Human rights violations against lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender persons has gained news coverage, especially in Africa, raising public outrage and condemnation. On Friday 26 July, the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, Navi Pillay, was joined by Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu, Justice Edwin Cameron of the South African Constitutional Court and renowned South African artist Yvonne Chaka Chaka at the launch of the ‘Free and Equal’ campaign that seeks to avert this situation in South Africa and Africa at large.
UN Human Rights Office launches unprecedented global campaign for LGBT equality (video)
In LGBT Weekly
South Africa: Duduzile Zozo murdered in anti-gay hate crime
By Talia Ralph for the Global Post
Africa’s Gays Say They’re ‘Under Siege’
By Darren Taylor for Voice of America
Unholy silence over gay murders
By Mbuyiselo Botha for Pretoria News
Frequent arrests and blackmail, the violent crackdown on activists in Russia, the increasing violence on the streets of Paris and New York, and President Mugabe’s call for beheadings point to a climate where homophobia is inflamed by political actors eager to score points or affirm authority. “State homophobia” is the willful engagement of political leadership that often preempts and defines organizing among sexual minorities – like Mugabe’s claims about marriage – in ways sometimes only weakly related to the struggles of sexual minorities in those contexts.
However, this violence complicates the UN ad about LGBT human rights and LGBT in/visibility. Just as President Obama served as a convenient opponent against whom President Macky Sall of Senegal could affirm his opposition to homosexuality, this ad risks inflaming the politics of sexual identity in some contexts even as it might sooth such violence or inspire LGBT activists in others. The globalization of a similar set of rhetorics and practices about homosexuality – centered on notions of gay and lesbian visibility and rights – has become an easy recourse for authoritarian nationalists, who invoke the dangers of “western homosexuality” to national survival. And though it might look like sexual minorities nearly everywhere organize in the same way as LGBT activists in some places, the fact is that despite some similarities, there remain significant differences in terms of identity, opportunity, and political claims.
Instead, we need a more inclusive strategy to fight state homophobia targeting the oppression that people experience, while we de-center the kind of politics that assumes the experience of sexual orientation in only a few contexts is the experience everywhere and across time. One approach might emphasize empowerment through spaces and forms of support that allow individuals and communities to define their own struggles and development. Being free of oppression, violence, police intimidation, and inflammatory rhetoric provides that kind of space, so the target should be those specific laws and practices that enable authorities to scapegoat sexual minorities and that inflame hatred and fear.
This is an excellent commentary that distills the complicated intersections of sexuality, violence, rights talk, and government power. Thanks, Mike!