Stepan and Maxim knew the dangers firsthand: They’d narrowly escaped a run-in with Russian agents in the Donbas after separatists took control of their region, and left to build a new life in a town inside the Ukrainian territory called Kramatorsk. Russia has been stoking homophobia in the region ever since Russia enacted its so-called “gay propaganda ban” nine years ago. The relationship “is one thing that Putin gifted to me.”īut the specter of Putin has haunted their relationship. “Without the war, without the situation, we probably never meet each other,” Stepan says. When a friend in that town told Stepan she wanted to sublet her apartment, the men leapt at the chance to move in together.
For three months, they would both spend half an hour on the bus to reach a town equidistant from their homes, constantly worried about making it somewhere safe before curfew. But their feelings were more powerful than logistics. Maxim tried to call things off when the time came for his family to go home.
“Instead of sex, we decided to love each other,” Stepan says.
