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Police apprehend protesters in Moscow in 2015. Photograph: Maxim Shemetov/Reuters

How globalisation has transformed the fight for LGBTQ+ rights

This article is more than 3 years old
Police apprehend protesters in Moscow in 2015. Photograph: Maxim Shemetov/Reuters

Much progress has been made in attitudes towards sexual equality and gender identity – but in many places a dramatic backlash by conservative forces has followed. By Mark Gevisser

On a visit to Senegal in 2013, Barack Obama held a press conference with the Senegalese president Macky Sall. “Mr President,” asked an American journalist, “did you press President Sall to make sure that homosexuality is decriminalised in Senegal? And, President Sall,” the journalist continued, “as this country’s new president, sir, will you work to decriminalise homosexuality?”

The question was inevitable: the previous day, while they were flying over the Atlantic, Obama and his staff had erupted into cheers when they heard that the US supreme court had overturned the Defense of Marriage Act, paving the way for same-sex marriage across the country. The president had issued a statement from Air Force One: “The laws of our land are catching up to the fundamental truth that millions of Americans hold in our hearts: when all Americans are treated as equal, no matter who they are or whom they love, we are all more free.”

But in Senegal, the penal code outlawed homosexual acts as “improper or unnatural”, and the law was now being strictly applied after having been dormant for many years. In what had been a perfect storm in the early 21st century, the world-shrinking energies of globalisation had brought intolerant new strains of Islam to this west African Muslim country just as the Aids epidemic was surging in Africa. In the following years, as online media and satellite news spread awareness of LGBTQ+ rights and same-sex marriage, the backlash grew more severe. A few months before Obama’s visit, I had travelled to Dakar and met leaders of the LGBTQ+ movement who were living underground and in fear. A prominent male journalist was in jail, as were several women: like almost half of the sodomy laws the world over, the Senegalese one criminalised lesbian sex, too.

The question put to the two presidents at the press conference highlighted the way that a global conversation about sexual orientation and gender identity had begun to define – and describe – the world in an entirely new way. As globalisation gathered momentum, a new human-rights frontier was being staked out: while same-sex marriage and gender transition were now celebrated in some parts of the world as signs of progress, laws were being strengthened to criminalise them in others. Thus was a “pink line” drawn: between those places increasingly integrating queer people into their societies as full citizens, and those finding new ways to shut them out.

The expansion of the LGBTQ+ rights movement created a new sense of space and identity for people everywhere. It also created a new set of challenges, as people attempted to toggle between the liberation they experienced online and the constraints of their offline lives, or between their freedom in cities and their commitments back home. It created new categories of people demanding rights – and also panicked resistance. It created new horizons, as societies began to think differently about what it meant to make a family, to be male or female, to be human – and also new fears.

The pink line ran through TV studios and parliaments, through newsrooms and courtrooms, and opened up new frontiers of the culture wars. In the US, this line ran right through children’s bathrooms, as school boards and parents fought legal battles to prevent transgender children from using the facilities consistent with their gender identities. This week, in a landmark judgment, the US Supreme Court ruled by a majority of six to three that to fire someone on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity was a form of sex discrimination, and therefore illegal. This was a shot across the bows of Trump’s administration, which has tried to ban transgender people from the military and last week issued regulations that would erase protection from discrimination in healthcare for transgender people. This is part of a campaign to eliminate civil rights protections for transgender people, and to establish a definition of sex as being biologically determined at birth. Meanwhile, in the UK, it has recently been reported that Boris Johnson’s government is planning to scrap plans to allow people to change their legal gender by self-identifying as male or female.

US president Barack Obama and Senegalese president Macky Sall in Dakar in 2013. Photograph: Jim Watson/AFP/Getty Images

Seven years ago, at the 2013 press conference in Dakar, Obama tried to respond with delicacy toward his Senegalese host by drawing a line between personal beliefs and traditions, which had to be “respected”, and the state’s responsibility, which was to treat all people equally. When it was his turn to speak, the Senegalese president made the point often advanced by those who set traditional values against the notion of universal human rights. “We cannot have a standard model which is applicable to all nations,” Sall said. “We have different traditions.”

Sall was a liberal with a human-rights background who had previously made positive statements about decriminalisation. But he was under pressure from Senegal’s Islamist lobby, and could also not be seen to be pandering to the west. He would later voice his frustration in an interview with the German magazine Zeit: “You have only had same-sex partnerships in Europe since yesterday and now you ask it today from Africans? This is all happening too fast! We live in a world that is changing slowly.”

There were two assumptions in Sall’s statement that caught my eye. The first was that “we live in a world that is changing slowly”, and the second was that the people asking for change in Senegal were outsiders – the west, “you”, not Senegalese citizens themselves.


In another part of the world, at the same time, the pink line was being traced over the disintegrating old marks of the iron curtain. In 2013, Ukraine was wrestling over whether to continue its application to the European Union, or to join the Russian president Vladimir Putin’s new “Eurasian” customs union.

This was the year that Putin took aim at the EU and its eastward spread, and the way he did so was by claiming to protect the “traditional values” of Orthodox Slavic society against a decadent secular west. In Kiev, the Ukrainian capital, a Kremlin proxy erected billboards showing same-sex stick figures holding hands, with the slogan: “Association with the EU means same-sex marriage.” There was even a popular punning rhyme on the Russian television channels that many Ukrainians watched: “V Evropu cherez zhopu”, or “The way to Europe is through the ass”.

Across the region, nativist politicians began to use resistance to LGBTQ+ rights as a way of re-establishing a sovereignty they felt had been conceded to Europe. In Poland, the Kaczynski twins built their anti-European Law and Justice party in no small part through the demonisation of that country’s budding LGBTQ+ movement, a strategy that would play a significant role in its 2019 election campaign. In Hungary, Viktor Orbán’s Fidesz did the same, first through a 2012 constitutional amendment that outlawed same-sex marriage and more recently through new legislation preventing trans people from changing gender legally. In Poland and Hungary, as in Russia, public homophobia was part of a greater project of asserting a national identity against migrants, another perceived negative consequence – along with gay visibility – of open borders.

At the same time that Russia began cracking down on migrants – particularly from central Asian countries – it developed and passed what became known as the “gay propaganda law”. The law outlawed any mention of homosexuality in the presence of minors, or in a medium where they might read it or hear it. This unleashed a wave of violent aggression, from witchhunts of teachers to online entrapment and torture to violent attacks on public demonstrators. It had a particularly harsh effect on transgender women, who were seen to be the most visible face of western debauchery.

It was in the context of all this that I met Ukraine’s leading LGBTQ+ activist, Olena Shevchenko. She told me how she and others were fighting for a much more modest aim than marriage equality: to stave off a copycat anti-propaganda bill promoted by Russian proxies and rightwing Ukrainian nationalists alike, and to seek protection from the growing public violence against queer people – a result, as in Senegal, of their own increased visibility. But some of Shevchenko’s allies in Ukraine’s civil society movement had remonstrated with her: it was not the right time to talk about these issues at all. Ukrainian society was not ready, and it might play into the opposition’s arguments about being European pawns.

Shevchenko is a lawyer who became a leader of a female-only volunteer military unit during the February 2014 revolution. “Yes,” she said to me, “they are right. Ukrainian society is not ready for LGBT rights. I agree. But Ukrainian LGBTs, themselves, they cannot be restrained anymore. They go online. They watch TV. They travel. They see how things can be. Why should they not have similar freedoms? Why should they be forced to live in hiding? The world is moving so fast, and events are overtaking us in Ukraine. We have no choice but to try and catch up.”

Kiev Pride in Ukraine in 2017. Photograph: Stepan Franko/EPA

Who was correct? Macky Sall, who believed the world was moving slowly, or Olena Shevchenko, who felt it was moving so fast?

Both, actually.

In the 21st century, the pink line is not so much a line as a territory. It is a borderland where queer people try to reconcile the liberation and community they might have experienced online, on TV or in safe spaces with the constraints of the street, the workplace and the family. It is a place where queer people shuttle between worlds each time they look up from their smartphones at the people gathered around the family table; as they climb the steps from the underground nightclub back into the nation-state. In one world, time quickens; in the other it dawdles. Spending your life criss-crossing from world to world can make you quite dizzy.

The queer people I met over the past decade of reporting from across the world might have been subject to a whole range of influences, from the pulpit to the smartphone. But they all had agency. In this respect, Shevchenko understood something that Sall could not or would not see: the call for change might be supported by external players such as Barack Obama or the European Union, but it was being made by Senegalese and Ukrainian people themselves.


It was no coincidence that the notion of LGBTQ+ rights was spreading worldwide at the same time that old boundaries were collapsing in the era of globalisation. The collapse of these boundaries led to the rapid spread of ideas about sexual equality or gender transition – and also a dramatic reaction by conservative forces, by patriarchs and priests who feared the loss of control that this process threatened. These were the dynamics along the pink line, particularly in places where people came to be counted as gay or lesbian or MSM (men who have sex with men) or transgender for the first time. In most societies, they had always been there, albeit in ways that were sometimes circumscribed or submerged, but now they claimed new status as they took on new political identities. And they became enmeshed in a bigger geopolitical dynamic.

In the French presidential election of 2017, the National Front candidate, Marine Le Pen, said the world was no longer divided into “leftwing” and “rightwing”, but rather into “globalists” and “patriots”; Le Pen lost the election to Emmanuel Macron, but elsewhere in the world, leaders with views similar to Le Pen’s scored major victories. Trump came to power in the US in 2016, using the word “nationalist” and alleging that those who embraced globalisation were unpatriotic. The UK voted to leave the EU the same year, and the new prime minister, Theresa May, famously said: “If you believe you are a citizen of the world, you are a citizen of nowhere.” Both the Trump revolution and the Brexit one that brought Boris Johnson to power in 2019 sought to reassert national borders against the free movement of trade, capital and, most of all, people. The new politics was not only about erecting new walls, but also about making claims that older walls had been taken down too quickly.

Particularly in Europe, these new-look nationalist movements sometimes bolstered their agendas by claiming they were protecting not just jobs and citizens but values, too. By the time Le Pen was running for office in 2017, these values included the rights of LGBTQ+ people. The man who wrote this script had been the crusading Dutch anti-immigration politician Pim Fortuyn, who was assassinated in 2002. Fortuyn, who was gay, attracted mass support when he claimed that Muslim intolerance of homosexuality posed an existential threat to European civilisation. His far-right successor, Geert Wilders, drove the agenda hard. When a troubled Muslim man killed 49 people at the Pulse gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida, in June 2016, Trump – then on the campaign trail – slammed “radical Islamic terrorism”. Wilders, fighting his own election campaign back home, capitalised on this: “The freedom that gay people should have – to kiss each other, to marry, to have children – is exactly what Islam is fighting against.”

Pim Fortuyn, a far-right Dutch politician who was assassinated in 2002, invoked gay rights in his arguments against Islam. Photograph: Phil Nijhuis/AP

Wilders lost the Dutch election, but he influenced the agenda to such an extent that the centre-right incumbent, Mark Rutte, ended up echoing much of his far-right rhetoric. At one stage, he stated that the Dutch feel growing “unease when people abuse our freedom … [when they] harass gays, howl at women in short skirts or accuse ordinary Dutch people as racists … If you reject our country in such a fundamental manner, I’d rather see you leave.”

In France, Le Pen played both sides: she opposed same-sex marriage but would not participate in the massive protests against it. In a television interview during a 2013 visit to Russia, she agreed enthusiastically with her new Kremlin comrades that “homophilia is one of the elements of globalisation”. But her deputy and chief strategist Florian Philippot was himself gay, and she openly courted the gay vote in 2017 with the message that her policies were all that stood between them and Islam’s “hatred of homosexuals”, as she put it in a televised debate with Macron.

Other rightwing European parties followed suit. In 2018, a spokesman for the Flemish nationalist party Vlaams Belang said that his party was the country’s most gay-friendly, because all the others were “willing to import thousands of Muslims who have very violent ideas against being gay or transgender”. And although the anti-immigrant Alternative for Germany (AfD) opposed same-sex marriage and wanted to limit sexuality education in schools, its leader, Alice Weidel, is lesbian, and there is a gay grouping within the party that insisted action against “Islamic orthodoxy” was necessary for the “survival” of LGBTQ+ Germans. In 2016 the AfD’s Berlin branch put up billboards stating: “My partner and I don’t want to get to meet Muslim immigrants who believe that our love is a deadly sin.”

In western Europe, the issue of LGBTQ+ rights was being staked as a pink line against the influx of new migrants. At the same time, in eastern Europe, it was being staked as a pink line against decadent western liberalism. In both instances, queer people themselves came to be instrumentalised politically as never before. They acquired political meaning far beyond their own claims to equality and dignity. They became embodiments of progress and worldliness to some, but signs of moral and social decay to others.


In many parts of the world, the staking of a pink line along LGBTQ+ rights disrupted age-old ways of dealing with sexuality and gender variance. As had happened in the west in the late 20th century, homosexuality came to be increasingly understood in Latin America, Asia and Africa as an identity deserving of rights and recognition, rather than simply a sexual behaviour to be kept quiet. And having a gender identity different from the one you were assigned at birth came to be seen as a human right, something medicine and surgery could facilitate.

This offered opportunities for empowerment on the one hand, but shut down space on the other, as western notions of the gender binary settled in societies where gender was often permitted to be more fluid. Suddenly, age-old transgender categories, such as Indonesian waria or Senegalese goorjigeen, came to be pinked with the new LGBTQ+ brush. In many parts of the world, men walk arm in arm or hand in hand: in countries including Egypt and Nigeria, where there was moral panic against a new category of people demanding space and rights, even these gestures of affection became suspect.

One of the distinctive features of 21st-century life is the speed at which ideas blow across the planet. “There is always backlash when people come out,” the veteran American LGBTQ+ activist Julie Dorf said in 2014, “but what makes this era different is that what happens in the US today is known in Azerbaijan tomorrow. And what the rightwing and conservative forces fear is true: rights are rights are rights. When you do start to fight for the equality of LGBT people, it will at some point lead to calls for marriage equality, even if marriage equality is not what activists are asking for today in, say, Nigeria or Russia. They are simply asking to live in peace and not be killed, to have the same basic protections as everyone else.”

The 21st-century conversation about sexual orientation and gender identity is a global one, although it has local or regional accents. In Russia and many African states, for some people it has been about the most basic rights to freedom of association and safety, and for others, about protecting children. In countries from the US to Mexico to France, the conversation has been about what a family looks like, and who has the right to make one. In the Catholic countries of Europe and Latin America, the pink line became part of a broader conflict over “gender ideology”, and the accusation that humanity is meddling with a divine plan. In the Middle East, the conversation blossomed as a result of the Arab spring, as a budding queer movement made tentative first steps toward public visibility – and was described, too, as a negative symptom of this opening up.

A gay couple kiss after their public wedding ceremony in China’s Fujian province in 2012. Photograph: AFP/Getty Images

In much of Asia, the conversation was carried on the winds of new social media, and also by rapid urbanisation and industrialisation, which meant young populations living away from their families for the first time. In different ways all over the world, the conversation now encompassed discussion about gender identity, and about a person’s right to change the categories of male and female, or to live between them. What these different pink lines had in common was the way they set something called “tradition” against something called “modernity”. The work of queer people along the pink line was often to reconcile these: to embrace a liberating notion of modernity while remaining part of their societies and communities.

All over the world, precisely because the conversation was new in many places, it was vibrant and often violent, as conservative forces blew back against the inevitable consequences of a newly globalised world and the ideas that it generated. It mobilised moral panic in which homosexual or gender-variant people became scapegoats, or bogeymen, or excuses to rally law and order, or evil forces against which nationhood was defined. In most instances, these campaigns purported to protect “traditional values” or “natural order” from the depredations of modern society, or ordinary people from a global or cosmopolitan elite.

The then UN secretary general Ban Ki-Moon used the platform of the 2012 African Union in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, to call on African countries to repeal sodomy laws. The ranking African in the Vatican, Cardinal Robert Sarah, responded harshly: “You cannot impose something stupid like that. Poor countries like Africa [sic] just accept it because it’s imposed upon them through money, through being tied to aid.”

This was the great shibboleth of the global anti-gay discourse: homosexuality was a commercial transaction, a form of “recruitment” that set out to exploit poor people, or young people, or black people, and to compromise the values in which they were reared.


If this was a script that reached back into history, its first modern application, in the era of “gay rights”, was in Iran’s 1979 revolution: the fierce condemnation of homosexuality, including the death penalty under Sharia law, was one of the ways the new rulers differentiated themselves from the western decadence of the Shah’s regime (another, of course, being the severe constraints on women). There are no reliable figures for how many alleged homosexuals have been executed since 1979, but thousands have gone into exile.

In 2015, the Iranian leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei issued a statement about how Iranian youth were exposed to threats more dangerous than ever because of “communications media that can spread a wrong thought or comment”. Iran was “not involved in the military war” anymore, but “in political, economic and security wars – and, above all, the cultural wars”. Khamenei was not talking specifically about homosexuality, but about the broader diffusion of western values into the country. In other statements, he made it clear that homosexuality, and same-sex marriage in particular, were the prime avatar of this “stampede on human values.”

Such notions took root even in the more tolerant parts of the world. In Indonesia, during an uncharacteristic crackdown on queer people in 2016, the minister of defence, Ryamizard Ryacudu, branded the LGBTQ+ movement more dangerous than even a nuclear war, because “we can’t see who our foes are, but out of the blue everyone is brainwashed”. He called this “a proxy war” in which “another state might occupy the minds of the nation without anyone realising it … Everything we know could disappear in an instant – it’s dangerous.” Like Khamenei, Ryacudu was acknowledging the ineffectiveness of conventional warfare – of borders themselves, really – against this new threat. It was a moral war, and it needed to be fought on moral terms, in cyberspace rather than along physical borders.

In May 2017, the conservative Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán hosted a global initiative called the World Congress of Families, led by American evangelicals and Russian Orthodox conservatives. In his opening speech, Orbán linked his anti-immigrant policies with Christian “traditional values”, and boasted about how his border fences had changed history by stemming the tide of migrants entering Europe. Trump had just been elected after a campaign that expressed a similar faith in walls.

But another keynote speaker in Budapest underscored the unfixed nature of these new battles. The speaker’s name was Jack Hanick, and he was a Fox News founder who had moved to Moscow to help set up Tsargrad TV – “God’s TV, Russian Style” as the Financial Times called it. Hanick projected an image from The Brady Bunch on to a big screen. The 70s American show might have had a male patriarch and a stay-at-home mom, he said, but with its “blended family” it represented nonetheless the beginning of an inexorable moral slide into Modern Family, the 21st-century sitcom that “idealises same-sex marriage”. “This is a war,” Hanick said, “but it is not a war to be waged in the physical world.”

If television was “at the centre of a spiritual war”, as Hanick put it, then so too was the internet. Hanick’s employer at Tsargrad TV was Konstantin Malofeev, a rightwing oligarch-activist who had set up Russia’s Safe Internet League: in the name of child protection, the league set out to patrol cyberspace by learning lessons from China. The architect of “the Great Firewall of China”, as the country’s highly restrictive internet policy became known, was a man named Fang Binxing. At a forum on the subject in 2016 hosted by Malofeev, Fang insisted that “if borders exist, they exist in cyberspace too”. He also alleged that the US government directly controlled the companies that dominated cyberspace. Google, Facebook and Twitter are, of course, barred from China.

China had decriminalised homosexual sex in 1997 and depathologised homosexuality in 2001. But as the country’s queer population became increasingly visible through western media and online, its cyber-marshals soon turned their attention to it. In 2016 and 2017, the government put out a list of “abnormal sexual relationships” that would be banned from television and the internet: these included “same-sex relationships” along with “incest”, “sexual perversion” and “sexual abuse.” In 2018, Sina Weibo – the Chinese equivalent of Twitter – announced it would remove any graphic material that was pornographic, bloodily violent, or homosexual, in order to comply. This prompted the largest protest China had yet seen over LGBTQ+ issues. The hashtag #IamGay was posted more than 500,000 times, and viewed more than 530m times; tens of thousands of people tweeted their own stories about being queer or having queer family members or friends. Weibo retracted quickly.

In different parts of the world, people found community and information – and sex – online, but the increased connectivity also brought new threats to security, from cyberbullying and unanticipated exposure to online entrapment. In Russia, queer youth found support and solidarity through a closed group called Children-404, hosted by VKontakte, the Russian social media platform. At the very same time, another group, called Occupy Pedofilia, used VKontakte to entrap gay men, and then post horrific videos of their torture and assault. At an international LGBTQ+ conference in 2012, I heard how opponents of the Assad regime in Syria were blackmailed with evidence of their activity on gay hookup apps. In the years following, dozens of Egyptian men were entrapped by the vice police through Grindr, and the company disabled its global positioning function in the country in response.

Thus were the pink lines of the 21st century staked: by Grindr and Modern Family and Weibo, as much as by the policy makers in the US state department and the Kremlin, the technocrats at the UN Commission on Human Rights, and the activists on the frontlines on both sides.

This is an edited extract from The Pink Line: The World’s Queer Frontiers, published by Profile on 3 July and available at guardianbookshop.com

Follow the Long Read on Twitter at @gdnlongread, and sign up to the long read weekly email here

This article was amended on 18 June 2020 because an earlier version said Viktor Orbán was president of Hungary, rather than prime minister.

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