Mark Gevisser, Mark Gevisser is a South African author and journalist. His books include Lost and Found in Johannesburg: A Memoir (2014) and The Pink Line: The World’s Queer Frontiers (2020)

Last Sunday, the Polish president, Andrzej Duda, was re-elected by a narrow margin with the help of an assault on what he styled “LGBT ideology”: he campaigned on a “family charter” to protect Poles from this new threat, worse than communism.

Two of Poland’s near neighbours have recently activated anti-LGBT politics in similar ways. In May, Viktor Orbán’s Hungarian government passed a law that makes it impossible for trans people to change their gender on legal documents. And last month, Russians voted by a landslide to approve Vladimir Putin’s Russian constitution: among its many amendments is one that marriage can only be between a man and a woman.

Already, Russia’s lawmakers are explicitly using the new constitution to threaten freedoms associated with the liberal west: on Tuesday, Yelena Mizulina, the woman responsible for Russia’s anti-“gay propaganda” law, proposed legislation barring trans people from adopting children, or from establishing families – including getting married – after transitioning.

For the first time since 1918, “God” is written into Russia’s constitution, which now also mandates the teaching of “patriotism”, and urges citizens to resist (western) falsification of their history. “We are not just going to vote on legal amendments,” Putin said. “We are voting for the country in which we want to live.”

For which read: not Europe. Leaders like Putin, Orbán and Duda use LGBTQ+ people to draw what can be called a pink line against a western secular liberalism that allegedly threatens the “traditional values” of the homeland. This plays on deep-rooted anxieties about globalisation and the digital revolution, and the fear of a loss of control that comes with the opening of borders to new ideas and new people – or, in the case of LGBTQ+ people, those who have been there all along, but now demand to be seen. Read more via Guardian