Last July, Zoryan Kis was sitting on a bench in the center of Kiev with his boyfriend on his lap when a group of right wing teenagers came up to them. They asked the couple if they were patriots, and then emptied a can of pepper spray in to Zoryan’s face. Friends chased away the attackers, and Zoryan rushed to a pharmacy. Having had tear gas fired at him during Ukraine’s Maidan protests, he knew exactly how to rinse out his eyes.

The public display of public affection by Zoryan and his boyfriend Timur was not entirely spontaneous. In Russia, two male actors had decided to see what would happen if they walked around Moscow holding hands, documenting the abuse they received and uploading it to YouTube. Zoryan decided to do the same thing in Kiev — he wanted to see how much Ukraine had changed since the Maidan revolution and how different it was from Russia. The experiment had gone well until the very end.

Zoryan was not the only person asking how much has actually changed for the LGBT community since Ukraine officially embraced Western values following the ouster of President Viktor Yanukovych in 2014. Gone are the days when Kiev tried to court Putin’s favor and cash by copying Russia’s anti-gay laws, but the freedoms of speech and assembly called for by the Maidan protests are still unevenly applied in post-revolutionary Ukraine when it comes to the LGBT community.

Even in the Maidan itself the role of the LGBT community was difficult. The protests brought together people from different economic, regional, ethnic and religious groups. At any given time you could see flags belonging to the EU, Ukraine, the Crimean Tatars and even Israel. But the one banner you would not find was a rainbow flag.