The Pink Line

Journeys Across the World's Queer Frontiers

Mark Gevisser

• Publisher: Jonathan Ball
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781868426584
• Topic: Scienze sociali
• Subtopic: Studi su tematiche LGBT

The Pink Line is not just necessary reading for those who care about justice, it ought to be mandatory.' – Sisonke Msimang, author of Always Another Country

'This is politics and poetry all at once. The Pink Line is a remarkable narrative of resilience, romance, and realism.' – Homi K. Bhabha, author of The Location of Culture

'Hugely ambitious and brilliantly executed, it is an engrossing and essential read.' – Jonny Steinberg, author of One Day in Bethlehem

How did "LGBT Rights" become a dividing line across the world, bringing new freedoms and creating new fears? And what impact has it had on the people who live along this new global frontier?

Over seven years, Mark Gevisser has followed protagonists from across the world to tell one of the most startling stories of the 21st century: how a new conversation about sexual orientation has come to divide – and describe – the world in an entirely new way. While same-sex marriage and gender transition are celebrated in some parts of the world, laws are being strengthened to criminalize homosexuality and gender nonconformity in others. As globalized queer identities are adopted by people across the world – thanks in large part to the digital revolution – fresh culture wars have emerged. A new Pink Line, Gevisser argues, has been drawn across the globe, and he takes readers to its frontiers.

In between sharp analytical chapters exploring identity politics, religion, folklore, gender ideology, capitalism, human rights, and geopolitics, Gevisser provides sensitive and sometimes startling profiles of the queer folk he's encountered along the Pink Line. They include a trans Malawian refugee granted asylum in South Africa, a lesbian couple campaigning for countrywide marriage equality in Mexico, genderqueer high schoolers coming of age in Michigan, a gay Israeli-Palestinian couple searching for common ground, and a community of kothis – "women's hearts in men's bodies" – who run a temple in an Indian fishing village. What results is a moving and multifaceted picture of the world today and the queer people defining it.

Eye-opening, expertly researched, and compellingly narrated, The Pink Line is a monumental – and urgent – journey of unprecedented scope into 21st-century identity, seen through the border posts along the world's new LGBTQ+ frontiers.

1

THE WORLD’S
PINK LINES

Mr. President . . . did you press President Sall to make sure that homosexuality is decriminalized in Senegal? And, President Sall . . . You just said you embrace democracy and freedom. As this country’s new President, sir, will you work to decriminalize homosexuality in this country?”

These questions were put by an American journalist to Barack Obama and his host, the Senegalese president Macky Sall, at a press conference after the two had met in Dakar on June 27, 2013. The topic was inevitable: while they were flying over the Atlantic the previous day, Obama and his staff had erupted into cheers when they heard that the U.S. Supreme Court had overturned the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), paving the way for same-­sex marriage across the country.

The case had been brought to the court by an octogenarian widow named Edith Windsor, whose life partner of forty-­four years, Thea Spyer, had died in 2009. DOMA barred recognition of same-­sex marriages by the U.S. federal government, and Windsor had sued because this meant she could not collect spousal tax benefits after Spyer’s death. It was a perfectly telegenic test case, and in the majority judgment Anthony Kennedy ruled that DOMA had stigmatized same-­sex couples by enshrining a “separate status” for homosexuals into law.

In 1996, when President Bill Clinton signed DOMA into law (under duress, he insisted), 68 percent of Americans opposed same-­sex marriage, and only 27 percent supported it. By 2009, just thirteen years later, this ratio had flipped, and Obama would later describe the “marriage equality” movement as “the fastest set of changes in terms of a social movement that I’ve seen [in my lifetime].” His own public turning point had been in May 2012: not uncoincidentally, just days after a Gallup poll revealed that, for the first time, more Americans supported same-­sex marriage than opposed it. Now, a year later, on his way to Senegal, the president 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.”

This was not the case in Senegal, where the penal code outlawed homosexual acts as “improper or unnatural,” a law now being applied after having been dormant for many years. In what had been a perfect storm, the centripetal world-­shrinking energies of globalization had brought aggressive new strains of Islam from the Arab world to this West African Muslim country at exactly the same time as the global AIDS epidemic hit; it was a storm made only more severe in the following years as word spread—­through the increasingly penetrating channels of online media and satellite news—­of LGBT rights and same-­sex marriage in the West.

In December 2008, the Senegalese government hosted a pan-­African AIDS conference. The new label was “men who have sex with men” (or MSM): this formed a prominent part of the conference program, as did Senegal’s own MSM organization, AIDES Sénégal. The event caused an outcry from Senegalese clerics and Islamist politicians already inflamed by sensationalist media coverage of a “gay wedding” (an eerie premonition of what would befall Tiwonge Chimbalanga in Malawi a year later). The authorities responded by raiding an AIDES Sénégal meeting and arresting those present. Nine men were sentenced to eight years in prison, found to be guilty of using their HIV outreach work as “cover to recruit or organize meetings for homosexuals.” They were eventually pardoned after five brutal months in jail, because there was no evidence of actual sexual congress. But their lives were ruined. Many fled the country.

The situation was little changed when Barack Obama arrived in Senegal four years later, trailing liberal Americans’ euphoria about the Windsor decision in his wake. I had visited Dakar a few months previously, and met leaders of the LGBT movement 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 criminalized lesbian sex, too.

Obama’s government had made the global protection of LGBT rights an American foreign policy priority in December 2011, when Hillary ­Clinton, the secretary of state, had famously declared to the United Nations that “gay rights are human rights, and human rights are gay rights.” Obama instructed state agencies “to combat the criminalization of LGBT status and conduct” and “to respond swiftly to abuses against LGBT persons.” As a consequence, the State Department began reporting regularly on the matter, and Obama was surely briefed on the department’s 2012 Senegal finding, which was that “LGBT persons often faced arrest, widespread discrimination, social intolerance and acts of violence” in the country.

Now, at the grand colonial Palais de la République in Dakar, Obama responded that he had personally called Edie Windsor from Air Force One to congratulate her; the judgment was “a victory for American ­democracy.” The topic of decriminalizing homosexuality had not come up in his meeting with the Senegalese president, Obama said. He tried to respond with delicacy toward his host by drawing a line between personal beliefs and customs and traditions, which had to be “respected,” and the state’s responsibility, which was to treat all people equally. He explicitly linked his advocacy of LGBT rights to his country’s own history of racial discrimination: “We had to fight long and hard through a civil rights struggle to make sure that [people are treated equally].”

When it was his turn to speak, the Senegalese president Macky Sall 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 . . . We have different traditions.” He put the issue into a time frame: while he insisted (incorrectly) that his country did not persecute homosexuals, his society had to take time to “digest” these issues: “Senegal . . . is a very tolerant country . . . but we are still not ready to decriminalize homosexuality.”

In fact, Sall was a liberal with a human rights background who had previously made positive statements about decriminalization. And compared to other African leaders his comments were mild, even encouraging, in that they suggested a path to reform. But he was under pressure from the 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.”

The phrasing was revealing. No one—­not the Zeit journalist, nor Obama, nor even the Senegalese human rights movement—­was calling for his government to legitimize same-­sex partnerships. Rather, Sall was being asked to reform his country’s penal code and decriminalize homosexual sex, given the way the law had been applied as a discriminatory tool in the country.

But there were two other assumptions in Sall’s statement that caught my eye, and that have helped frame the questions of this book. 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.

Was he correct?

AS I PONDERED Macky Sall’s assumptions, I thought about another country where the Pink Line was being drawn, traced in this case over the disintegrating old marks of the Iron Curtain: Ukraine. In the precursor to the Maidan revolution and Russia’s invasion of Crimea, the country was wrestling in 2013 over whether to continue its application to the European Union, or to join 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. The dog whistle for this strategy was to call Europe “gayropa.” In the Ukrainian capital, Kiev, 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 many Ukrainians watched: “The way to Europe is through the ass” (“V Evropu cherez zhopu”).

Accession to the EU did indeed require an embrace of “European” values, which included the protection of LGBT people against discrimination and violence. Ukraine and Russia had both abolished the crime of sodomy for consenting adults (in 1991 and 1993, respectively), a precondition to joining the Council of Europe. Now, as a new religious and political elite sought to establish itself in countries disoriented by the collapse of the Soviet Union, the new legal status—­and visibility—­of gay people could stand in for the general lawlessness of the post-­communist era.

This was a trend in the region, as nativist nationalist politicians began to use LGBT rights as a way of reestablishing 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 demonization of that country’s budding LGBT movement, a strategy that played a significant role in its 2019 election campaign. In Hungary, Viktor Orbán’s Fidesz did the same, including through a 2012 constitutional amendment that outlawed same-­sex marriage. 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 its federal law “for the Purpose of Protecting Children from Information Advocating for a Denial of Traditional Family Values”: the “gay propaganda law” as it became known. 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 witch hunts of teachers to brutal 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—­and freakish—­face of Western debauchery.

Europe’s criticism of the law only went to prove its moral bankruptcy, President Putin said in a December 2013 tirade: the West’s trend of recognizing “everyone’s right to freedom of conscience, political outlook and private life” meant an acceptance of “the equality of good and evil.” For Putin, the primary evidence of this trend was the normalization of homosexuality: “a direct path to degradation and primitivism, resulting in profound demographic and moral crisis.”

It was in the context of all this that I met Ukraine’s leading LGBT activist, Olena Shevchenko. She told me how she and her comrades were fighting for a much lower bar than marriage equality: to stave off a copycat anti-­propaganda bill currently in parliament, promoted by Russian proxies and right-­wing Ukrainian nationalists alike, and to seek protection from the burgeoning public violence against queer people, a function—­as in Senegal—­of their own increased visibility. But some of Shevchenko’s allies in Ukraine’s civil society movement 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 hands about being European pawns.

Shevchenko was a lawyer in her thirties who would become a leader of a female-­only volunteer military unit during the February 2014 revolution. “Yes,” she said to me, “yes, 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.”

WHO IS CORRECT?

Senegal’s president Macky Sall, who believes that “we live in a world that is changing slowly”?

Or the Ukrainian activist Olena Shevchenko, who insists that “the world is moving so fast . . . We have no choice but to try and catch up”?

Both, actually.

In the twenty-­first 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 or on TV or in safe spaces, with the constraints of the street and the workplace, the courtroom and the living room. It is a place where queer people shuttle across time zones 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 zone, time quickens, in the other it dawdles; spending your life criss-crossing from zone to zone can make you quite dizzy.

Like Aunty in her new Tambo Village home, the people I met while researching this book were subject to a whole range of influences, from the pulpit to the smartphone. But like Aunty, who came up with the idea for her chinkhoswe all by herself and was making her own life in Tambo Village, they all had agency. In this respect at least, Olena Shevchenko understood something that Macky 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.

THIS BOOK IS primarily a collection of stories, then, with very singular protagonists making very personal decisions, in very specific places. These people drive their own stories; the rest of us—­activists and policy makers, scholars and scribes and readers—­try to catch up.

But this book is also an argument: about one way the world has been changing in the twenty-­first century, and why this is happening.

It was no coincidence that the notion of LGBT rights was spreading globally at the exact moment that old boundaries were collapsing in the era of globalization. ...