Global Homophobia: States, Movements, and the Politics of Oppression

Chapter 1 Political Homophobia in Comparative Perspective

1 Political Homophobia in Comparative Perspective michael j. bosia and meredith l. weiss The way I see it, homophobia—not homosexuality—is the toxic import. Thanks to the absurd ideas peddled by American fundamentalists, we are constantly forced to respond to the myth—debunked long ago by scientists—that homosexuality leads to pedophilia. For years, the Christian right in America has exported its doctrine to Africa, and, along with it, homophobia. . . . Not all Ugandans are homophobic. Some say there are more pressing issues to worry about than gay people and believe we should have the same rights as anyone else. But they are not in power and cannot control the majority who want to hurt us. —Frank Mugisha, “Gay and Vilified in Uganda” The wave of anti-authoritarian revolts that began to roll across the Middle East and North Africa in 2011 coincided with another contemporary trend: a widespread, caustic focus on sexuality, in the form of overtly political homophobia. Egypt figures in both. Among the most striking incidents in contemporary homophobia was Cairo’s 2001 “Queen Boat” case, which saw fifty-two men prosecuted in a special national-security court on charges related to same-sex intimacy. A decade later, as Hosni Mubarak toppled from power, the Muslim Brotherhood and the military filled the vacuum; after decades of authoritarianism, few other social forces could hope to do so. Given the extent to which Mubarak had suppressed Egyptian civil society, one would hardly expect to see active mobilization 2 . michael j. bosia and meredith l. weiss either for or against sexuality rights at that point. Yet homophobia hit the ground running. When the Brotherhood joined forces with old enemies in the junta to support a set of constitutional amendments in Egypt’s first post-Mubarak vote in 2011, mysterious forces issued warnings that a defeat would bring a triumphant secularism that would unveil women, ban the call to prayer, and—echoing apocryphal global discourse—permit men to marry men (Slackman 2011). Of all the fears contending forces could summon to reinforce their political stature in Egypt, why leap to sexuality? Or if sexuality be the target, why skip past far more globally prevalent calls from Western leaders and international institutions for the decriminalization of same-sex sexuality, directly to imagined demands for same-sex marriage, as if sexual minorities everywhere claim the same rights that define LGBT organizing in only a handful of countries? Egyptian sexual minorities have no durable networks; the small LGBT organization Bedayaa was founded only in 2010, primarily for social and educational purposes.1 A joint statement they issued with other Arab sexual minority groups in May 2011, still in the heady first months after Mubarak’s ouster, called merely for “peaceful coexistence” and denied any intent “to persuade you to accept our gender identity.”2 Marriage equality has hardly been a priority. The invocation of such incongruous marriage fears demonstrates the particular power of homophobia, not as some deep-rooted, perhaps religiously inflected sentiment, nor as everywhere a response to overt provocation, but as a conscious political strategy often unrelated to substantial local demands for political rights. This volume seeks to understand and explain political homophobia as a state strategy, social movement, and transnational phenomenon , powerful enough to structure the experiences of sexual minorities and expressions of sexuality. We consider political homophobia3 as purposeful, especially as practiced by state actors; as embedded in the scapegoating of an “other” that drives processes of state building and retrenchment; as the product of transnational influence peddling and alliances; and as integrated into questions of collective identity and the complicated legacies of colonialism . Specifically, we target the open deployment of homophobia in political rhetoric and policy, as a remarkably similar and increasingly modular phenomenon across a wide range of countries. While the more brutal examples of hatred and violence grab headlines, we see this dynamic just as clearly in less overtly repressive contexts—for instance, the Philippines, where an emerging LGBT-rights movement has begun to contest the clout of the Catholic church in the (constitutionally secular) state (see Weiss, this volume). This broad political homophobia · 3 application of more and less oppressive homophobic strategies suggests that homophobia may be better globalized than homosexuality (Murray 2009). In our analysis, “unexpected” forms of political homophobia must be examined as typical tools for building an authoritative notion of national collective identity, for impeding oppositional or alternative collective identities that...