By Paul Varnell

As best I can from this distance, I try to follow the progress of gay rights movements abroad. And I feel great admiration and sympathy for the brave men and women who are trying to promote gay legal and social equality in many countries of Eastern Europe, Asia, Africa and South America.

But most of them face a much harder time than we did in North America and Western Europe. They face very different social situations from the ones we did so I am not sure if the activist model they have adopted in part from us can work as well for them as it did for us.

An effective gay rights movement in America followed—it did not precede—the sexual revolution of the 1960s, which liberated heterosexual sexuality. In addition, the late 1960s and 1970s were a time of growing economic prosperity and the growing autonomy for individuals that that prosperity facilitated. There was—if not exactly a growing secularization—at least a gradual decline in the Cold War-inspired Christian religiosity that gripped the country in the 1950s. And finally, prestigious reports—the Wolfenden Report (1957) in England and the American Law Institute’s Model Penal Code (draft, 1954; final version, 1962)—both recommended decriminalizing homosexuality.

Most countries outside North America and Western Europe have few or none of these things to aid their efforts. After decades of official homophobia by atheist Communism in Russia and Eastern Europe, once Communist oppression was removed, people returned to religion, with the attendant hostility to homosexuality of both Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy. How gays can find any institutional support, lessening of hostility or any wedge point at which they can begin to build power and influence is far from clear.

Contrast this with Spain, where the Franco regime’s military authoritarianism tied itself to a conservative Catholicism. A growing economic and religious liberalization began in the last years of Franco’s reign and now Spain is one of the most gay-friendly nations, even allowing gay marriage. You have to wonder if there is some general law that people react against whatever supported that oppression.

In China, there has been a gradual reduction of economic controls and, resulting from that, some social controls so long as there is no organized opposition to the government. The official psychiatric organization, influenced by international psychiatric groups, declared gays no longer sick. This has allowed gays to meet unobtrusively in public places with only sporadic harassment prompted by officials at the local level.

It will be interesting to see if, with China’s growing capitalism and economic liberalization, a kind of gay liberation can occur without organization and leadership, or if, alternatively, a cautious, non-political gay movement can manage to work within the government strictures. We can view with concern the rise of Christianity and Falun Gong spiritual exercises in China since both are hostile to gays, but on the other hand perhaps their growth will pressure the government to further reduce social controls—which would also benefit gays.

Africa presents a dismal spectacle except for South Africa. There the country has recoiled from the conservative segregationist regime, with its Dutch Reformed religious support, and embraced gay equality in its constitution—another example of the rebound thesis. This has been aided by prominent pro-gay spokespersons within the Episcopal Church and the government itself.

But in most of the rest of Africa gays are officially harassed and threatened, their sexuality and organizations criminalized. Religious leaders of both an aggressively ignorant Christianity and an equally ignorant Islam compete for legitimacy and followers by loudly promoting their hostility to homosexuality.

South America presents a mixed picture. Chile remains sexually conservative, while Brazil’s Sao Paulo has the largest gay Pride parade in the world. With its pervasive Catholicism, South America should be socially conservative, but its Catholicism seems to have more to do with ritual and festivity and a worship of saints and the “Blessed Virgin” than with sexual morality. Growing evangelical Protestantism should be a concern except that so far its social agenda has focused on literacy and economic self-help. Neither seems to pose a threat to gays.

One major obstacle to gay progress seems to come from South America’s obsessively macho concern with gender roles and the social construction of gays as feminine. There is harassment and even murder of gays by youth gangs in several countries. But the targets seem often to be transvestites, especially transvestite prostitutes. It seems doubtful that most of these are genuinely transgendered males. Instead many seem to be gay men dressing to signal their sexual availability to other, ostensibly heterosexual males.

I offer these perceptions and analyses only tentatively and welcome better-informed thoughts by others.

Some of Paul Varnell’s previous columns are posted at the Independent Gay Forum (www.indegayforum.org). His e-mail address is pvarnell@aol.com.