On a visit to Senegal in 2013, Barack Obama held a press conference with the Senegalese president Macky Sall. “Mr President,” asked an American journalist, “did you press President Sall to make sure that homosexuality is decriminalised in Senegal? And, President Sall,” the journalist continued, “as this country’s new president, sir, will you work to decriminalise homosexuality?”
The question was inevitable: the previous day, while they were flying over the Atlantic, Obama and his staff had erupted into cheers when they heard that the US supreme court had overturned the Defense of Marriage Act, paving the way for same-sex marriage across the country. The president had issued a statement from Air Force One: “The laws of our land are catching up to the fundamental truth that millions of Americans hold in our hearts: when all Americans are treated as equal, no matter who they are or whom they love, we are all more free.”
But in Senegal, the penal code outlawed homosexual acts as “improper or unnatural”, and the law was now being strictly applied after having been dormant for many years. In what had been a perfect storm in the early 21st century, the world-shrinking energies of globalisation had brought intolerant new strains of Islam to this west African Muslim country just as the Aids epidemic was surging in Africa. In the following years, as online media and satellite news spread awareness of LGBTQ+ rights and same-sex marriage, the backlash grew more severe. A few months before Obama’s visit, I had travelled to Dakar and met leaders of the LGBTQ+ movement who were living underground and in fear. A prominent male journalist was in jail, as were several women: like almost half of the sodomy laws the world over, the Senegalese one criminalised lesbian sex, too.
The question put to the two presidents at the press conference highlighted the way that a global conversation about sexual orientation and gender identity had begun to define – and describe – the world in an entirely new way. As globalisation gathered momentum, a new human-rights frontier was being staked out: while same-sex marriage and gender transition were now celebrated in some parts of the world as signs of progress, laws were being strengthened to criminalise them in others. Thus was a “pink line” drawn: between those places increasingly integrating queer people into their societies as full citizens, and those finding new ways to shut them out.
The expansion of the LGBTQ+ rights movement created a new sense of space and identity for people everywhere. It also created a new set of challenges, as people attempted to toggle between the liberation they experienced online and the constraints of their offline lives, or between their freedom in cities and their commitments back home. It created new categories of people demanding rights – and also panicked resistance. It created new horizons, as societies began to think differently about what it meant to make a family, to be male or female, to be human – and also new fears.
The pink line ran through TV studios and parliaments, through newsrooms and courtrooms, and opened up new frontiers of the culture wars. Read more via Guardian
This is an edited extract from The Pink Line: The World’s Queer Frontiers, published by Profile on 3 July and available at guardianbookshop.com