All 64 of the countries where it’s illegal to be LGBTQ+ – and yes, it’s all colonialism’s fault

squirrel@lemmy.blahaj.zone to LGBTQ+@lemmy.blahaj.zone – 199 points – All the places where it's illegal to be LGBTQ+ – and why it's colonialism's fault
thepinknews.com

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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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?

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.

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.

It was occupied by Italy in WW2, which is outside the "Scramble for Africa" period but is an occupation by a European power

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 The laws weren't repealed until Russia seceded from the Soviet Union in 1991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.

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.