In the compelling book The Pink Line, Mark Gevisser combines immersive encounters with LGBTQ people in different countries with a robust analysis of how the transnational diffusion of LGBT rights has unfolded around the world amid religious fundamentalisms, revolution, migration, xenophobic mobilization, capitalist consumerism and deeply embedded socio-economic inequalities. Gevisser imagines the ‘Pink Line’ as a ‘human rights frontier’ (p. 4) that also functions ‘as a geographical border: between those parts of the world that have come to the point of accepting the existence (and equality) of people who deviate from sexual or gender norms, and those parts of the world that continue to deny it’ (p. 118).

The Pink Line is significant for Gevisser's sustained attention to LGBTQ culture and politics in several countries on the African continent, including Egypt, Malawi, South Africa and Uganda. He opens and closes the book with the experiences of Tiwonge Chimbalanga, a transgender woman at the centre of a global LGBT rights controversy. In 2009, Malawian police arrested Chimbalanga and her partner at the time, Steven Monjeza, for violating the anti-sodomy law. Rumours that local LGBT rights organizers had offered the couple inducements to become engaged publicly saturated Malawian media, an indication of growing concern about the perceived intrusion of Western political affairs on national sovereignty. In 2010, after a judge convicted and sentenced the couple to fourteen years in prison, Malawian President Bingu wa Mutharika pardoned Chimbalanga and Monjeza under international pressure. The couple's relationship ultimately crumbled, and Chimbalanga requested asylum in South Africa. Unlike other renderings of Chimbalanga's experiences that focus exclusively on the trial, Gevisser's account provides readers with an insider's view about her ordeal, reconstructing her experiences based on conversations with her relatives and friends in Malawi and repeated visits to the home Chimbalanga shares with her husband in Cape Town. Chimbalanga's anti-queer persecution and prosecution by the state and subsequent migration to South Africa operate as a prism through which to understand the direct and indirect consequences of the ‘Pink Line’ on the lives of queer Africans, some of whom exit their countries to seek relief from queerphobia elsewhere on the African continent or in the global North and find other hardships in their new homes.

Gevisser is attentive to the many constituencies who live under an LGBTQ umbrella in different African countries. He recounts the difficulties faced by Amira and Maha, married lesbian proprietors of a café open to LGBTQ people in Cairo, Egypt, in trying to set up a home to share and negotiating the consequences of heightened visibility for gender and sexually diverse people in Egypt after the 2011 revolution. The ‘Queen Boat’ raid in 2001 haunted the memories of gay, bisexual and queer Egyptian men, constraining their public mobility. He also cites the raid as an ‘early plotting of the Pink Line, between a West-oriented “globalized” worldview in which homosexual desires were affirmed into a “gay” identity and subculture, and a patriarchal Muslim society determined to hold its ground against this onslaught and all it represented’ (p. 149). In this way, the narrative moves from the micropolitical concerns of queer people maintaining discretion to the macropolitical: how Western state leaders and LGBT activists used this incident to deploy ‘us vs. them’ rhetoric, thereby demonizing Egyptian authorities for persecuting gay men. What changed in the state's most recent anti-LGBT campaign was the specific focus on harassing and abusing people believed to be ‘transgender women (or gender-nonconforming men)’ using social media (p. 156).

Writing this book required a tremendous amount of work. Most notably, the author interviewed dozens of subjects multiple times, in person and online. Unlike many ethnographers, Gevisser has remained involved in subjects’ lives, offering support and solace where he can. As he observes towards the book's end, ‘We are forged by our contexts and, of course, we make our contexts, too’ (p. 459). One insight I appreciated from The Pink Line is Gevisser's repudiation of a simplistic narrative about how anti-queer mobilization has emerged and proceeded in different African contexts.

I wonder about the stories Gevisser is unable to tell because of their geographic distance from the Pink Line narrative. I offer this rumination not as criticism but as an invitation to readers to pick up the investigative threads Gevisser offers. What other stories might we uncover if we examine African national contexts in which LGBT rights organizing has been less prominent and publicly visible? Given Gevisser's care and concern for African LGBTQ interlocutors, I think that he will encourage readers to continue plotting the Pink Line's course: the unpredictable trajectories of LGBT rights mobilization and queer liberation on the African continent.