Order The Pink Line.
One of Time’s books of the year, 2020. Longlisted for the 2021 Rathbones Folio Prize.
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 the course of seven years, Mark has followed protagonists from nine countries around the world to tell one of the most startling stories of the 21st Century: how a new conversation about sexual orientation and gender identity has come to divide―and describe―the world in an entirely new way. From Ugandan refugees forced from their homeland to Egyptian activists struggling to hold on to love in a newly repressive regime, transgender women in Russia fighting for access to their children and transitioning teens in the American Mid-West, The Pink Line folds intimate and deeply affecting stories of individuals, families and communities into a definitive account of how the world has changed, so dramatically, in just a generation. In doing so, Mark reveals a troubling new faultline: while same-sex marriage and gender transition are now celebrated in some parts of the world, laws to criminalise homosexuality and gender non-conformity have been strengthened in others. And the internet means that people across the world are downloading globalized queer identities - and adapting them too. Fresh culture wars have emerged. This ground breaking and highly original book takes you to their frontiers.
Latest News
Essay
What I learned about myself and the world
- Sunday Times
Interview
Mark Gevisser in Conversation with Colm Toibin
- Politics and Prose
Vlog
Mark Gevisser and Andrew Solomon in Conversation
- New York Public Library
Review
The complicated, and sometimes surprising, global fight for LGBT rights - Bilal Qureshi
- The Washington Post
Extract
In this edited extract from his prologue, Mark Gevisser introduces us to ‘Aunty’, and sets out the big ideas of his book
- Daily Maverick
Interview
Crossing the Pink Line
- The New York Review of Books
Essay
The Front Line of the New Gender Wars: How the struggle of transgender people to gain rights has set off an explosive global debate
- Financial Times
Review
‘The Pink Line by Mark Gevisser review – the world's queer frontiers’ by Colm Tóibín
- The Guardian
Reviews & Endorsements.
Colm Tóibín, The Guardian
“Astute and nuanced…. Engrossing….
This is a valuable book not only for the quality of Gevisser’s analysis and the scope of his research, but because he spends a good deal of time with the people on whose lives he focuses. He does not just sail into such cities as Cairo, Nairobi, Kampala, Ramallah and Istanbul, interview a few gay locals, deplore their plight and depart. He sticks around; he finds people whose lives he can follow over a couple of years. He hangs out with them, enjoys their company; he renders them in all their complexity…. In [these] sections, Gevisser becomes almost a novelist….
Gevisser is clear-eyed and wise enough to have a sharp sense of how tough the struggle has been, and how hard it will be now for those who have not succeeded in finding shelter from prejudice.”
Andrew Solomon, author of Far From the Tree: Parents, Children, and the Search for Identity
“In this masterful recounting of sexuality and identity around the globe, Mark Gevisser achieves an almost shocking empathy. His accounts are riveting, brilliantly researched, liberal, and forthright. He talks to people with and without privilege, of every race and of every nationality, limning the aspects of queer experience that are universal and those that are local. In intimate, often tender prose, he brings to life the complex movement for queer civil rights and the many people on whom it bears. Whether recounting suffering or triumph, Gevisser is a clear-sighted, fearless, and generous guide.”
Bilal Qureshi, The Washington Post
“… a hugely ambitious and exceptional work of long-form journalism…. revelatory in [its] globalist approach…. riveting and morally complex… The Pink Line is work of clear-eyed analysis and exceptional reporting, and it deserves a wide and non-LGBT readership that wishes to understand these frontiers. What elevates the book is Gevisser’s poetic and queer gaze, his searching language about why he has dedicated almost a decade of his life to understanding a generational transformation.”
Homi K. Bhabha, Harvard University
“The Pink Line is a deep diagnostic account of the ways in which queer lives and queer loves cross the fraught frontiers of race, rights, discrimination and denigration to transition from agony to agency, and isolation to community. Mark Gevisser has given us a rare piece of writing in which the quotidian confrontations and consolations of everyday life build into an encyclopedic vision of the global frontiers of the queer condition. This is politics and poetry all at once. Gevisser occupies the front-lines of sorrow and struggle with his informants who, in becoming his friends and comrades, together define an activism of defiant desire unafraid of the ambivalences and contradictions of the human condition. The Pink Line is a remarkable narrative of resilience, romance and realism.”
Samantha Allen, author of Real Queer America: LGBT Stories from Red States
“No one understands queerness from an armchair — and few have captured that truth better than Mark Gevisser. THE PINK LINE is a vital exploration of queerness around the globe, searching and intimate but also expansive in its scope. Like all the best writing about LGBTQ lives, this book clearly changed its author. It would be impossible not to be transformed by the reading of it.”
Garth Greenwell, author of What Belongs to You and Cleanness
“Mark Gevisser’s The Pink Line is a book I’ve been waiting a long time for: a global geography of queer struggle, a wide-ranging, open-hearted, beautifully told account of the radically various state of LGBTQ rights in the world. This is a book that should be very widely read—and not only read, but acted upon.”
Susan Stryker, author of Transgender History: The Roots of Today's Revolution
“The Pink Line traces a planet-spanning fissure that runs through the most intimate dimensions of life, documenting the sometimes literally war-torn rift zones where so-called “traditional values” are being mobilized by states to combat trans, queer and feminist social movements. A smart and sobering book for our times.”
Publishers Weekly
“Expansive and deeply-sourced….. this impressive work is a must-read for anyone invested in social justice and LGBTQ rights.”
Booklist, starred review
“This dense, well-researched project alternates between chapters contextualizing political and legal events from a high-level view and closeup chapters that follow, empathically and personally, the lives of LGTBQ+ people living on the wrong side of the Pink Line. . .This structure reinforces the social justice belief that the personal is political and vice versa. Gevisser’s monumental effort in this global deep-think of a text outlines how much work remains ahead. This necessary, timely, intelligent book belongs in every library, the world over."
Library Journal
“The humanity and tension with which Gevisser portrays his subjects keeps the prose engaging alongside his incredible and seemingly encyclopedic knowledge of LGBT world history…. a must-read for all interested in gender studies.”
Read the full review here
Denis Altman, Australian Review of Books
"Gevisser brings the skills of a novelist to these stories, capturing the constant negotiation that queers experience in very different contexts to find ways of adjusting to hostile environments. The cast list of The Pink Line is enormous: here are the stories of Malawian refugees in South Africa, lesbian parents in Moscow, Palestinian homosexuals living in Israel. Each could be read as a short story in itself; my favourite revolves around the women who established a café in Cairo in the brief period of hope ushered in by the Arab Spring.
Gevisser is aware of his privilege as an affluent white man able to travel the world and he recognises that in sharing their stories many of his informants reasonably expect something in return. His own involvement with many of his informants is carefully acknowledged, and in the last section, where he immerses himself in the complex world of kothis in Tamil Nadu, he comes to recognise that he, too, has been changed by his encounters with very different assumptions about how we construct our sexual and gendered selves."
Andrew McMillan, The Observer
"The Pink Line offers an approach that shifts between the micro and the macro, looking at the battle for same-sex marriage, say, or the emerging campaigns for the rights and humanity of the trans community, and then zeroing in on the story of individuals from a particular place. This way, author Mark Gevisser clearly shows the impact of large, sweeping tides of complex histories on specific people. This is where the strength of this book lies: letting people speak out for themselves against the wider political and social backdrop that Gevisser paints for the reader. Long after finishing the book, it’s the individual stories of the likes of Pasha in Moscow, or Michael, the Ugandan refugee in Nairobi, that will stick with you…. This is a meticulously researched book. The compassion for the people Gevisser encounters sings through the pages and the reader is richer for being introduced to every single one of them.”
Sarah Schulman, author of The Cosmopolitans
“Mark Gevisser’s sensitive yet firmly broad book coheres the concept of a “pink line”: the difference between the wish of queer individuals for autonomy, versus the increased manipulations of gay and trans identities to shore up power systems. His book is both enlightening and disturbing in a world where the wish to be understood can become a commodity of domination.”
Jonny Steinberg, author of One Day in Bethlehem
“Both global and intimate, both analytical and richly narrative, The Pink Line follows across continents the preeminent global divide of the early 21st century: the rights to sexual orientation and gender identity. Hugely ambitious and brilliantly executed, it is an engrossing and essential read.”
Justice Edwin Cameron, retired South African Constitutional Court judge and author of Witness to AIDS
“In his magnificent new study, Mark Gevisser melds vivid, often anguishing, personal stories with commanding analysis. The result is an engrossing and unforgettable book - one that treats its subjects with profound respect, but never forgets that at base our common struggle, queer or straight, is to find our own way to be sufficiently human.”
Pierre de Vos, University of Cape Town
“The Pink Line is an important and timely book giving voice to a carefully selected group of LGBTQ individuals struggling to assert their right to exist and to live freely …. Their stories are told here with exquisite intelligence, admirable honesty, deep respect for its subjects, and great sensitivity and compassion. What stands out is not only the cruelty and inhumanity of those who want to deny LGBTQ people their human rights, but also the humour, creativity and resilience of many people who find themselves on the wrong side of the Pink Line. This is a magnificent book that made me cry, but also made me laugh in delight.”
Lord Chris Smith, UK’s first openly-gay cabinet minister
“The Pink Line is a riveting, beautifully written, immensely moving book. It puts together a series of powerful personal stories that add up to a world riven by gender and sexual discrimination. The frontier between humiliation and civilisation is changing, albeit slowly, and we have to hope that it will move far further in the years to come. Mark's book will help that to happen.”
Sisonke Msimang, author of Always Another Country
“Gevisser has produced that rare book of non-fiction — rigorously researched, meticulously analysed and beautifully crafted. The Pink Line is not just necessary reading for those who care about justice, it ought to be mandatory.”
Rebecca Davis, South African author and journalist
“A monumental achievement. Gevisser's survey of today's global landscape of sexuality and gender is breathtaking in both its scope and insight. The Pink Line is timely, important, and never less than compelling.”
Arja Salafranca, Johannesburg Review of Books
The Pink Line is a tour de force of scholarship into the lives and issues that affect queer people today, opening a window on lives that are still so often marginalised, and a riveting account of Gevisser’s own exploration into these worlds.
Richard Canning, The Literary Review
“In The Pink line, Mark Gevisser takes up the challenge: radically to rethink the circumstances facing a set of communities around the world. He approaches this task with bravura, care and deliberation, leaving their diversity and individualism fully intact…. The frontiers and borders of sexual mores are shifting and changeable, Gevisser insists, but they hardly ever straightforwardly go away. For too many LGBTQ people, simply holding the pink line is often the best they can hope for.”