PBS’s (formerly taxpayer funded) News Hour program had some news you could use Tuesday evening -- a monologue from the author of "The Queer Face of War: Portraits and Stories from Ukraine.”
Co-host Geoff Bennett: It has been more than four years since Russia launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine. And while the war has affected the daily lives of nearly all Ukrainians, life has been especially challenging for members of its LGBTQ community. Author and photojournalist J. Lester Feder’s recent book chronicles some of those lives. Here's our conversation with him.
The “conversation” was actually a four-minute leftist monologue interspersed with shots of trans people, perhaps for the best, since PBS’s questions would have surely been cringeworthy, given the channel’s documented commitment to transgender propaganda.
J. Lester Feder, Author, "The Queer Face of War: Portraits and Stories from Ukraine": My name is J. Lester Feder. I'm a reporter that's primarily been a foreign correspondent. And I'm the author of "The Queer Face of War: Portraits and Stories from Ukraine."
LGBT people have been targeted in wars in well-documented ways going back at least as far as World War II. But we don't have a lot of stories about what actually happened to them, because, in most wars, it hasn't been safe for LGBT people to speak publicly. So, when the war in Ukraine began, I immediately went over there to begin interviewing people to find out what issues they might be having. And we were particularly concerned, because Russia had used so much anti-LGBT propaganda, that they might be targeting queer Ukrainians on the ground.
Was there a way to work Donald Trump into this profile of “queer Ukrainians” in the military? Indeed there was.
Author J. Lester Feder on PBS: "It's really important for marginalized groups to be able to serve in the military because it is a way of demonstrating that there is an ability to bear the full weight of citizenship and therefore they're entitled to the full rights as citizens." pic.twitter.com/35sNIRqbys
— Clay Waters 🇮🇱 (@claywaters44) June 25, 2026
Feder boasted of having talked to “a woman [sic] named Emilia, who is transgender, joined the military initially because she thought it was the only way that she could afford gender-confirming surgery.” It made him think “about the fights over gay people being able to serve in the military when I was a teenager, and today the Trump administration's efforts to remove trans people from service.”
Feder: It's really important for marginalized groups to be able to serve in the military, because it is a way of demonstrating that there is an ability to bear the full weight of citizenship, and therefore they're entitled to the full rights of, as citizens. And that denial of service is saying that marginalized people are somehow less than other citizens, they're not truly equal, and, therefore, can't make those demands.
The monologue format allowed Feder to unload maximalist radically transgender rhetoric like this:
The treatment of queer people, like the treatment of all marginalized groups, is a real measure of the health of a democracy….
