Omar G. Encarnación is professor of political studies at Bard College. His books include Democracy without Justice in Spain: The Politics of Forgetting (2014) and Out in the Periphery: Latin America’s Gay Rights Revolution (2016).
Last August, while researching a book on contemporary gay rights politics, I traveled to Spain, the country with the longest history of policies intended to make amends for past wrongs against the gay community, otherwise known as “gay reparation.” I wanted to know what made Spain—a country notorious for having burned “sodomites” at the stake during the Inquisition—a pioneer on this new front of LGBT activism. I was also eager to learn how the gay reparation movement had spread so quickly to other countries. In the last decade alone, close to a dozen nations, including the United States, have embraced some form of gay reparation—from financial compensation for those who faced criminal prosecution because of their sexual orientation, to a formal apology to the gay community for past policies of anti-gay discrimination, to the creation of a truth commission to chronicle the history of homosexual repression. And I was curious to gain insight into the puzzling question of why some countries in the West were choosing this particular moment in history to come to terms with a centuries-old grim legacy of state policies intended to humiliate, dehumanize, and even exterminate homosexuals.
Why some countries are coming around to making amends to the homosexual community is far from clear. After all, gays and lesbians are among the most consistently despised minorities in the history of the West. Certainly, we are living in the so-called age of apology: in recent decades, governments have sought to make amends for all kinds of past failings and oppressions. The Irish government has attempted to atone for sending unmarried women and illegitimate children to inhumane state-run institutions. The Argentine Catholic Church has apologized for its complicity in the Dirty War of the military dictatorship of the 1970s and early 1980s. And the Canadian government has expressed regret for policies that separated indigenous parents from their children, whom it placed in institutions that erased their languages and cultures.
It is also the case that gay reparation reflects the maturation of the gay rights movement. It is no accident that gay reparation policies have arrived in the wake of numerous gay rights victories, most notably the legalization of same-sex marriage in some two dozen nations. These victories have had a two-fold effect in facilitating the rise of gay reparation: significantly advancing the normalization of homosexuality while at the same time allowing gay activists to shift their attention from demanding new rights to redressing past wrongs.
Still less clear is why nations differ in their approach to gay reparation. Read more via NY Books