A couple of days ago I was watching “Milk” for the third time and amid my tears (yes, I’m a movie crier), I started to think. The film, which takes place in San Francisco in the 1970s, illustrates California’s Proposition 6, which would have made firing gay teachers – and any public school employees who supported gay rights – mandatory. In 1978, the proposition lost by more than a million votes. The ruling was a landmark in gay rights, and one that many activists at the time didn’t see coming.
The controversy and media coverage of the legislation were also reminiscent of a more recent California law you may have heard of: Proposition 8. To supporters of gay rights, the results this time around were far less encouraging, but just as astounding. So, as I sat watching gay California’s 1978 triumph unfold before me on the movie screen, I couldn’t help but wonder: What in the name of Sean Penn is wrong with our country? Who cares if two adult men or women want to get married? What’s it to you? Etcetera, etcetera.
Later that evening, however, as my roommates and I praised the brilliancy of Gus Van Sant and moped about the idiocy of the general U.S. population, another thought occurred to me (and I apologize to all my fellow gay rights supporters if what I’m about to say seems offensive or counterproductive): It could be a helluva lot worse.
Don’t agree? Ask the gay Jamaican who saw one of his nation’s best-known gay activists murdered in 2004 with an ice pick. Or the gay Nigerian whose relationship will likely soon be criminalized, and who will be jailed if she organizes a gay rights group or participates in a same-sex marriage ceremony.
Or, ask the gay Iraqi who would rather be dragged into the street to be tortured and executed than killed in his home, so his family doesn’t learn his secret. Stories such as that of Kamal, an 18-year-old Iraqi man, are a daily reality for many Iraqis like him. Kamal (whose story was told by CNN, and whose name was changed to protect his identity) was just 16 when gunmen kidnapped him off the streets of Baghdad and stuffed him in the trunk of a car. Kamal had his shirt off and the men saw that his chest was shaved, which they took to mean he was gay. According to Kamal, the gunmen took him to a house and forced him to take off his clothes and allow them to rape him, or he would be killed. He was held for 15 days, each of which he was raped, and only released after his family paid a $1,500 ransom. He never told his family about his rapings because of the shame it would bring.
In a 2007 “GQ” article, Ali Hili, a 34-year-old Iraqi man who lives in London, details his experience seeing one of his oldest friends, a transsexual, beaten and doused with gasoline by uniformed officers while observers cheered as she burned to death.
Though it’s unknown how many gays and lesbians have been killed by militias in Iraq, a 2006 U.N. report on human rights reinforces the accusations of violence throughout the country’s lawless streets. “Armed Islamic groups and militias have been known to be particularly hostile toward homosexuals, frequently and openly engaging in violent campaigns against them,” according to the report. “Militias are reportedly threatening families of men believed to be homosexual, stating that they will begin killing family members unless the men are handed over or killed by the family.”
In October 2005, a fatwa (a religious statement on Islamic law, issued by an Islamic scholar, that may or may not be legally binding) was posted on the Internet, calling people “involved” in homosexuality to be “killed in the worst, most severe way possible.” The issuing scholar? Grand
Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, arguably the most powerful religious figure in Iraq, and a man many have promoted for a Nobel Peace Prize. The decree went unnoticed by most of the world, as did its slight softening a year later.
As does the fact that the killings have not stopped.
In Iran, the situation is just as grim – homosexuality is a crime punishable by death. However, the government has adopted a “remedy” that doesn’t involve murder or torture. Instead, it “provides” sex-change operations to homosexuals so they can conform to the country’s theocratic ideas of sexuality, where apparently a sex change is preferable to accepting differences in sexual orientation. Some Iranians accept the sex change as a way to avoid persecution, while others simply acquiesce because of intense outside pressure. But the vast majority of those who undergo the procedure face no fewer problems as a result: In a country where family is the focal point, many post-op “former homosexuals” are disowned by their relations out of shame. Let alone the psychological issues one would face from being ostensibly forced to change one’s sex.
The list could go on. And on.
The last thing I aim to do is discount efforts to legalize gay marriage in America or call domestic gay rights battles misguided. What I’m concerned with is the fact that Americans, in my experience, are frighteningly unaware of the daily atrocities committed against gays in these myriad other countries. Granted, Americans’ strong point has never been recognizing the plight of the less fortunate. But haven’t you heard? The messiah was just elected our 44th president, and we have the world’s attention. Maybe we could give them ours.
Considering the power the U.S. government has on the international stage, the American people – and especially the American LGBT community – must recognize that the U.S. government has all-too-frequently been counterproductive and shown failed leadership on international gay rights issues. In January 2006, for example, following the lead of the Iranian delegation, the United States voted to block recognition of two LGBT groups at the United Nations.
We need to take a page out of the book of individuals such as Mark Bromley, who founded the Council for Global Equality (formerly the LGBT Foreign Policy Project), an organization committed to influencing U.S. foreign policy to promote LGBT equality. In 2007, Bromley addressed the U.S. State Department’s annual cataloging of global human-rights abuses around the world, including those against the LGBT community, and its failure to trigger significant policy responses or action. “It doesn’t trigger funding that would go to support LGBT activists or organizations. It hasn’t triggered significant diplomatic interventions … in countries that have significant concerns. It hasn’t triggered any meaningful effort to raise issues of criminalization or harassment (of LGBT people),” Bromley said in his address.
Thankfully, domestic and international human rights do not have an either/or relationship. The United States, on both the government and citizen level, simply needs to sit up and take notice – to realize that while we devote millions of dollars, celebrity-ridden YouTube campaigns and the majority of our attention to debating the right to marry, people in other countries are struggling for the right to live.
Personally, I’d sooner fight to save someone in another country from torture and death than to secure my right to marry, however sacred and unbreakable I’m told the institution is. Marriage may contribute to liberty and happiness, but first you need life.
[email protected]
Global struggle for gay rights
Daily Emerald
January 29, 2009
0
More to Discover