We take a look at all the countries and territories where it is still illegal to be gay or LGBTQ+ – and examine the role colonialism played.
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India was Britain’s favourite colony and it’s clear. All of North and South America was colonised and it’s clear, as are Australia and new Zealand. Not to mention all the countries that colonised them.
when did these countries become “clear”? do you know? it wasn’t a billion years ago, lemme tell you that, and it isn’t all sunshine and roses in the modern day. as it happens, there are quite a few queer people from all the places you’ve mentioned who would probably disagree with this perspective, myself included. queer rights and queer liberation is an ongoing process in all the places you’ve mentioned. we’ve not reached some post-homophobic utopia by any means.
If you think that ex colonies aren’t capable of changing, then you are a racist, plain and simple.
right. so you don’t want people to think about the ways that colonialism impacts the cultures of the colonized people (that’s racist, apparently), and just straight up deny the fact that a great deal of these laws are, as written, directly sourced from British colonial law codes, to support your particular interpretation of Islamic depravity. many of the states on the list are majority christian, especially the ones in Africa, but its whatever. don’t let nuance get in the way of your Islamophobia.
Religion is the problem and it always has been. Some religions are worse than others. The abrahamic religions are particularly bad. Of those islam is by far the most draconian. Seriously pull up the map.
yeah, right, a single image of a map “proves” your extremely common right wing opinion beyond refutation. and the whole “religion is the problem” bullshit. as if the ills of the human condition can be reduced to a single solitary source. i get it, you like Sam Harris (or maybe Richard Dawkins, considering your spelling). you’re an Atheist. but the world is more complicated than that, and injecting your own biases about people that aren’t like you does nothing for nobody. religion didn’t happen in a vacuum. it’s not some outside force that warps us into a state of conflict and subjugation. religion is just culture, power, and hegemony. it was made by humanity’s stupid monkey brains, and is shaped around the biases inherent to our cognition. we’d find a way to hate each other without it.
the world won’t automatically be better by its absence, and rhetoric pushing Islam as somehow quantitatively worse than others is just fuckin’ bigotry. that’s why people give you shit about this. you aren’t some free thinker by thinking Muslims are icky, you’re just reproducing dominant cultural narratives about the backwardness of people you don’t know, narratives built by Christian nations to justify conflict and conquest, just as modern Muslim nations have identified themselves in contrast to secularized formerly Christian nations.
in short, learn more about the world, and stop relying on the baked in biases we all inherit from our culture to decide which quarter of the world population has the bad evil religion. its not a good look.
Well, there’s a difference between settler colonialism (which replaces the indigenous population) and the sort of imperialist and classic colonialism in a lot of parts of this map, where people move in and resources are extracted, but you’re left with a traumatized population instead of a genocided one, like in North and South America as well as Australia, so we’d expect the results to probably be different.
Not that I think religion helps these matters, as the US which is slowly turning Christo-fascist and reversing LGBTQ rights, probably not coincidentally, shows. I just don’t agree with the Islamophobia part. Christianity looks pretty draconian on these issues too in some parts of Africa.
We get it you love doing an islamophobia and will jump at any opportunity to hate on it.
This isn’t about islam right now bud, the topic’s colonialism.
The topic is persecution of LGBTQ+ folk and unless we wanna exclude the majority of countries from that list, we should talk about Islamic Regimes.
Because surprise, surprise, a patriachical authoritarian religion will come down hard on dissenters :)
The topic is persecution of LGBTQ+ folk …where it’s the result of colonialism.
There’s not a soul that will deny the homophobia present in islamic states, but that’s not the point of this article. You people just can’t help yourself.
The point of the article is trying to explain the persistence of anti LGBTQIA+ legislation in the world. This is discussing an alternative (or in scientific terms, confounding variable) that challenges the absolute notions laid out in the article. I have no stake in this argument and am making no points against the British Empire or the Muslim religion, but to state that this discussion isn’t relevant to the article is frankly disingenuous.
As a bisexual man of historical UK origin, I can see and understand both impacts simultaneously. I also think we can discuss all forms of queerphobia simultaneously, and that it does a disservice to all my LGBTQIA+ comrades to dissent genuine discussion over the impacts of both colonialism and religion on the presence of queerphobia just because that’s not the specific angle of this specific article.
The tjing you quoted sure as hell isnt the title of it. The main argument of the article is “Its all colonialism’s fault” and people pointing put that its not. Like yeah, you people, because anyone who critizes the treatment of minorities in Islamic States must be Islamophobic, just like anyone who critizises Isreal must be an Antisemite lol.
I thought the topic was the hate of LGBTQ+, and right now it’s Islam that’s acting with said hate most of all. British colonialism, and homophobia for that matter, ended (to a larger extent, at least) a while ago, and you can’t actively blame dead people for it (well, you can, but they aren’t going to fix anything, and you won’t solve anything by blaming them), while Islam is remaining anti-LGBTQ+ right in this very moment. Isn’t it more productive to oppose whatever’s present right now?
Where are you living that British Colonialism and Homophobia are over?
In Russia. I think it’s the perspective that matters but I’d take British colonialism any day over the genocidal shitshow we have here, even putting Ukraine aside and focusing on LGBTQ+ for the sake of the argument. In comparison, the homophobia in the UK/US, while problematic, is relatively tame, e.g., it does not call all the LGBTQ+ people terrorists and extremists as official government rhetoric. And as for pre-2022, number 1 rule for an LGBTQ+ person living in an Islamic regionin Russia would be “don’t you even try to suggest that you are queer if you want to live”.
I kind of get the grievances towards the British colonialism and homophobia of the past (which incidentally gets a lot of whataboutism from some Russians I know: “What about Alan Turing! What about India!”), but for the present the British/American media is THE BEST thing that has happened in Russia to stop vilifying and demonizing LGBTQ+, and I just can’t wrap my head around the reverse situation.
Gotcha. Yeah. I would definitely consider Russian imperialism very evil and engrained with the systems of power governing the country. I hope for your sake, and for all of your brethren, that someday everyone under the historic influence of an imperial power can someday be free
British colonialism, and homophobia for that matter, ended (to a larger extent, at least) a while ago
lol. lmao, even. British homophobia has not ended. Britain is a modern hotbed for anti-queer bullshit. the consequences and effects of British colonial rule have not magically been wiped clean. we aren’t “blaming dead people”, we’re talking about the impact that colonial and imperial oppression had on the cultures of oppressed peoples. the structure and politics of the British Empire are inextricably linked to the world we live in today, and attributing modern queerphobia to the oppressive and cruel politics of the one of the largest imperial powers the world has ever seen, who directly imposed anti-queer laws onto the people they oppressed, is not about “fixing” things. its about recognizing how the past has shaped our present.
its funny, i think, how willing Islamophobes are to bring up the present anti-queer stances of religious nation-states as reflecting upon the religion of Islam itself, with all its 2 billion adherents spread over every continent and nation in the world, while failing to recognize the role of the Christian church in both the historical and modern anti-queerness of the British empire and the modern european state. somehow, you see clearly the monstrous power of religious authority in one hand, and dismiss it in the other. you propose anti-queerness as an essential quality of Islam, and seperate it from the essential qualities of european nation-states.
somehow, Muslim homophobia is special in its qualities, rather than a modern trait that arose in the same period of the 19th century under which the Christian hegemony was exported throughout the world by the British empire and its contemporaries. somehow, it is always the case that the religion that is foreign to you is the true danger, what should be the focus of our attention.
it is important to “oppose” whatever’s present now. but Islamophobes diagnosis for whats “present now” so often fails to acknowledge the immense influence and power that european religious institutions have had and continue to have over the anti-queer policy of their former colonial projects (like Uganda, for example), and their prescription for what “opposition” looks like happens to look a lot like religious and racial discrimination. funny how that works. singling out Islam as the true danger to queer people does nothing to help queer people. in fact, the mechanism by which Islamophobes identify a whole fourth of the world’s population as uniquely dangerous, violent, and backwards is exactly the same mechanism by which queer people are identified as perverse, deviant, and predatory. prejudice.
the acronym LGBTQ+ arose out of solidarity. people with different experiences, extremely different in some cases, coming together because they recognized that their struggle was alike. that they were together subjected to the violence of prejudice and discrimination, and that they were stronger together than alone. that is what needs opposing in the modern day. the violence of states. the violence of hegemony, dictating to us what we ought to be and what we cannot be, wherever it is found. not a diverse religious tradition that contains the same number of queer people as any other population of humans.
Thank you for a well-written response. I think I am just starting from the different position, having experienced more positive effects from English influence than negative ones, in my country at least.
My experience on social media mostly skewed my view towards “anyone can say anything, and it looks like there’s a lot of hateful things people want to say” for Britain or any other democratic country. As a result, I see the anti-queer sentiment, but know from what I see daily in real life it could be much worse.
In my experience, the Christian (well, orthodox for that matter) church is right now very reluctant to accept LGBTQ+ people, with state-wide position being non-tolerant, and individual priests being accepting, if you are lucky. This is wrong. This must be better. The same, I think, can be said about Catholic Church, yet I didn’t have direct experience with that. Still, it’s better (again, for my region) than Muslim-majority regions being in a murderous position about the same group of people. It’s a lousy choice, but still, in a choice between “you are a disgusting sinner” and “you don’t deserve to exist, and your own family will murder you” the latter looks much worse.
Maybe I am not opposing Islam per se, maybe I just think that Islam is inextricably linked with “non-secular form of governance”, and that alone is enough for me to condemn such states more than any form of British influence.
British colonialism spread queerphobia. Islamic-governed nations currently push queerphobia. Both are bad, both are regressive, and both have lasting impacts on us today. We can talk about both being bad at once. We can walk and chew gum. We can discuss all of the impacts on queerphobia simultaneously, if we allow ourselves to understand that all issues of humanity are multi-faceted and that blaming a single concept or source for an issue is usually farcical.
See, I am of position that in developing countries British colonialism (or whatever you prefer to call it it) right now seems to push pro-queer rhetoric, at least that was my experience. And I can’t accept opposing statements “Britain pushes homophobia” and “Britain pushes LGBTQ+ people acceptance”; at least if there is something of the former, the latter has larger effect it seems.
Why was this removed by mod?
Highly upvoted and removed by mod? Must have been a doozy!
Would Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, and arguably Afghanistan be the fault of Marxist-Leninist-Stalinist colonialism?
Stalin made homosexuality illegal in the Soviet Union and continued the Russian colonization of central Asia. Brezhnev invaded Afghanistan. The laws weren’t repealed until Russia seceded from the Soviet Union in 1991
Idk about the others, but for Afghanistan, it’s probably because it was taken over by religious fundamentalists trained, supported, and armed by Pakistan, Iran, and the US in order to fight off Soviet Union influence, along with some other countries (China, UK, probably some others). They basically invaded because they were called in by the local government afraid of these terrorist groups, who also called problems in the Soviet Union (similar to the US invading after 9/11). (Interestingly enough, the Pakistan influence can also be said to be a result of colonialism since it’s existence is basically a result of English colonialism in India and the Middle-East.) After this, Afghanistan was basically a civil war zone between religious fundamentalist warlords fighting each other, the most extreme being the Taliban, but the other US allied ones weren’t great, either, and were all still fundamentalist Muslim.
The official anti-LGBT laws were vague when the Republic (the Soviet friendly government) was in charge, all of the terrible attitudes were probably still there but under religious rules and unofficial, and being invaded by the USSR for years never helps those kinds of things, either. It was more intense when the US friendly war lords were in charge and made Sharia more official, making LGBTQ laws worse as a sort of collateral. It then got even worse when the Taliban officially took over, now it’s even more explicit and the punishment even worse (death). I haven’t read the article yet so not sure if it talks about any of these things, or if I got anything super off, but I’ve just been listening and reading stuff about this lately and felt I could contribute lol.
Palestine: Same-sex sexual activity is technically illegal in Gaza. The provision was introduced by Britain during its mandate over Palestine, although there’s little evidence that the law is enforced today.
No, it is still not safe if you are queer. They tortured and executed a Hamas commander via firing squad for being suspected of being gay.
https://www.lgbtqnation.com/2016/03/hamas-commander-accused-of-gay-sex-is-executed/
Not enough people are aware of colonialism’s role in spreading queerphobia across the globe. When I try to explain it, they look at me like I’m making it up.
Wasn’t Ethiopia never colonized?
Ethiopian here, Ethiopia was never colonized but unfortunately we’ve managed to be incredibly anti-lgbtq all on our own.
Personally, I blame our long history of Christianity and Islam which both carry anti-lgbtq beliefs.
Yes. From the article:
Ethiopia: […] It is one of the few African countries that enacted its own anti-gay laws – most others inherited those laws from Britain.
It was occupied by Italy in WW2, which is outside the “Scramble for Africa” period but is an occupation by a European power
Is it not illegal in Russia?
No, because in Russia there are no gays according to Putin.
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uk, australia, and the us definitely need to be on the list
Queer Australian checking in here.
…what? Have you ever lived here or know what our laws are?
theres also a growing terf and neo nazi culture war brewing, similar to the uk, which the liberals are trying to exploit… im just saying its something to watch like canada
There will always be loonies who hate us for being who we are. We shafted the last one we had from our federal government at the last election. We have no laws that cause discrimination towards my comrades and to try to pretend like a few crazies are somehow making being queer illegal is just disingenuous. Please speak to your own context, because you don’t speak for mine.
I prefer the pride flag from NASA…
