The complicated, and sometimes surprising, global fight for LGBT rights - Bilal Qureshi
- Washington Post, 11 September 2020
As 2019 drew to a close, Merriam-Webster declared the pronoun “they”, reconfigured as a
non-binary gender identifier, its “word of the year.” The authoritative choice to cement a
once-contentious usage affirmed the expansion of both the language and the politics of
gender and sexuality in recent years. As of this summer, the United States has had five years
of nationally legalized same-sex marriage, an openly gay presidential candidate, the
expansion of federal workplace protections for transgender employees and many pop-
cultural firsts. In the mainstreaming of LGBT identity, the 2010s could be seen as the lived
promise of the rainbow-tinted arc of justice once denied to those confined to the emotional
and physical violence of closets.
But beyond the privileged capitals of the United States, where pronouns are being
respected and applied, the political and personal borders of LGBT life remain far more
complicated, as the extraordinary new book “The Pink Line” reveals. South African journalist
Mark Gevisser’s account of the global fight over LGBT rights is a hugely ambitious and
exceptional work of long-form journalism. Eight years in the making, with stories from
Malawi, South Africa, Egypt, Russia, India, Mexico, Israel and the Palestinian territories, this
is a landmark study of unprecedented frontiers in the battle for civil rights. Gevisser, who is
gay, and came of age during the 1980s AIDS crisis, acknowledges in the introduction that
reporting this story was also a personal quest to understand the dramatic shift between his
generation and the current moment. But instead of a triumphant celebration of progress,
this is a layered and surprising work about those living along the cultural fault lines – what
Gevisser calls the world’s new “pink lines”.
He shows how the unapologetic queer demands for dignity are colliding with moral panics
and nationalist politics. Entrenched ideas about family and religion are being forced into
conversations with rapid shifts in norms and discourse. As the recent debate over JK
Rowling’s comments about trans women reveals, social media identity politics are even
igniting culture wars among progressives. To find through-lines in this swirling and shifting
story, Gevisser focuses on case-studies. He embeds with activists, lawyers, parents, LGBT
refugees and those who are living and moving along the world’s LGBT frontiers. Migrations
and technology have allowed for trends that seemed impossible in his own generation. “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,” he writes. “The
collapse of those boundaries meant the rapid global spread of ideas about sexual equality or
gender transition – and the very same time, a dramatic reaction by conservative forces, by
patriarchs and priests, who feared the inevitable loss of control that this process
threatened.”
In a chapter titled “Pink Dollars, Global Gay,” an international gay cruise sails into the
harbors of the Caribbean nation of Dominica, where authorities arrest an American gay
couple seen having sex on their balcony under stringent homosexual strictures. In later
sections, a Russian transgender mother struggles to be recognized as a rightful parent in
painful custody battles for her daughter. A lesbian couple from Cairo, awakened by the Arab
Spring, flee the country as the Tahrir Square revolution collapses and a spirit of rebellious
freedom is brutally crushed. Gevisser’s book feels especially revelatory in this globalist
approach, making thoughtful comparisons that illuminate just how privileged Western
societies have become in the application of LGBT legal rights.
What makes Gevisser an especially compelling narrator and guide to this subject is his
awareness of his privilege as a White, upper-middle-class South African from a country with
one of the most progressive post-apartheid constitutions in terms of human rights. He
writes openly about his struggles with “the white man’s savior complex” as he considers
how to help an impoverished teenage gay Ugandan refugee seeking asylum in Canada, or
how his passport allows for the freedom of movement unavailable to many queer people in
the world. (Along with his considerable travels, Gevisser has studied and lived in the United
States.) His self-disclosure liberates him from the sometimes insular and patronizing
Western gaze on LGBT communities in postcolonial societies, understanding how American
or European cultural power may have galvanized LGBT movements but can also serve to
destabilize and in many cases endanger local struggles for sexual and gender diversity.
These gray zones make the book riveting and morally complex.
I was deeply moved by these nuances in “The Pink Line” to reflect on my own coming-of-age
and coming-out story. I began the last decade still in my 20s, still in the closet, and watched
the 2010s unfurl into the most extraordinary transformation of the politics, culture and
inclusion of LGBT lives in the United States. I remember the anti-gay-marriage mandates and
frequent homophobic slurs in college in the early 2000s, now replaced with pop-cultural
icons and sprawling pride weekends. I have friends whose pronouns are “they” and who are
thriving professionally and personally. But I have also spent the past few years living outside
the United States, married to my husband, and have experienced the humbling
checkerboard of LGBT rights in different parts of the world, the unexpected moments one
has to slip back into closeted skin – and the stories of enduring inequity and struggle. Like
every queer person who crosses a border, I too have been living and thinking along pink
lines.
Gevisser gives language and form to those experiences. As he explains, “The Pink Line” is a
shifting border, sometimes porous, but too often marked by defeat, discrimination,
otherization and loss. His stories reveal how loves are disrupted, families torn apart, jobs
lost and exiles enforced. But as he reiterates, there are daily triumphs, breakthroughs and,
in some of this most moving stories, unprecedented transformations in families from the
Palestinian territories to Malawi whose hearts and doors are opening where that once
seemed impossible. While the author’s own sexuality certainly makes him a partial observer,
this is by no means a memoir or polemic. It is a 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. Dedicating his book to his husband Gevisser notes, “Writing
about it seemed, to me, to be my debt to love.”
The Pink Line
Journeys Across the World’s Queer Frontiers
By Mark Gevisser
Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
525 pp. $28.99
Bilal Qureshi is a culture writer and radio journalist whose work has appeared in The Washington Post, the New York Times and Newsweek, and on NPR.
