SCRAWLED ON WALLS ACROSS KYIV, graffiti harks back to a more innocent time: ‘Queer Sex,’ ‘Make QueerPunk Again,’ and ‘Be Queer, Do Crime, Hail Satan,’ among others. These provocative pronouncements were painted by the subversive collective, Rebel Queers, their way to resist the heteronormative and patriarchal world that so suffocated them. One night in mid-February 2022, on the wall outside K41 (or Ɇ), a club that has helped put Kyiv’s queer techno scene on the global map, they painted a slogan thatwould prove darkly prophetic: ‘Your dancefloor is Putin’s battleground.’
It was meant as a ‘Fuck you!’ to the ‘techno tourists’ who flooded in from Berlin and elsewhere to enjoy Kyiv’s no-limits party scene in recent years, largely ignorant of the
