Longreads: Deconstructing Disney: Queer Coding and Masculinity in Pocahontas

 Disney often codes their villains as queer: This is widely known and accepted. First noticed by scholars during the Disney Renaissance of the late ‘80s through the ‘90s, critical observations about characters like Scar (The Lion King) have since disseminated into pithy, viral tweets and TikToks. A quick Google search of “gay Disney villains” will turn up dozens of articles, all repeating the same litany of facts: That The Little Mermaid’s Ursula is based on the iconic drag queen Divine, that Hollywood often uses British accents and effeminate mannerisms in men like Robin Hood’s King John to signal moral decrepitude.[...]

Pocahontas has one of the top-five highest-grossing Disney soundtracks of all time, but that’s generally where any lingering nostalgia dies. To say that the film itself is problematic is an understatement. While the screenshot of Chief Powhatan, Pocahontas’ father, saying “these white men are dangerous” has found a rich afterlife on social media, the film’s historical inaccuracy and deliberate whitewashing of colonization and its aftermath have cycled it out of many a millennial’s “comfort film” rotation, something that has generally gone unaddressed by the corporation. (The fact that Mel Gibson voiced John Smith hasn’t helped, either.) [...]

Ironically, even the most chaotic queer-coded villains are rarely bent on creating their own power structures — they only ever desire the kingdom and, seemingly, the lives of their straight-coded, heroic counterparts. Jafar wants to be sultan, but has no conception of what to do with that power once obtained, to the point he cannot strategize enough to realize that the genie is beholden to others. Scar believes himself to be the rightful ruler of the Pride Lands, only to drive the kingdom into a barren wasteland: The queer failure of reproduction, on which society so purportedly rests, made manifest. “Fuck the social order and the child in whose name we’re collectively terrorized,” queer theorist Lee Edelman writes in No Future — the anthem of Disney villains everywhere. [...]

Colonizing isn’t worthy of punishment in this film, nor is racism, otherwise every white character — John Smith included — would be in chains. The reality is that Ratcliffe is punished for failing to assimilate within the crew successfully, for not embodying the right kind of masculinity, for not reading the room, and attacking the much-respected cowboy-esque leader who the men ultimately mutiny for. This is his crime: not trying to assassinate Chief Powhatan, but wounding one of his own. Meanwhile, Thomas, a colonizer who explicitly murders an Indigenous warrior, Kocoum, is given … a redemption arc, complete with Pocahontas’ forgiveness.

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The Guardian – Politics Weekly Extra: The hypocrisy of the Christian right

 Amidst allegations central to the Matt Gaetz scandal, Jonathan Freedland speaks to Peter Wehner of the Ethics and Public Policy Center. They discuss the decades-old pattern of prominent Christian political leaders and commentators, who forgive allies for the same transgressions for which they harshly judge their opponents.

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The Guardian: How globalisation has transformed the fight for LGBTQ+ rights

 It was no coincidence that the notion of LGBTQ+ rights was spreading worldwide at the same time that old boundaries were collapsing in the era of globalisation. The collapse of these boundaries led to the rapid spread of ideas about sexual equality or gender transition – and also a dramatic reaction by conservative forces, by patriarchs and priests who feared the loss of control that this process threatened. These were the dynamics along the pink line, particularly in places where people came to be counted as gay or lesbian or MSM (men who have sex with men) or transgender for the first time. In most societies, they had always been there, albeit in ways that were sometimes circumscribed or submerged, but now they claimed new status as they took on new political identities. And they became enmeshed in a bigger geopolitical dynamic. [...]

Particularly in Europe, these new-look nationalist movements sometimes bolstered their agendas by claiming they were protecting not just jobs and citizens but values, too. By the time Le Pen was running for office in 2017, these values included the rights of LGBTQ+ people. The man who wrote this script had been the crusading Dutch anti-immigration politician Pim Fortuyn, who was assassinated in 2002. Fortuyn, who was gay, attracted mass support when he claimed that Muslim intolerance of homosexuality posed an existential threat to European civilisation. His far-right successor, Geert Wilders, drove the agenda hard. When a troubled Muslim man killed 49 people at the Pulse gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida, in June 2016, Trump – then on the campaign trail – slammed “radical Islamic terrorism”. Wilders, fighting his own election campaign back home, capitalised on this: “The freedom that gay people should have – to kiss each other, to marry, to have children – is exactly what Islam is fighting against.” [...]

In western Europe, the issue of LGBTQ+ rights was being staked as a pink line against the influx of new migrants. At the same time, in eastern Europe, it was being staked as a pink line against decadent western liberalism. In both instances, queer people themselves came to be instrumentalised politically as never before. They acquired political meaning far beyond their own claims to equality and dignity. They became embodiments of progress and worldliness to some, but signs of moral and social decay to others.

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LGBTQ Nation: Bhutan votes to decriminalize homosexuality

 The tiny Himalayan kingdom of Bhutan has voted to decriminalize homosexuality during a joint session of parliament. Sixty-three of the 69 members voted in favor of making gay sex legal; the other six were absent. [...]

Unlike many neighboring countries, Bhutan was never colonized by European powers. The sparsely populated Buddhist kingdom criminalized “unnatural sex” and “sodomy” in 2004. [...]

“My primary reason is that this section is there since 2004 but it has become so redundant and has never been enforced. It is also an eyesore for international human rights bodies,” he said.

LGBTQ people in Bhutan do not report many problems with authorities or persecution, but there are no laws protecting them from discrimination.

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4Liberty: LGBTQ Community Became Viktor Orban’s Latest Scapegoat

In the second half of 2019, racism was the next topic to be tested, and the Hungarian Roma community became the focus point of Orbán’s hateful rhetoric. Orbán started with a harsh anti-Roma narrative, then denied financial compensation for Roma children who were forced to learn in segregated schools for years. Orbán portrayed the victims of segregated education as people who are “looking for free money”.[...]

In May 2020 Fidesz made a radical move: they completely banned legal gender recognition for Hungarian transgender and intersex people. This is an unprecedented phenomenon in Europe: legislators usually work towards a more equal society, not the other way around. This law ended a 20 year practise with which transgender people could (although, though a very long and malfunctioning, but still existing process) get the personal documents that provide their basic safety within the society. [...]

These cases show how Fidesz shifted from the “behind closed doors” narrative to the “pathologizing” narrative. And when Fidesz started talking about changing what LGBTQ people are doing in the privacy of their own home by sending them to conversion therapies or depriving them of their right to adopt, fundamental radical groups started to disrupt LGBTQ cultural indoor events.

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Social Europe: Poland’s abortion protests—democratic standards at stake

 The PiS has been in power for five years now. From the outset, these have been turbulent times, marked by diverse protests—by doctors, teachers, farmers, miners and parents of disabled children. The pandemic has only aggravated the public mood, adding to the frustration of the most affected groups, such as micro- and small entrepreneurs, as well as coronavirus-deniers, a movement also germinating in Poland.

Nevertheless, it’s the ideological war which seems to have agitated the society and petrified the political polarisation. The presidential election during the summer was won by Andrzej Duda, candidate of the United Right, by the skin of his teeth. The PiS retains a majority in the Sejm, the lower chamber, thanks only to its two junior coalition partners, while the Senat was lost to the opposition after the parliamentary elections in October 2019. Local governments and cities remain independent and very often in opposition to the central government. [...]

It was in this context that over the summer the LGBT community in Poland became the target of a defamation campaign, which sadly mobilised many and mainstreamed homophobic narratives. It seems the PiS wanted to deliver a pointed response, to prove its ideological ‘purity’—and completely overdid it, putting its own government at existential risk. In so doing, it again tested the boundaries of what remains a young Polish democracy.

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Aeon: Sex is real

There’s no need to reject how biologists define the sexes to defend the view that trans women are women. When we look across the diversity of life, sex takes stranger forms than anyone has dreamt of for humans. The biological definition of sex takes all this in its stride. It does so despite the fact that there are no more than two biological sexes in any species you’re likely to have heard of. To many people, that might seem to have ‘conservative’ implications, or to fly in the face of the diversity we see in actual human beings. I will make clear why it does not. [...]

Many people assume that if there are only two sexes, that means everyone must fall into one of them. But the biological definition of sex doesn’t imply that at all. As well as simultaneous hermaphrodites, which are both male and female, sequential hermaphrodites are first one sex and then the other. There are also individual organisms that are neither male nor female. The biological definition of sex is not based on an essential quality that every organism is born with, but on two distinct strategies that organisms use to propagate their genes. They are not born with the ability to use these strategies – they acquire that ability as they grow up, a process which produces endless variation between individuals. The biology of sex tries to classify and explain these many systems for combining DNA to make new organisms. That can be done without assigning every individual to a sex, and we will see that trying to do so quickly leads to asking questions that have no biological meaning.

While the biological definition of sex is needed to understand the diversity of life, that doesn’t mean it’s the best definition for ensuring fair competition in sport or adequate access to healthcare. We can’t expect sporting codes, medical systems and family law to adopt a definition simply because biologists find it useful. Conversely, most institutional definitions of sex break down immediately in biology, because other species contradict human assumptions about sex. The United States’ National Institutes of Health (NIH) uses a chromosomal definition of sex – XY for males and XX for females. Many reptiles, such as the terrifying saltwater crocodiles of northern Australia, don’t have any sex chromosomes, but a male saltie has no trouble telling if the crocodile that has entered his territory is a male. Even among mammals, at least five species are known that don’t have male sex chromosomes, but they develop into males just fine. Gender theorists have extensively criticised the chromosomal definition of human sexes. But however well or badly that definition works for humans, it’s an abject failure when you look at sex across the diversity of life. [...]

Nothing in the biological definition of sex requires that every organism be a member of one sex or the other. That might seem surprising, but it follows naturally from defining each sex by the ability to do one thing: to make eggs or to make sperm. Some organisms can do both, while some can’t do either. Consider the sex-switching species described above: what sex are they when they’re halfway through switching? What sex are they if something goes wrong, perhaps due to hormone-mimicking chemicals from decaying plastic waste? Once we see the development of sex as a process – and one that can be disrupted – it is inevitable that there will be many individual organisms that aren’t clearly of either sex. But that doesn’t mean that there are many biological sexes, or that biological sex is a continuum. There remain just two, distinct ways in which organisms contribute genetic material to their offspring.

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Social Europe: Intersectionality: time for a rethink

 The term intersectionality was first used by the legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw in 1989. But the intersectional approach is rooted in the social movements of the US in the 70s and 80s, as a critique of feminist and anti-racist struggles. The general experience of black women was that in feminist activism the interests of white women were at the forefront, whereas in anti-racist struggles men predominated.[...]

First, the current practice of the intersectional idea presumes that those who experience the most oppressions will understand best the nature of the oppressive system and pursue the least particularistic politics. But one cannot simply add (or multiply) such positions in the manner of an oppression Olympics—who has more points in the oppression race, in how many dimensions one is standing on the losing side of the Excel sheet. [...]

If the main issue becomes recognition of individual uniqueness or an identity mix, then not only is it an ad absurdum extension of the feminist slogan ‘the personal is political’—to only the personal is political. This also renders particular identities inscrutable—which means that groups so constituted can neither show solidarity with each other nor formulate a common goal. They can then fit in with the individualistic neoliberal spirit of the era, which delegitimises all systemic critique, for instance concerning its categories of class and gender. [...]

The focus should not be on ahistorical intersections of differences and repressed groups of identities, but on examining how distinctions and hierarchies are established between them. Identities should not be interpreted as some kind of inner, intimate, unquestionable substance, but as a personal experience of a relative position in a system of social relations.

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UnHerd: Stop searching for the ‘gay gene’

 The history of the search for the gay gene is not a comfortable one. One of the most controversial studies was conducted by gay neuroscientist Simon LeVay in 1991, who claimed that gay men’s brains were “more like women’s”. Then there was the study suggestion that boys with older brothers are 33% more likely to be gay because of occupying a womb where a male foetus has already been.

Appallingly, the then Chief Rabbi of the United Kingdom Immanuel Jakobovits reacted to news of LeVay’s research by saying: “If we could by some form of genetic engineering eliminate these trends, we should — so long as it is done for a therapeutic purpose.” [...]

The response to Hamer’s study was largely that of horror. Alarmists said the discovery would be used to try to “cure” homosexuality, ignoring the fact that Freudians, fascists and supporters of eugenics alike have been trying to eradicate homosexuality for decades on the assumption that it was something that could be “fixed”. Yet gay rights activists in the US and Britain were, on the whole, delighted at the discovery of the “gay gene”, seeing it as ammunition in the war against homophobia. To them, the gene proved that their sexuality was instinctive and inevitable, not perverse. [...]

A further analyss in 2003 led researchers to say that they had found persuasive evidence to support the theory that a person’s sexuality is developed before birth. They had measured the “eye-blink reaction” of straight and gay test subjects who were subjected to sudden loud noises, finding significant differences in the response between male and female, heterosexual and homosexual participants which, they said, could be linked to the area of the brain which determined sexuality.

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Notes from Poland: Poland’s human rights commissioner on the state of democracy, LGBT protests and “dormant civic energy”

 Agnieszka Wądołowska: “Poland in 2020 is a completely different country than it was in 2015,” you said in the Senate in a statement summarising your term as commissioner for human rights. “Poland is no longer a constitutional democracy”, but a state of “electoral authoritarianism” and a “hybrid democracy”. What do you think we have lost in those five years? [...]

For example, with the [ruling] Law and Justice party’s anti-refugee advert, it was impossible to hold anybody who produced it accountable. The prosecutor’s office discontinued the proceedings. And the matter of the antisemitic post of a member of the National Council of the Judiciary will probably not be ruled upon, because the statute of limitations will apply in a few weeks’ time. Even though the case has been known about for years. There are many such examples. [...]

In many cases, the hardest thing is the fact that the changes stop me from helping people as I would like to. Every commissioner used to be able to take a case to the Constitutional Tribunal. Now I must make a rational judgement on whether that might not make the situation worse – because, for example, the Constitutional Tribunal legitimising a given law can make the work of the courts difficult, as they can always directly apply the constitution. [...]

There is one more thing to mention. What is happening is, in my view, a repercussion of the presidential campaign and the fact that the subject of LGBT became an electoral fuel used to heat up the atmosphere and take votes away from the [far-right] Confederation party. A moment ago, we had the Istanbul Convention on the table, now it’s LGBT rights – this all seems to me to be a political game. And I find this regrettable because one should not play with human rights. This is of course connected to a very real, concrete threat to the people who become victims of this situation.

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Notes from Poland: Polish bishops call for “clinics to help LGBT people regain natural sexual orientation”

They also call for the creation of “clinics to help people who want to regain their…natural sexual orientation”. Such “conversion therapy” has been rejected by the established medical community as unethical and harmful, and has been completely or partially banned in a number of countries. [...]

The bishops admit that this idea “stands in clear contradiction to positions regarded as scientific, as well as to so-called ‘political correctness'”. [...]

The premise that non-heterosexual orientations are a mental illness has in recent decades been rejected by leading medical bodies, including the World Health Organisation in 1990. The practice of “conversion therapy” to “cure” or “correct” such orientations has also been deemed unethical and harmful. [...]

Further countries are currently considering legislation to outlaw the practice. In 2017, the Church of England declared conversion therapy to be a “discredited” and “theologically unsound” form of “abuse”, and called on the British government to ban it.

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openDemocracy: Poland is moving further towards autocracy

For many years after the collapse of communism Poland's political landscape was characterised by consensus. But consensual politics frayed in the mid-2000s and gave way to contention between two main political parties, PiS and Civic Platform. The rivalry of these two parties has fostered polarisation in Poland. Since 2015, when PiS won an outright majority in parliamentary elections and when Duda first became President, PiS has aggressively pursued its policy agenda (including troubling reforms to the judiciary, anti-abortion measures, and politically targeting LGBTQ individuals), pushing Poland's liberal democracy toward conservative autocracy. In turn, the government's actions have stoked the fires of polarisation. [...]

What about when polarisation gets ratcheted up? The PiS government has been marked by politicisation of gender equality and regression for LGBTQ Poles. Quite often, actions in these areas have been justified on political bases with few appeals to biblical canon or Catholic dogma. Nevertheless, Poland's Catholic establishment (chiefly, the Polish Episcopal Conference) and religious conservative voters endorse and take succour from PiS's reactionary measures. Resultantly, Poland is among the most polarised countries in the EU along religious and gender and sexual orientation dimensions. [...]

Events following President Duda's re-election, such as the arrest of an LGBT activist and resultant protests as well as the persistence of so-called 'LGBT free zones' in several Polish towns, have signaled the continuation of polarisation trends. As long as PiS retains its control of governing authority – which it will do at the national level for at least three more years, until the November 2023 parliamentary elections – polarisation is a useful strategy that allows the party to pursue its conservative autocratic agenda. The liberal opponents of PiS are left to pursue resistance through collective action and to build resilience in local communities.

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The Guardian: In Poland we've become spectators at the dismantling of democracy

 International attention may be focused on Belarus, but in Poland, ministers have just announced an autumn agenda which involves a simultaneous attack on the judiciary and the independent media. It coincides with intensifying pressure on the LGBT+ community in the form of verbal assaults from PiS figures. Demonstrations in cities across the country against the pre-trial jailing of an LGBT+ activist have led not to dialogue, but to the heavy-handed arrests of dozens more. [...]

So why was Duda apologising? Some observers assumed that he wanted to signal a genuine change, a wish to heal the polarisation in Polish society. In our view, Duda’s words carried less the spirit of Gandhi than Oscar Wilde, whose advice was to always forgive one’s enemies, because “nothing annoys them so much”. [...]

The phenomenon applies as much to Donald Trump, Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdoğan or Thierry Baudet, the leader of the populist Forum for Democracy in the Netherlands. Essentially, it means that the media becomes a theatre for an ongoing performance aimed at capturing and keeping the audience’s attention. [...]

And the populists’ strategic use of entertainment to win poses a fundamental challenge to defenders of liberal democracy. Calling populists “fascists” and “authoritarians” stopped making an impression on voters long ago. However justified, it became repetitive, uninteresting and therefore, unfortunately, ineffective. If liberal democrats don’t learn about the power of spectacle in the era of dopamine politics, they will fade into irrelevance. And if populism is about creating a spectacle that depicts liberal democracy falling apart, liberalism must provide an alternative spectacle.

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Reuters: Hungary's Orban calls for central Europe to unite around Christian roots

 “Western Europe had given up on ... a Christian Europe, and instead experiments with a godless cosmos, rainbow families, migration and open societies,” Orban said in a speech.

He said the monument, a 100-metre long and 4-metre wide ramp carved into a street near Budapest’s parliament building, was a call to central European nations to strengthen their alliance and rally around what he called the “Polish flagship”. [...]

Orban himself had rarely criticised rainbow, or same-sex families, but Parliament’s speaker - a long-time ally of Orban - had equated gay adoption with paedophilia.

Last weekend, two rainbow flags were torn down from municipals buildings in Budapest, prompting a warning from the U.S. Embassy that neo-Nazi groups should not be tolerated.

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Notes from Poland: “No apologies, no shame”: the rise of Poland’s guerrilla LGBT activists

Various legal efforts have been made by LGBT groups to stop the vans, but have largely been unsuccessful, due to the fact that Poland’s laws against hateful and offensive speech do not cover sexual orientation or gender identity.

Although a court in Gdańsk ordered Fundacja Pro to temporarily stop using some of the slogans it claims are based on “scientific” evidence, another judge in Wrocław rejected a case against the organisation, saying that its activities are “informative”. [...]

Speaking with Notes from Poland shortly before her latest detention, Margot explained what she calls the groups’ “no apologies” approach. They have sought to “throw off the discourse of docility and shame” that she associates with the respectability politics of more moderate members of the LGBT movement. But this radicalism does not exist in a vacuum; it has “adapted to the growth of homophobia”. [...]

For some, the insult to religious feeling was a step too far; others questioned the wisdom of strategies that make LGBT people standout, preferring campaigns that present them as “normal people”. One interviewee said they should be looking for issues that they have in common with religion, such as the idea of love.

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Time: #PolishStonewall: LGBTQ Activists Are Rallying Together After Police Violence at Protests in Warsaw

 By Saturday, thousands had gathered in Warsaw to denounce Margo’s arrest and police aggression against LGBTQ people. And although Poland is experiencing a rise in new cases of COVID-19, at least 15 solidarity protests, both big and small, took place on Monday in towns and cities across the Poland, as well as in Budapest and London, New York, Paris and Berlin, with more planned.

While not all activists may agree with Margo’s methods, her prosecution and imprisonment has been widely condemned. “These radical actions are a part of history that has happened in many other countries before,” says Julia Maciocha, chairwoman at the Warsaw-based LGBTQ organization Volunteers of Equality Foundation. In a nod to the Stonewall Uprising of 1969 in New York City, several users on Twitter started posting #PolishStonewall in tweets about the weekend’s events and subsequent solidarity protests. [...]

The church in Poland also wields enormous influence over education, law and politics, and about 86% of the population identify as Roman Catholic. Marek Jedraszewski, an archbishop, warned last year that a “rainbow plague” seeks to “control” the population. Since 2019, authorities in one-third of cities across Poland have adopted resolutions declaring themselves “LGBTQ ideology free zones.” In late July, the European Union announced it would not provide funding to six Polish towns that made this declaration.[...]

What activists want now is stronger international solidarity, particularly from European governments. Remy Bonny, a Brussels-based LGBTQ rights activist and researcher who focuses on Central and Eastern Europe, says “we have seen this kind of violence in Russia and Belarus, for example, but not in an E.U. country.” The European Commission should condemn police violence in Poland in the same way it recently denounced the repression of protests in Belarus, he says. Makuchowska says she and other activists are calling on the international community to “help us to immediately release Margo.”

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Balkan Insight: Mass Arrest of LGBT People Marks Turning Point for Poland

 “I have been an activist for equality and human rights for over 30 years, but never in my life have I been as afraid as I am now,” Rawinska told BIRN following her release from prison. “What happened on Friday is a kind of greenlight to shout at us and attack us.” [...]

Rawinska’s determination to fight for her rights is echoed by other activists, who say that Friday’s events have revealed a “new rainbow solidarity” and anti-LGBT actions by the government and its allies are likely to receive a stronger pushback from now on. “I think it’s in the Polish genes that when something bad happens, we flex our muscles and fight it off. We saw it with the Solidarity movement or martial law – the more the government pressures us, the more we will fight back,” Bart Staszewski, a prominent LGBT activist who was part of the protests on Friday, told BIRN. [...]

The police said the mass arrests were necessary to carry out the court order to take Margot into detention. But testimonies from the detained and their lawyers, as well as independent observers, point to a disproportionate response by the police, who arrested peaceful protesters and even random passers-by while acting violently – an approach some argue can be explained by the general anti-LGBT climate building up in Poland over the last years. [...]

A report published on Saturday by the Polish Ombudsman’s office, based on talks with 33 of the detained while they were imprisoned, says that, “among the arrested, there are people who did not take active part in the gatherings on Krakowskie Przedmiescie or Wilcza street, but were watching the incident. Some of them had rainbow emblems – bags, pins, flags. Among the detained there were also random people who in a certain moment were, for example, coming out of a shop with bags.”

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The Guardian: Party and protest: the radical history of gay liberation, Stonewall and Pride

The Stonewall riots were not the birth of the gay rights movement. They weren’t even the first time LGBTQ+ people had fought back against police harassment. In 1966, in the Tenderloin neighbourhood of San Francisco, transgender customers of Compton’s Cafeteria had attacked police, following years of harassment and discrimination by both cops and management. Seven years before that, when police had raided Coopers, a donut shop in the city nestled between two gay bars, LGBTQ+ patrons had attacked officers after the arrest of a number of drag queens, sex workers and gay men. [...]

Those two decades, however, would be among the hardest for LGBTQ+ people in US history, as the greater visibility of the homosexual identity led to a conservative backlash, and a moral panic in the media that was capitalised upon by politicians. In 1952, the American Psychiatric Association included homosexuality in its new Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, classifying it as a “sociopathic personality disturbance”. Meanwhile, Senator Joe McCarthy was using public revulsion towards homosexuals in his campaign against leftists. Communists and homosexuals were inextricably linked as anti-American subversives, he argued. Talking to reporters, McCarthy stated: “If you want to be against McCarthy, boys, you’ve got to be either a Communist or a cocksucker.” [...]

As Pride parades have been organised around the world, LGBTQ+ people have often found themselves as proxies in wider political battles. In recent years accusations have been made that Pride has become part of a “homonationalist” project, where the victories won by LGBTQ+ activists since the 50s, in the face of widespread opposition and hostility, are now portrayed as inevitable products of a national culture. Such a process is used to portray other countries as “less civilised”, despite the role that European empires had in imposing anti-sodomy laws in their colonies and suppressing other cultural approaches to gender. This is doubly ironic, considering the role that US evangelical movements still have in funding political campaigns in many parts of Africa for the continuation or even strengthening of colonial-era anti-sodomy laws. Last year, Richard Grenell, Donald Trump’s ambassador to Germany, attacked Iran, saying that “barbaric public executions are all too common in a country where consensual homosexual relationships are criminalised and punishable by flogging and death”. This is true, of course – but then the same could be said for the US’s close regional ally, Saudi Arabia.

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Daily Dot: Public sex is at the center of a queer culture war

Public sex has lost some of its popularity over the years thanks to the internet and modern cybersex, but its taboo nature—and, ironically, increased privacy away from home—still renders it popular. Still, there’s an ongoing culture war within the queer community between those who advocate for public sex and those who believe it’s abhorrent. As radical queers go toe-to-toe with burgeoning purity culture, issues of class, race, gentrification, sexual consent, and the long-term legacy of the AIDS crisis merge together to create one of the most complex issues the LGBTQ community deals with. [...]

During the 20th century, public sex was a cornerstone of LGBTQ sexual expression. By having sex in public, queer men, women, and nonbinary folks reclaimed public spaces from heteronormative society and turned them into hubs for queer eroticism and desire. Queer cruising for public sex is born out of necessity, author Alex Espinoza argues in his book Cruising. [...]

Instead, moral panic over gay public sex has grown. While cisgender heterosexual couples are much less likely to be seen as boundary violators for hooking up in a bathroom stall or the backseat of a car, queer sex is inherently transgressive, so queer public sex quickly becomes a target for homophobia from within and without the queer community. This past June, one queer Twitter user argued public sex at Pride is akin to being “flashed and traumatized by someone who decides its [sic] okay to pull their dick out.” The year prior, another queer user criticized “dumbasses who [have] public sex at pride” because the event is “family-friendly.” The user, who has acronyms for Black Lives Matter and the abolition slogan “All Cops Are Bad” in their profile, promised to “call the police” on these attendees and vowed to “bring a bat to pride and shut shit down.”

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Notes from Poland: Polish courts annul “LGBT ideology-free zones”, finding they violate constitution

Polish courts have annulled two of the “zones free from LGBT ideology” that have been declared by many local authorities around Poland. Judges found that they violate the constitution, which bans discrimination and requires equal treatment. [...]

The court noted that the anti-LGBT resolution violated Article 32 of Poland’s constitution, which stipulates that “all persons shall be equal before the law” and “have the right to equal treatment by public authorities”, and that “no one shall be discriminated against in political, social or economic life for any reason whatsoever”. [...]

Last month, the European Commission wrote to the heads of five Polish provinces requesting an explanation regarding such resolutions. In the letter, the Commission reminded local authorities that the activities of beneficiaries of European funds must be in accordance with European values and may not violate any European laws.

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