Their Voices

According to the survey of the project “Global Assessment of Values” conducted in 2020, 44.8% of Ukrainians do not want to live next to the representatives of LGBT+. “The challenge is that Ukrainians don't want to hear the stories of LGBT+ people. As soon as the rainbow flag appears, many click a skip button,” says Max Burtsev, the campaign's creative director. “The campaign is based on an insight that at the moment people for the first time meet a gay, lesbian, bisexual or trans person, their level of tolerance automatically increases. Because it becomes clear that real people have nothing in common with the stereotypes in their head.” The six LGBT+ stories were narrated by heterosexual opinion leaders who, at the beginning of the video, commit a coming-out... telling the story of another. The characters in the stories were all real people: a military man, a sports coach, a transgender man, a religious woman, a 68-year-old grandpa, a woman whose mother hired a man for her ‘curative rape’. The most unexpected and important result of the campaign was the act of Roman, a Ukrainian military man from Donbass. After publishing a video telling his story, Roman decided to come out publicly. Digital advertisement created by Arriba!, Ukraine for Kharkiv Pride, within the category: Public Interest, NGO.