minds as they learn about the many LGBTQI+ people who will open up. They’ll be doctors, they’ll be police officers, they’ll be the people defending the country — soldiers, they’ll be teachers and so on. So when people find out this way, they’ll go, you know: “Damn, but he’s so cool, she’s just as great.”

Probably, yes. Probably it’s true, maybe, that orientation has nothing to do with illness. Because — how can a sick person teach children? Or how can a sick person heal people? Or how can a mentally ill person defend our Ukraine? I mean, you see? And there’s probably some sense in that.