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In addition to other vulnerabilities, this article calls out the increased likelihood of LGBTQIA+ people to experience houselessness, which automatically creates greater vulnerability to the effects of extreme weather.

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How Environmental and Climate Injustice Affects the LGBTQI+ Community

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This Pride Month, policymakers and the environmental movement must consider how environmental injustice affects the LGBTQI+ community.

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The Stonewall riots were so important to the queer community in this country. Queer people standing up to unfair and hateful law enforcement practices and creating increased visibility for queer and trans people paved the way for subsequent generations of queer folks.

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How the Stonewall Riots Sparked a Movement | History

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I've identified as part of the Portland queer community from a young age. The Pride Parade is a highlight of the year for the community, not only because it's fun but because it feels empowering to be among community and allies.

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Drag has become a huge cultural force in the years since Stonewall. RuPaul's career, and the platform they have provided for hundreds of other performers, has really normalized queer art and experimentation with gender and exposed typically heteronormative mainstream culture to queer music, art and performance.

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“RuPaul’s Drag Race" Cast Explains The History of Drag Culture | Allure

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This touches on both global inequality and public health and how they intersect with the LGTBQIA+ community. It highlights how those overlapping factors increased the community's vulnerability to COVID with a variety of examples from around the world.

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The pop singer Madonna once dubbed Covid-19 " the great equalizer " - from a rose-petaled bathtub. Under criticism, she retracted her statement.

What she meant, of course, was that the virus can infect anyone. But what she came under fire for was ignoring that people who are poor have higher rates of infection, are more likely to have serious complications from COVID-19, and will suffer a disproportionate economic burden as a result of the pandemic.

Similarly, to address the specific vulnerabilities of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBTQ) people to the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, a more nuanced perspective is needed.

June, Pride Month, is an appropriate time to look at the differences in susceptibility to infection, chances of recovery, and the pandemic's economic impacts. The June 15 U.S. Supreme Court ruling - that federal employment laws do protect against discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity - offers necessary protection, especially in a precarious economic climate.

It is a truism that crisis amplifies existing inequalities - the social and economic hierarchies that pre-date the pandemic are reproduced within it. When the Titanic goes down, those in steerage have the least chance of saving themselves. In the U.S., widespread protests against police violence are also fueled by the disproportionate burden of infection, mortality, and the economic impact of COVID-19 on black people.

Around the world, inequality as a determining factor in susceptibility to human rights abuses is something that hides in plain sight, even in ordinary times.

Violence and discrimination against poorer LGBTQ Jamaicans are widespread and commonplace, whereas middle class activists say they do not often share those experiences.

Similarly, the experience of township-dwelling black lesbians in South Africa is a world apart from South African lesbians who are affluent. They may face discrimination and abuse across the class divide but the systemic nature of violence against poorer lesbians is linked to economic inequality, as well as identity.

And in Kenya, the gay and transgender youths who found themselves homeless after being chased from their homes by angry groups acting on rumors of a gay marriage, were targeted for abuse because they were poor.

Lesbians in Ghana have nowhere to turn when families turn abusive - the law does not protect them, and it is hard for them as women to establish economic independence. When middle class men were arrested in 2001 in a raid on the Queen Boat in Egypt, it created an international furor precisely because they were middle class. They were able to garner international activist support that generated extensive media attention, unlike poorer LGBTQ people who are routinely arrested in Egypt without the option of activating solidarity networks or media interest.

COVID-19 has highlighted these class divisions in multiple ways. The homeless youth arrested at a shelter in Uganda for gay youth rejected by their families, under the pretense of enforcing presidential directives to slow the spread of COVID-19, were victims of poverty and discrimination. Transgender Panamanians found themselves between a rock and a hard place during gender-based quarantines when neither their identity documents nor their expressed identities protected them from abuse. They were forced to rely on courier services for supplies - a luxury they could ill-afford.

When LGBTQ people are scapegoated by religious leaders for bringing the virus in the form of divine punishment, those who are unable to seek refuge in the privacy of their homes bear the brunt of harassment that results from these inflammatory statements. In South Korea, scapegoating on the heels of media reports about an infected person who went to gay clubs amplified fears of familial rejection as well as the threat of employment discrimination and other economic repercussions in the public sphere.

Young Filipinos targeted by curfew-enforcing local officials with mocking abuse were on the social and economic margins. And in South Africa, LGBTQ migrants from the continent live extremely precarious lives, compounded by COVID-19. They lack community support networks due to homophobia, and have no access to the government-issued emergency supplies available to needy South Africans during the lockdown.

Poverty and inequality constitute a vicious cycle. Persistent bullying in school and family rejection can lead to poor performance and limited opportunities in later life. Employment discrimination means that some LGBTQ people find themselves restricted to certain kinds of work, often in the informal sector, with little security and no benefits. For example, waria are disproportionately employed in the beauty industry in Indonesia, ladyboys in Thailand have a niche in performance, while in India hijra make a living from alms, ritual occasions, or sex work.

These are precarious livelihoods at the best of times. In a pandemic they all but evaporate.

Outright Action International, an LGBTQ rights group, recently undertook a global survey on the impact of COVID-19 and created an emergency relief fund. Within weeks they had received 1,500 applications, including a disturbing number for food relief. And for LGBTQ organizations that live hand to mouth on small grants, the pandemic is a potential endpoint for their activities.

A more nuanced approach to the abbreviation LGBTQ, not as a monolith but as an inadequate shorthand, is in order.

On the one hand, identification based on sexual orientation or gender identity is the basis for solidarity across lines of difference. On the other, an uncritical look at nominally shared experience risks obscuring stark inequalities along socio-economic lines that renders the phrase "LGBTQ discrimination" as potentially meaningless as Madonna's "great equalizer" musings. It is not wrong, but neither is it accurate.

More attention should be paid to structural inequalities that keep us apart, and that have been so starkly highlighted by the current pandemic. Human rights advocates working on poverty and economic relief, and those working on LGBTQ issues, would do well to foreground the needs of those who are doubly marginalized.

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LGBTQ Inequality and Vulnerability in the Pandemic

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The pop singer Madonna once dubbed Covid-19 "the great equalizer" - from a rose-petaled bathtub. Under criticism, she retracted her statement. What she meant, of course, was that the virus can infect anyone.

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This article highlights the increased likelihood for members of the LGBTQIA+ community to live in poverty in this country, compared to their cis-het peers. Interestingly though, it digs in further and makes clear that feminist issues of patriarchal control and prejudice are also at play in this dynamic, as gay men represent an exception to the rule. Women, non-binary and trans people experience the worst of these effects.

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Poverty generally refers to a lack of basic necessities, resources and income, though its exact definition is often widely debated and measured in a variety of ways. A common way to measure poverty is to look at a family's income and size, in order to determine whether it has enough income to support that family. This approach is employed by the Census Bureau, who each year identifies family size-specific income thresholds, below which, a family is considered to be living in poverty.

According to a 2019 Williams Institute analysis of Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System (BRFSS) data, which is the best available evidence on poverty in the LGBTQ+ community, LGBTQ+ adults in the United States are significantly more likely to be living in poverty than their straight and cisgender counterparts. Overall, more than one in five LGBTQ+ adults (22%) are living in poverty, compared to an estimated 16% of their straight and cisgender counterparts. Among LGBTQ+ adults, poverty further differs across sexual orientation, gender, and race. Almost three in ten transgender adults (29%), as well as almost three in ten cisgender bisexual women (29%), are living in poverty, substantially more than cisgender bisexual men (19.5%) and cisgender lesbian women (17.9%). Cisgender gay men, in contrast, are less likely to be living in poverty than straight and cisgender adults, with 12% of cisgender gay men, compared with 13% of cisgender straight men, and 18% of cisgender straight women, living in poverty. When looking across race/ethnicity, poverty rates among LGBTQ+ people of color in the U.S. tower over those of other groups. For example, almost half of Latine transgender adults (48%), as well as approximately four in ten Black transgender adults (39%), are living in poverty.

More recently, research conducted by the HRC Foundation found that full-time LGBTQ+ workers earn less than typical workers in the United States, with LGBTQ+ workers earning approximately 90 cents for every dollar earned by a typical worker, Black workers earning approximately 80 cents, trans men and nonbinary, genderqueer, genderfluid and two-spirit workers earning approximately 70 cents, and trans women earning approximately 60 cents.

However, income alone does not capture the full picture of LGBTQ+ people's experiences with poverty and economic insecurity.

Poverty related to Un/Underemployment

One explanation for the lower wages reported by LGBTQ+ workers is higher rates of 'underemployment,' or employment in temporary/part-time positions, lower paid positions, as well as positions with limited or no benefits. HRC Foundation's analysis of data from the 2018 GSS found that LGBTQ+ working people are also more likely to work in jobs that typically are associated with lower earnings and benefits. The top five industries where LGBTQ+ adults work-representing approximately 40% of all LGBTQ+ workers-are restaurants and food services (15%), hospitals (8%), K-12 education (7%), colleges and universities (7%) and retail (4%), which are some of the lowest paid sectors. This includes the almost 20% of LGBTQ+ workers in service industries such as restaurants and food services or retail, which are among the least likely to offer benefits such as medical coverage and paid leave.

LGBTQ+ poverty can also be linked to higher rates of unemployment seen among LGBTQ+ adults. Prior to the pandemic, nearly one in ten LGBTQ+ people were unemployed, approximately twice that of non-LGBTQ+ people. Unemployment has substantial implications for the ability to afford medical care, housing, food, and other basic necessities. But for those LGBTQ+ adults who are employed, many are in jobs where access to these resources remain out of reach.

More insidiously, higher rates of unemployment and poverty may also be linked to discrimination. Despite recent advances in equality, LGBTQ+ individuals and families across the country continue to experience discrimination across their lives including at work. According to an October 2020 study by the Center for American Progress, 36% of LGBTQ+ adults had experienced discrimination in the workplace within the last year. Discrimination like this leads to an increased risk for poverty and economic struggle among the most vulnerable in the LGBTQ+ community. For example, in the same study, among those who had experienced discrimination, 29% of LGBTQ+ people, 37% Black respondents, and more than half of transgender respondents stated this discrimination had significantly impacted their financial well-being.

Poverty related to lack of comprehensive employment benefits and the cost of parenting
When it comes to paid medical and family leave, the U.S. lags far behind other industrialized countries, being the only industrialized country that offers no paid leave to working adults. The lack of comprehensive paid leave is a universal experience across all walks of life in the United States. Existing evidence suggests that LGBTQ+ individuals and their families are uniquely impacted by these policies. In addition to the job sector related disparities in access to benefits mentioned above, HRC Foundation's 2018 LGBTQ+ Paid Leave Survey found that fewer than half of LGBTQ+ respondents reported that their employer's policies cover new parents of all genders equally, and only 49% said that employer policies are equally inclusive of the many ways families can welcome a child, including childbirth, adoption or foster care. This is especially critical for LGBTQ+ families who may have lower household incomes and cannot seek a wider range of options for their path to parenthood. Furthermore, LGBTQ+ people are more likely to work part-time than their non-LGBTQ+ peers, exempting them from the unpaid leave benefits already guaranteed to workers and families in the United States under the Family and Medical Leave Act.

Implications of Poverty for LGBTQ+ Health and Wellbeing
The impact of poverty extends into all aspects of the health and wellbeing of LGBTQ+ Americans. As a result of higher rates of poverty and economic insecurity, previous research has found that LGBTQ+ people are at increased risk for food insecurity, or an inability to afford food, as well as homlessness and housing insecurity. As a result of higher rates of unemployment, underemployment in industries with lower pay and/or positions with fewer benefits, LGBTQ+ people are more likely than their non-LGBTQ+ peers to lack health coverage or the monetary resources to visit a doctor. According to HRC Foundation's analysis of the BRFSS, 17% of LGBTQ+ adults do not have any kind of health insurance coverage, compared to 12% of non-LGBTQ+ adults. Furthermore, 23% of LGBTQ+ adults of color, 22% of transgender adults, and 32% of transgender adults of color have no form of health coverage. In addition, one in five LGBTQ+ adults have not seen a doctor when needed because they could not afford it. Black LGBTQ+ adults (23%), Latine LGBTQ+ adults (24%), and all transgender women (29%) are most likely to have avoided going to the doctor because of costs.

Unfortunately, recent research conducted by the HRC Foundation suggests that many of these economic disparities have only worsened during the Covid-19 pandemic: For example, research conducted by HRC Foundation found that the number of LGBTQ+ people who were unemployed reached record highs (22%) in the early months of 2022 as the pandemic's continued impact on LGBTQ+ workers and families deepened. LGBTQ+ adults were more likely than their straight and cisgender peers to see their hours cut at work, with job loss and wage/hour cuts felt most acutely by LGBTQ+ people of color and transgender men and women.

The COVID-19 pandemic has worsened existing factors contributing to poverty in the LGBTQ+ community. These include unemployment and underemployment, lack of comprehensive paid leave, inadequate childcare policies and lack of adequate health coverage. The Human Rights Campaign will continue tracking the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on economic well-being of the LGBTQ+ community.

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Understanding Poverty in the LGBTQ+ Community

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Poverty generally refers to a lack of basic necessities, resources and income, though its exact definition is often widely debated and measured in a variety of ways. A common way...

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This article is from a few years ago but does a great job pointing out the friction that has been created by the differing ways that countries are evolving to treat and protect (or not) their LGBTQIA+ populations. The differences between different countries' laws and the wild west of the internet can create a very complex set of expectations for folks to navigate.

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n 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.

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.

n 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."

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.

t 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."

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.

n 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.

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.

f 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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How globalisation has transformed the fight for LGBTQ+ rights

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n 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?"

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This interview with Lauren Schweppe, of the National LGBT Chamber of Commerce, goes into some depth on the challenges that the community of LGBT entrepreneurs faces in trying to build their businesses and create jobs in the wider economy. Their annual contribution of $1.7T is significant and must be protected and preserved.

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LGBTQ+ Businesses: Adding Over $1.7 Trillion to U.S. Economy

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LGBTQ+-owned businesses generate over $1.7 trillion in economic impact, help create jobs, and innovate business solutions nationwide. Despite this positive impact on the U.S. economy, 54% of LGBTQ+ Americans live in states that do not protect against credit and loan discrimination based on sexual orientation or gender identity. Lauren Schweppe, Director of Programs and Stakeholder Advocacy with the National LGBT Chamber of Commerce, talks with host Tetiana Anderson about the successes of LGBTQ+-owned businesses, the challenges they face, and efforts to elevate them.

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Economic security is mental health security. 4 in 10 LGBTQ+ young people are struggling to meet their basic needs — like food, housing, and safety. Trans and nonbinary youth face even steeper odds.  This isn’t just about money, it’s about survival. LGBTQ+ young people deserve real support, investment, and change.  Read our full April Research brief & share it with your friends.

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This short video from the Trevor Project is powerful in laying out how the compounding impacts of LGTBQ identity, lack of family and community support and the accompanying economic hardship can have huge negative health impacts on this community.

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Economic security is mental health security. 4 in 10 LGBTQ+ young people are struggling to meet their basic needs — like food, housing, and safety. Trans and nonbinary youth face even steeper odds.  This isn’t just about money, it’s about survival. LGBTQ+ young people deserve real support, investment, and change.  Read our full April Research brief & share it with your friends. The data is clear: LGBTQ+ youth deserve better. trvr.org/April2025Research  Visit our full research archive 🔗 trvr.org/research  #TheTrevorProject #LGBTQ  #DataMakesADifference 

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@trevorproject
Economic security is mental health security. 4 in 10 LGBTQ+ young people are struggling to meet their basic needs — like food, housing, and safety. Trans and nonbinary youth face even steeper odds. This isn’t just about money, it’s about survival. LGBTQ+ young people deserve real support, investment, and change. Read our full April Research brief & share it with your friends. The data is clear: LGBTQ+ youth deserve better. trvr.org/April2025Research Visit our full research archive 🔗 trvr.org/research #TheTrevorProject #LGBTQ #DataMakesADifference
♬ Pieces (Solo Piano Version) - Danilo Stankovic

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This article highlights the fact that the health disparities and challenges for the LGBTQ+ community in our society begin at a very early age and compound over time. Per the article, "These outcomes include poor mental health, suicidal thoughts and behaviors, experiences of violence, and sexually transmitted infections (STIs)."

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CDC works with educators and public health partners to address health risks among LGBTQ youth.

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This document that defines the state of Oregon's commitment to specifically considering the needs of LGBTQIA+ youth, in addition to other minority or marginalized groups, is an important piece of the work to ensure that these kids are set up for success, and understand that they are as worthy of support and as capable of success as any of their peers. Digging into the document, there's a section highlighting the work the group did to solicit and incorporate into their outcomes direct feedback from impacted youth. This is so crucial.

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This video from Harvard Graduate School of Education focuses on challenges in K-12 ed in this country around LGBT kids and/or kids with LGBT parents with a lot of specific details and examples to substantiate these concerns.

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This is a great talk with specific suggestions on pedagogy and changes that can be made to create better, safer, more inclusive environments for kids in schools. It's informed by the speaker's own experience growing up as a closeted gay kid, which adds a layer of relevance and urgency.

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Safe Is Still Not Enough for LGBTQ+ Students | Michael Sadowski | TEDxBard College

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This is an interesting video about individuals' experiences with the intersection of religiosity and queer identity, and how that impacted their development and conception of themselves. This is a very micro look at the experience, which I think is a useful piece of the larger picture. It touches on conversion therapy, one of the most intensely anti-LGBTQ, toxic practices used to try and force kids to be straight.

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LGBTQ People Discuss Their Experience With Religion | Taboo | Refinery29

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This is a great set of demographic and sociological data around religion, sexual orientation/identity and even incorporates race. To contrast the very personal video I selected around this topic about individual experiences, this is a big picture data set that allows one to understand the general landscape of how, and how often, the community interacts with religiosity.

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A think tank at UCLA Law dedicated to conducting rigorous, independent research on sexual orientation and gender identity law and public policyWilliams Institute | A think tank at UCLA Law dedicated to conducting rigorous, independent research on sexual orientation and gender identity law and public policy

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This article is very clear that kids in families that place a high degree of emphasis on traditional religious practices and whose parents talk about those fundamentally anti-LGBTQ religious beliefs are at higher risk for suicide. Youth is an incredibly dangerous time for LGBTQ folks and their family and community are the number one factor that can either allow them to grow and flourish or prevent them from doing so.

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Religiosity and Suicidality among LGBTQ Youth

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Parental religiosity can play a significant role in suicide attempts among LGBTQ+ young people. Learn about those statistics here.

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A short video about one of the earliest events in the gay liberation movement in San Francisco, a precursor to the Stonewall riot.

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ABC7 archival film sheds light on earliest known 'gay liberation' uprising in US

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A great overview of the struggle for trans rights and freedoms in the US, with some context on the larger historical presence of trans and other variations on gender and identity.

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A short history of trans people's long fight for equality | Samy Nour Younes

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This is a full length documentary, a deep dive into the long fight for marriage equality. This is one of the most well known, well publicized social movements championed by the LGBTQ community and its allies.

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THE FREEDOM TO MARRY - The Battle For Same-Sex Marriage

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HIV/AIDS was a massive health crisis for the gay community in the 1980s and in the face of indifference and fear, healthcare providers, activists, patients and allies poured their hearts into grassroots activism and mutual aid and support as the community was decimated. Without the outspoken advocacy of the community, who knows whether or when the advances in medicines and treatments that have allowed those with HIV to live a relatively normal life now would have been developed.

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LGBTQ+ Rights Movement and the AIDS Epidemic | Fight the Power: The Movements That Changed America

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Activism and advocacy have been built into the struggle for LGBTQ+ rights and liberation for the better part of a century now. The examples I've specifically called out here are by no means exhaustive. The reality for queer people and those with non-traditional gender or sexual expression is that they have been disregarded at best and intentionally, systematically deprived of rights, attacked, othered and maligned. The community has known for a very long time that it needs to speak and fight for itself, and the proof of that is in examples like the ones I've shared. None of these hard-won rights were or would ever be just handed over, and the sometimes pugnacious culture of the community has evolved largely in response to that.

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Health and safety is an incredibly relevant topic for the LGBTQIA+ community. I've focused on health here, and the imminent threats to kids' mental and physical health, echoed in the education section below, in addition to the difficulties adults have in accessing informed care, but physical safety is another huge concern for the community. "Gay bashing", verbal or physical assaults prompted by someone's presumed sexual orientation or other gender/sexual behaviors or characteristics, unfortunately still happen all the time at the hands of ignorant, hateful individuals who often receive very little consequences for those actions. Zooming out from the individual struggles folks have with care, especially in non-urban, more conservative areas, is the often religion-based legal and political initiatives to rob the community of the same rights as their fellow citizens, including the ability to access gender-affirming, and therefore lifesaving, care.

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As referenced in the health section above, LGBTQIA+ youth is such a vulnerable population that requires special, thoughtful attention to ensure they never feel less than others, and to make sure the other kids are inculcated with the expectation that they treat these peers with respect and decency. When legislators lean in to try and make their personal religious or moral beliefs the law of the land, and seek to do harm to children in so doing, it is everyone's responsibility to stand up and fight back. The efforts in Florida, such as the incredibly insidious law preventing teachers and administrators from honoring kids' chosen names without outing those kids to their parents, puts kids in danger and actively harms their mental health, which is seemingly the desired outcome, to scare people back into the closet. This community will never give up and will never stop fighting for our, and our kids', futures.

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First person perspectives from a group of Australian queer folks of differing identities who all share a background of invalidating, negative, in some cases borderline hateful treatment at the hands of healthcare professionals, highlighting some of the barriers to accessing care.

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North Western Melbourne Primary Health Network

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LGBTIQ+ People Talk About Their Experiences Accessing Health Care

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The law colloquially known as "don't say gay" in Florida was intended to make it so adults in schools were legally prohibited from even acknowledging the existence of the LGBTQ community, or honoring kids' chosen names without explicit permission from their parents, which in some cases put them in dangerous situations. The fact that the article linked here is from just last year is proof positive that the struggle for equal rights, and to be treated as full and equal citizens in our society, is still in full swing.

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ORLANDO, Fla. - Students and teachers can discuss sexual orientation and gender identity in Florida classrooms, provided it's not part of instruction, under a settlement reached Monday between Florida education officials and civil rights attorneys who had challenged a state law which critics dubbed "Don't Say Gay."

The settlement clarifies what is allowed in Florida classrooms following passage two years ago of the law prohibiting instruction on sexual orientation and gender identity in early grades. Opponents said the law had created confusion about whether teachers could identity themselves as LGBTQ+ or if they even could have rainbow stickers in classrooms.

Other states used the Florida law as a template to pass prohibitions on classroom instruction on gender identity or sexual orientation. Alabama, Arkansas, Indiana, Iowa, Kentucky and North Carolina are among the states with versions of the law.

Under the terms of the settlement, the Florida Board of Education will send instructions to every school district saying the Florida law doesn't prohibit discussing LGBTQ+ people, nor prevent anti-bullying rules on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity or disallow Gay-Straight Alliance groups.

The settlement also spells out that the law is neutral - meaning what applies to LGBTQ+ people also applies to heterosexual people - and that it doesn't apply to library books not being used for instruction in the classroom.

The law also doesn't apply to books with incidental references to LGBTQ+ characters or same-sex couples, "as they are not instruction on sexual orientation or gender identity any more than a math problem asking students to add bushels of apples is instruction on apple farming," according to the settlement.

"What this settlement does, is, it re-establishes the fundamental principal, that I hope all Americans agree with, which is every kid in this country is entitled to an education at a public school where they feel safe, their dignity is respected and where their families and parents are welcomed," Roberta Kaplan, the lead attorney for the plaintiffs, said in an interview. "This shouldn't be a controversial thing."

In a statement, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis's office described the deal as a "major win" with the law formally known as the Parental Rights in Education Act remaining intact.

"We fought hard to ensure this law couldn't be maligned in court, as it was in the public arena by the media and large corporate actors," said Ryan Newman, an attorney for the state of Florida. "We are victorious, and Florida's classrooms will remain a safe place under the Parental Rights in Education Act."

The law has been championed by the Republican governor since before its passage in 2022 by the GOP-controlled Florida Legislature. It barred instruction on sexual orientation and gender identity in kindergarten through the third grade, and it was expanded to all grades last year.

Republican lawmakers had argued that parents should broach these subjects with children and that the law protected children from being taught about inappropriate material.

But opponents of the law said it created a chilling effect in classrooms. Some teachers said they were unsure if they could mention or display a photo of their same-sex partner in the classroom. In some cases, books dealing with LGBTQ+ topics were removed from classrooms and lines mentioning sexual orientation were excised from school musicals. The Miami-Dade County School Board in 2022 decided not to adopt a resolution recognizing LGBTQ History Month, even though it had done so a year earlier.

The law also triggered the ongoing legal battles between DeSantis and Disney over control of the governing district for Walt Disney World in central Florida after DeSantis took control of the government in what the company described as retaliation for its opposition to the legislation. DeSantis touted the fight with Disney during his run for the 2024 GOP presidential nomination, which he ended earlier this year.

The civil rights attorneys sued Florida education officials on behalf of teachers, students and parents, claiming the law was unconstitutional, but the case was dismissed last year by a federal judge in Tallahassee who said they lacked standing to sue. The case was appealed to the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals.

Kaplan said they believed the appellate court would have reversed the lower court's decision, but continuing the lawsuit would have delayed any resolution for several more years.

"The last thing we wanted for the kids in Florida was more delay," Kaplan said.

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Florida teachers can discuss LGBTQ topics under 'Don't Say Gay' law, settlement says

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Students and teachers can discuss sexual orientation and gender identity in the classroom, provided it's not part of instruction, under a settlement between Florida officials and civil rights lawyers.