THEME
Gay Imperialism and the Clash of Ignorance
Mathieu Vervynckt
Bilateral development aid and conditionality have been going hand in hand for several years, and are often linked to neoliberal reforms or human rights. Lately, state leaders and the civil society in the Global North have been campaigning for gay rights in the Global South.
In 2011, British Prime Minister David Cameron even put the idea forward to cut bilateral development aid to Commonwealth member states that do not acknowledge gay rights, such as Nigeria and Uganda.
Critical voices all around the Global South expressed their concern with this idea, some of them describing it as racist and a new form of imperialism.
While these accusations may sound unjustified, Cameron’s statement is much more than an unfortunate choice of words. In fact, several critically acclaimed international NGOs concerned with lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and intersexual (LGBTI) rights are putting pressure on Cameron to take a strong stance on the issue of homonegativity in the Global South, while using an essentialist and at times racist rhetoric. Therefore, Cameron’s statement has to be interpreted as part of a broader “us” versus “them” dichotomy (“them” often meaning the “global Muslim community”, regardless of whether such a community even exists or not).
Professor Joseph Massad of Columbia University describes these LGBTI activists as the
“Gay International”: a collection of international LGBTI activists that took over the role of white, “western” feminist groups and aim to defend their gay rights worldwide. Typical of the “Gay International” is the fact that they carry on an essentialist and Orientalist discourse on homosexuality and impose a universalizing model of homosexuality on the Global South, causing a counterproductive effect: by forcing a “Western” model of gay rights onto the Global South with disregard to regional and local understandings and perceptions and trying to officially label certain homosexual behavior as such, local homosexuals tend to identify as heterosexual to avoid repressive measures. Instead of creating a “queer planet”, they are producing a “straight planet”.