This is a really important point.
Related: some countries in the Global South which have strong anti-LGBT-laws, have them since colonial times. For example the Ugandese law which specifies a sentence of life in prison for homosexual acts was introduced by the British.
Speaking from experience. I realized I was gay in high school in China and nobody around me from my teachers and classmates to my parents and extended family gave me any trouble — except the grand narrative on everyone’s mind was that, because I am gay, my future lay completely with the west, mostly cuz of this “western value” idea Chen seems to subscribe to. It was a big factor why I so eagerly moved the US and became an absolutely cringe Eurocentric lib till recently.
There’s perhaps something to be said about how queer people in non-western worlds might be assumed/pushed to identify with the western capitalist world that has middle-class-washed and hijacked the lgbt liberation movements. But this line of thought is always too close to home for me to rationally think about
except the grand narrative on everyone’s mind was that, because I am gay, my future lay completely with the west, mostly cuz of this “western value” idea Chen seems to subscribe to. It was a big factor why I so eagerly moved the US and became an absolutely cringe Eurocentric lib till recently.
A self fullfilling prophecy… This is just absolutely frustrating.
On one hand i can give some slack to these former feudal countries and colonies being backwards in regards to LGBT. Theyre not going to get everything right. But on the other hand ffs why cant people just be cool about gay people.
Ngl I don’t. It’s not like the colonizers we’re promoting LGBT dominance. Anticolonial movements should be inherently pro-LGBT rights, are you against oppression or are you not?
Homophobes get the wall. Period.
Then there’s likely not a single AES country you could support because theyre bound to get something wrong.
I expect that from Qatar with it being an officially Islamic state that specifically draws legislation from religion, but I don’t expect it from an atheist, communist country like China. Anti-LGBT rhetoric is steeped in reactionary thought. The only justification against it is religion and when that doesn’t work, they come up with conspiracy theories like the whole grooming thing or trans panic. I’ve seen more breathless coverage about puberty blockers than fucking safe drinking water, but that’s reaction for you; take an edge case and make it seem like it’s everywhere.
It’s like that clip of that Walsh guy on Rogan getting fact checked. Walsh asserted without evidence that there were “millions” of kids on puberty blockers, but Rogan’s producer fact-checked him and told him it’s less than 5,000 over years. But hey, if we’re doing wall-to-wall coverage of issues that effect 5,000 people, I’ve got some potholes on my work commute that need a fucking act of Congress to be filled, I guess.
Being officially an Islamic state does not mean one has to take this stance. Just a hundred years ago, gay men fled from the UK to Morocco because they could live in peace there. It’s a classic orientalist cliché to paint the middle eastern man as effeminate and suspicious of being queer, one that carries over until the present day when western commenters joke about how soft Saddam Hussein’s handshake was. The ostentatious homophobia we can now sadly see in many societies in the Islamic world is historically a backlash against such racial stereotypes, a compensatory act that cannot be explained without the deep shame about the brutal subjugation of the rich, ancient cultures of the greater middle east at the hands of western colonizers.
To an even greater extend, this goes for transphobia in the global south. It is a result of gender norms violently imposed on indigenous cultures that very frequently, on all continents, recognized more than the western gender binary. Indonesia used to have cultures with 5 different genders, now it is one of the few places worldwide were being trans is illegal.
When we look at who is most ardently supporting and spreading queerphobia in the global south, it is evangelicals and catholics. Colonizer religions that tell the colonized they must hate the gays lest they continue to accept western supremacy.
Queer liberation can and must be a decolonization project.
we’re in this new horrible era of imperialism where the justification for imperialism has become the ghosts and consequences of previous generations of imperialism. every desperate imitation of the west to avoid colonization (genocide, anti-lgbt, poor labor rights, pollution) becomes a new casus belli from the children of the people who showed the global south ‘that’s how you get strong’.
we so desperately need to reclaim the language of liberation from the cynical evil people in power :yes-honey-left:
