by J. Lester Feder
In the following piece, Feder reflects on the six years he has reported on LGBTQ issues for Buzzfeed News and LGBTQ rights have shifted in that time.
My first job at BuzzFeed News in 2013 was something of an experiment: We wanted to cover LGBTQ rights worldwide as seriously as we cover wars or elections.
Over the years that followed, I met LGBTQ refugees who’d fled ISIS in Syria, queer teens who escaped gang violence in El Salvador, and doctors in Japan trying to help win acceptance for transgender people. In retrospect, it seems obvious that these were stories that deserved to be told. But back in 2013, few big media companies had specialist reporters devoted to LGBTQ news in the US, let alone reporters trying to write about the issue around the world.
The US and the world were changing fast. Former president Barack Obama made promoting LGBTQ rights a key priority of US foreign policy during his first term in office, even before he came out in support of marriage equality. In June 2013, the US Supreme Court ruled that the federal government had to recognize marriage for same-sex couples. Four days later, Russian President Vladimir Putin signed legislation that became known as the “gay propaganda ban,” and sparked a global outcry. [….]
[…] If Clinton’s 2011 “gay rights are human rights” speech represented what the decade promised in the beginning, Trump represents what the decade became in the end.
When the Trump administration talks about LGBTQ rights today, it comes across as gaslighting. He makes occasional noises about protecting LGBTQ people, but he also rolled back several protections for transgender people and had his Justice Department argue it should be legal to fire people for being gay. During his 2016 campaign, Trump copied a tactic of anti-immigrant politicians in countries like France and the Netherlands, using the issue exclusively as a justification to attack the rights of another minority. The best way to protect “the gays,” Trump said at the time, was to ban Muslims from entering the US.
As for other human rights, Trump has put immigrant children in cages along the southern border, denied asylum-seekers their rights under the Geneva Conventions, and turned a blind eye to the murder of a Saudi journalist in order to preserve lucrative weapons contracts. In a recent speech at the UN, he called for the repeal of sodomy laws but also called NGOs that work with immigrants “cruel and evil.”
While the US has not overtly renounced support for LGBTQ rights in international diplomacy, some human rights activists worry that day could still be coming. The White House was silent when news broke in 2017 that police in the Russian republic of Chechnya had kidnapped and tortured more than 100 LGBTQ people. Trump’s current secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, has called homosexuality a “perversion” and said during his confirmation that he still opposes marriage equality. Pompeo recently convened a new commission tasked with reining in a human rights regime he said had been “hijacked.”