Global Gay Quotes

“It is a relic of colonialism. In many commonwealth countries, former colonies, and English protectorates, state homophobia was left over from the British Empire: Section 377 was a part of the penal code that England imposed on its colonies in 1860.
It was a sort of umbrella crime covering everything, especially homosexuality and bestiality; it took into account neither the consent nor the age of the partners, which made it impossible to legitimately distinguish homosexuality, rape, and pedophilia. The British crudely implemented this provision first in India, where the Indian Penal Code would become the colonial matrix, and then, based on Indian law, throughout the British Empire in Asia, Australia, and Africa as the colonizers advanced. Today one can still find that famous Section 377 almost intact in ten Asian countries and fifteen Anglophone African countries.”
― Frédéric Martel‏, Global Gay: How Gay Culture Is Changing the World

“The problem with provocation is that it is often counterproductive.”
― Frédéric Martel‏, Global Gay: How Gay Culture Is Changing the World

“You can create a real geopolitics of LGBT rights based as much on languages as on cultural boundaries.”
― Frédéric Martel‏, Global Gay: How Gay Culture Is Changing the World

“And a major phenomenon that is still underreported is taking place before our very eyes: the globalization of LGBT rights.”
― Frédéric Martel‏, Global Gay: How Gay Culture Is Changing the World

“Anything that liberates is not without risk.”
― Michael Bronski, Global Gay: How Gay Culture Is Changing the World

“The West has no monopoly on gay rights, nor does the East or the South own the privilege of homophobia.”
― Frédéric Martel‏, Global Gay: How Gay Culture Is Changing the World

“History proceeds and is being written.”
― Frédéric Martel‏, Global Gay: How Gay Culture Is Changing the World

“Barack Obama was one of the first leading international figures to consider the issue of gay rights to be fully a question of human rights.”
― Frédéric Martel‏, Global Gay: How Gay Culture Is Changing the World

“As for the HRC’s Sandra Hartness, here’s how she summarizes current developments: “We represent a modern activism, a postgay activism, if you like, that seeks to build bipartisan, local, decentralized coalitions and be very pragmatic. Our goal is reality. In that sense, we are very different from the old gay movement. If a Republican defends our position, we support him or her. And if a Democrat is hostile to same-sex marriage, we get him defeated!”
― Frédéric Martel‏, Global Gay: How Gay Culture Is Changing the World

“In Taiwan as in Shanghai, as well as in Rio, Moscow, Jakarta, and Beirut, the same global gay icons appear in gay-friendly cafés and bookstores and on the walls of LGBT organizations. On five continents, I see Harvey Milk, Lady Gaga, Elton John, Ricky Martin, and, of course, the two Brokeback Mountain cowboys everywhere. There’s even a Brokeback Mountain Café in the gay Chapinero neighborhood of Bogotá.”
― Frédéric Martel‏, Global Gay: How Gay Culture Is Changing the World

“But that’s Ang Lee’s genius: to have been able to provoke both the Chinese and the Americans with gay cowboys.”
― Frédéric Martel‏, Global Gay: How Gay Culture Is Changing the World

“The idea of coming out is not a natural one in Asia as it goes against the whole tradition and the morals of Confucianism. What gays frequently do in Asia is they ‘come home’: they bring their partners home, into their family, once they are a stable couple, and things are therefore known without being spoken. That is our way here of becoming gay. The Asian way.”
― Frédéric Martel‏, Global Gay: How Gay Culture Is Changing the World

“Not all Englishmen are homosexual.”
― Frédéric Martel‏, Global Gay: How Gay Culture Is Changing the World

“Let my pussy free.” On a sign, I also read: “Gay Pride sent to Siberia in chains” (an allusion to one of Pussy Riot’s punk prayers).”
― Frédéric Martel‏, Global Gay: How Gay Culture Is Changing the World

“Bureaucracy progresses at its own pace. That is to say, slowly.”
― Frédéric Martel‏, Global Gay: How Gay Culture Is Changing the World

“There’s an SM club in Moscow where the knout, old Russia’s instrument of torture, a leather strap for lashing, with metal balls at the end of it, has turned into an SM object. Russian gays know how to stay Russian!”
― Frédéric Martel‏, Global Gay: How Gay Culture Is Changing the World

“And ten years after adopting the most gay-friendly constitution in the world, South Africa, under judicial pressure, authorized same-sex marriage in 2006. It became the first—and for now the only—African country to authorize same-sex marriage (and the fifth in the world). Mandela’s future successor, Jacob Zuma, would be a virulent opponent of this law.”
― Frédéric Martel‏, Global Gay: How Gay Culture Is Changing the World

“In South Africa, race and class are often far greater determining factors than sexual orientation.”
― Frédéric Martel‏, Global Gay: How Gay Culture Is Changing the World

“Ultimately, if Americans and Europeans sometimes appear ahead of their constitutions and laws, South Africa offers the peculiarity of being a country where the Constitution is ahead of the way its people think.”
― Frédéric Martel‏, Global Gay: How Gay Culture Is Changing the World

“There is no such thing as an “African man” or any uniquely African values—it is diversity that has created Africa’s greatest wealth and its identity.”
― Frédéric Martel‏, Global Gay: How Gay Culture Is Changing the World

“And then there’s AIDS. The virus continues to wreak havoc, especially in southern Africa, where the highest HIV prevalence rate worldwide can be found (in Swaziland, Botswana, Lesotho, Zimbabwe, Zambia, and South Africa the prevalence rate always exceeds 10 percent of the adult population and in the first three reaches 25 percent). But the epidemic is also high in Malawi, Tanzania, Kenya, and Uganda, which is an excuse sometimes, but not always, for some governments to implement antigay policies.”
― Frédéric Martel‏, Global Gay: How Gay Culture Is Changing the World

“The two most dramatic new things homosexuals face in Africa are, first, Christian neoevangelicalism, which is often imported or inspired by the United States, and, second, political Islam, modeled on Iran or Saudi Arabia.”
― Frédéric Martel‏, Global Gay: How Gay Culture Is Changing the World

“The link with the black question is obvious. I compare homophobia to apartheid. And that is why we must do everything to encourage the universal decriminalization of homosexuality.”
― Frédéric Martel‏, Global Gay: How Gay Culture Is Changing the World

“When you reconstruct the history of the mobilization for the decriminalizing of homosexuality worldwide, you realize the important role organizations play.”
― Frédéric Martel‏, Global Gay: How Gay Culture Is Changing the World

“Gay people are increasingly globalized and often very Americanized, but they remain deeply rooted in their individual countries and cultures.”
― Frédéric Martel‏, Global Gay: How Gay Culture Is Changing the World

“Paradoxically, America appears to many gays not as an imperialist nation, but since Stonewall as a symbol of their liberation.”
― Frédéric Martel‏, Global Gay: How Gay Culture Is Changing the World

“Gay life in Amman, as in Havana, Damascus, Tehran, Riyadh, Cairo, Mumbai, and Beijing, is a marginal, dangerous, and marvelous underground counterculture: a fear and a promise. The phrase “one thousand and one nights” has never seemed to me both so unsettling—and so gay-friendly.”
― Frédéric Martel‏, Global Gay: How Gay Culture Is Changing the World

“Homogeneity is arguably a necessary step in the process of socialization for gays who have so long been isolated and alone.”
― Frédéric Martel‏, Global Gay: How Gay Culture Is Changing the World

“... the slow, complicated evolution of how we as humans decide to define and act on an agreed definition of human rights that would be functional and useful for all national cultures. So far this has been an impossibility.”
― Michael Bronski, Global Gay: How Gay Culture Is Changing the World

“The progress of LGBT rights is often directly tied to—sometimes through indirect routes—multiple fights for human dignity and freedom.”
― Michael Bronski, Global Gay: How Gay Culture Is Changing the World