1. Introduction
‘Gay men and lesbian women suffer considerable oppression all over the world, and it is indispensable to strengthen the effectiveness of our actions by international co-operation between organizations of lesbian women and gay men’.Footnote 1 This sentence opened the 1978 press release announcing the foundation of the International Gay Association (IGA). On Saturday 26 August of the same year,Footnote 2 dozens of gay activists, all men,Footnote 3 gathered in a small hotel close to the train station in the English city of Coventry, during the annual conference of the British organization Campaign for Homosexual Equality (CHE), to establish the new association.Footnote 4 The closing words of the press release outline a framing that would increasingly gain centrality in the organization’s work over the following years, and which remains at its forefront to this day. It recalled that ‘the freedom from discrimination on the grounds of a person’s sexual orientation is a fundamental human right’.Footnote 5 At the height of the 1970s – with the rediscovery of human rightsFootnote 6 and the renewed mobilization of this framework, seen especially in Europe and North America,Footnote 7 – the gay liberation movement, too, started to make use of this ‘new’ discursive tool to advance its demands. If that decade witnessed a revolution that gave human rights their contemporary meaning, it also marked the beginning of the history of queer engagement with international human rights law (IHRL). In this sense, an account of how queer groups progressively and differently utilized this same discourse offers one among the multiple possible histories of human rights themselves.Footnote 8 These initial mobilizations of the notion of human rights and the queer movement’s attempt to gain space within the mainstream human rights movement are the central object of this article, which brings new historical elements to the debate.
The newly founded association, which several years later would be rebranded as ILGA World,Footnote 9 was not only the first of its kind, suggesting the then gay liberation movement’s renewed interest in the ‘international’ and in human rights, but to this day it remains the only international queer organization based in Geneva, playing a key role in the United Nations advocacy that takes place in the city. Structured as a membership-based organization, which saw a steady growth in its numbers over the years, spreading through all regions of the globe, the early political action of IGA provided a vessel for the amalgamation of multiple forms of activist initiatives aimed at the international level, undertaken by a heterogeneous group of actors who all came together through the association’s gatherings.Footnote 10 An analysis of the association’s initial engagements with the idea of ‘human rights’, which by no means were presumed to include queer subjects at the time (as remains the case in the discourse of many state actors), serves to demonstrate the emergence of queer individuals as subjects of IHRL, an emergence that was enabled, above all, by the discursive operation of reframing queer rights (at the beginning, ‘gay rights’, and later, ‘LGBTI+’, ‘SOGI’, or ‘SOGIESC’ rights) as a matter of human rights. The often-invoked slogan ‘gay rights are human rights’ was among the first broad and multifaceted campaigns to expand the boundaries of human rights universality and include new subjects under its protection. This article recounts the story of how these initial steps occurred, drawing from archival research and oral history interviews.Footnote 11
In other words, the article focuses on one of the foundational efforts to frame queer rights as part of the broader human rights discourse, namely, IGA’s decade-long campaign directed at Amnesty International. It asks: How did the initial attempts to frame gay rights as human rights develop? How did activists mobilize human rights language in such a context? And finally, how did embracing human rights shape the scope of action of international queer activism? The argument I advance is threefold. First, it locates the history of queer international activism as one of the many alternative histories of human rights that surfaced in the 1970s. Second, it indicates how resorting to the discursive economy of human rights was strategic to position gay struggles within the realm of intelligibility of mainstream legal and political debates, which, up to that point in history, would hardly have seen discrimination based on sexual orientation as unjustified. Finally, I demonstrate how the activism’s mobilization of the language of human rights set the platform that would enable the production of a queer subject of IHRL through activists’ continued engagement in the decades to come. Put differently, I show how queer demands were not ‘naturally’ linked to human rights, not least for lack of explicit inclusion in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR). It would take a lengthy advocacy process to expand the scope of IHRL, following the height of the new human rights revolution in the 1970s, to finally include queer claims within its framework, and to bring it to the notice of relevant actors in the human rights public sphere. As I argue in the last section, the use of human rights discourse was both purposeful and accidental. Human rights language became more widespread in the historical conditions of the time, making it accidental. But it was also purposeful: activists eventually saw human rights discourse as a strategic entry point for social recognition. As such, the mobilization of IHRL was relevant for its social consequences as much as it was for its legal effects.
This article’s contribution sits in dialogue with three major bodies of literature. It is primarily situated within the field of queer approaches to international law (QAIL), making a novel contribution to its intersection with IHRL scholarship.Footnote 12 In particular, the article deepens the analysis of the ambivalent relationship between queer activism and human rights discourse. An important contribution of the QAIL work has been to demonstrate that the resort to human rights has as many constraining effects as it has liberating ones. For instance, in different contexts, both Ratna Kapur and Dianne Otto have argued that the increasing integration of queer activism into the discourse and institutional spaces of IHRL may have the detrimental effect of diluting the radicality that for so long characterized this social movement,Footnote 13 which is something that became increasingly visible with trends of ‘NGOization’ and professionalization of queer activism.Footnote 14 This is true, and it can also be seen as a point of tension between different ideals of sexual liberation versus rights recognition throughout the early history of the transnational ‘gay’ rights activism covered by this article.Footnote 15 However, as the story told ahead reveals, the resort to human rights is not inherently less radical. In fact, more radical forms of protest can still coexist with institutional forms of advocacy, each aiming, at one and the same time, to disrupt human rights discourse and to find recognition within its terms. As such, similarly to the ‘optimist’ orientation assumed in the work of Odette Mazel, this article focuses on the hopeful dimensions arising from the strenuous dedication of activism to bend the law in queer ways.Footnote 16
The article also brings new elements to the strand of scholarship that has developed alternative critical accounts of the histories of human rights; in particular, through connecting the latter with the history of queer legal activism.Footnote 17 Finally, it is also in dialogue with the literature on transnational activism, shedding light on specific modes of action to advocate for a broader meaning of IHRL and adding novel elements to the literature on the history of transnational and international LGBTI+ advocacy, which so far has not seen a detailed analysis of the IGA’s lobbying of Amnesty International, despite a few analyses regarding the role Amnesty played in the longer history of queer activism.Footnote 18
The article is structured as follows. After this brief Introduction, Section 2 contextualizes the historical moment when the transnational gay rights movement began to take institutional form and engage at an international level. Sections 3 to 5 narrate the main challenges in convincing Amnesty International to incorporate the issue of ‘sexual orientation’ into its mandate. Sections 6 and 7 delve briefly into the aftermath of the formal recognition of ‘sexual orientation’ by Amnesty and the continued obstacles to getting the British NGO to work directly on the topic, while also connecting this historical moment to contemporary advocacy strategies that would later materialize in global governance spaces and continue the struggle to frame queer demands within IHRL discourse. Finally, the last section concludes the article.
2. Seeds of legal mobilization: Gay rights move to the international stage
In December 1974, the Student Union of the University of Edinburgh, Scotland, hosted the First International Gay Rights Congress (IGRC, see Figure 1).Footnote 19 The event lasted for five days, and was attended by hundreds of delegates from around two dozen different countries, all located where current political geography ascribes as the Global North.Footnote 20 The topic of sexism, and the need for both more women’s participation in key roles and the need to show solidarity with the international feminist movement, dominated much of the Congress’s debates, which also included discussions on national and international legislation and their frequent employment against gay individuals. The conversations pointed to the always ambivalent relationship of the queer movement with the law, which has historically been weaponized to the detriment of these groups, and only relatively recently started to represent a means of protection against violence and discrimination in some jurisdictions.Footnote 21 Debates on the intersection of sexuality with other markers of social experience also took place at the congress. Albeit with lesser centrality, delegates attended sessions, for instance, on ‘Black, Lesbians, and Gays’, the ‘needs’ of both ‘younger’ and ‘older’ homosexuals, the relationships between ‘gays and religion’, as well as other intra-LGBTI+ practices and identities, including ‘sado-masochism, transvesticism [sic], transsexuality, and bisexuality’.Footnote 22
Poster of the First International Gay Rights Congress, Edinburgh, December 18–22 (1974)
Source: Hall-Carpenter Archives, Ephemera Collection, Loc. HCA/EPHEMERA/164.
‘Two, four, six, eight, gay is twice as good as straight./Three, five, seven, nine, lesbians are mighty fine’.Footnote 23 The chant echoed through the streets of Edinburgh throughout the five days of the IGRC, when activists split their time between social activities, political discussions, and pride demonstrations. Reportedly the first-ever international gathering of this size, and certainly the first one with a legal focus,Footnote 24 it witnessed one of the first mobilizations of human rights discourse within the movement. During the congress, which also adopted the Greek letter lambda (λ) as the ‘international symbol of gay liberation’,Footnote 25 activists presented the manifesto ‘Love as a Human Right’.Footnote 26 In the document, which referred to human rights as the renewed ‘evolving moral conscience of mankind’, they asserted: ‘The time is at hand when we must recognize and declare yet another human right – the right to love’.Footnote 27 In the concluding paragraph, the drafters of the document indicated their awareness of how the contents of human rights were not all pre-established and how they required a struggle for their construction and expansion: ‘Human rights are not the proper objects of petition and generous gift. They are the minimal guidelines of common decency without which life itself is oppressive. Accordingly, such rights are the objects of demand, indignation, and conscientious resentment’.Footnote 28
Already in 1978, at the CHE Conference that opened this article, activists had the clarity to recognize that the first IGRC, albeit not ultimately fulfilling its objectives, was a pioneer in its attempts to establish the movement’s coordination beyond the domestic borders. In a proposal for joint political action submitted during the Coventry meeting, David Norris, Bernard Keogh, and Edmund Lynch, representatives of the Irish organization Campaign for Homosexual Law Reform (CHLR), wrote: ‘One of the most potentially significant aspects of the 1st International Gay Rights Congress at Edinburgh in 1974 was the attempt to establish a structure of political co-operation in the area of gay rights at international level’.Footnote 29 Further, the group determined that the time was ripe for ‘effective action at European level’, and identified ‘exchange of information’ as the most basic and urgent requirement, which should allow for synchronized political action.Footnote 30
The two main aspects of CHLR’s proposal summarize well the central characteristics that would mark the initial years of the soon-to-be-created IGA. First, the lack of institutional structure in the aftermath of its foundation meant that the association’s main purpose was to facilitate an exchange of information between, and the convening of activists from around the globe. In this sense, at the time, it was hardly possible to differentiate between the actions of IGA and its member organizations. As Nigel Warner, who had been engaged with the organization’s activities since its inception, noted during our interview, ‘the fact is that you can’t make a distinction between IGA’s work and its members’ work when they were working on international things, because there were no employees, there was no central staff. So, IGA only did what its members did’.Footnote 31 At its beginning, IGA did not have a central soul or its own personality, but rather it was formed by the assembly of its member organizations. The association’s main role was essentially to convene other engaged CSOs from different geographical locations to try and come up with coordinated initiatives. Primarily, examining the early action of IGA gives us insight into all other queer organizations working at an international or transnational level at the time.
The second aspect of CHLR’s proposal, however, shows the limited scope of this action. It illustrates the Eurocentric composition of the new association, which would only begin to change in the 1990s. The early objectives to animate the foundation of IGA, initially prompted by a call from the Dutch queer group COC Netherlands, invited the meeting of ‘European gay organizations to discuss a coordinated European approach’.Footnote 32 Until the actual foundation meeting, in August 1978, the European scope remained among the purposes of the association. Warner said he was surprised to learn that this had been changed in Coventry: ‘Well, it’s what we thought we were going into. And I remember being quite astonished when they came back from the meeting, saying, well, it’s going to be a global organization’.Footnote 33 According to him, the different outcome was a result of pressure from other Global North, but non-European, based groups who were present at the meeting, namely from the United States, Canada, and Australia. This element also illustrates how, despite its ‘international’ label, IGA remained a mostly European association (and marginally connected to the Australian-North American axis) and had very little integration of Global South activists in its infancy; something that would only begin to change during the 1990s. This does not mean, of course, that political organization around sexual liberation was not already present in other regions of the globe – they certainly were – but they were not automatically integrated into this description of the ‘international’ level, even if later Global South activists became central actors both within IGA and in the landscape of transnational activism on sexual orientation and gender identity rights.Footnote 34
The IGA’s founding meeting in Coventry was also an opportunity for those present to put together a list of ‘proposals for political action’ to be undertaken by the newly created organization. The small working group listed 14 projects that required the association’s engagement. The titles for most of these action points reveal the exclusively Global North membership of the time, and its predominantly European focus. The list included advocacy initiatives regarding national legislation, as well as efforts with a regional scope, and three initiatives with a more global reach.Footnote 35 The ninth action point was titled ‘Amnesty International’. Below the heading, we can read the two agreed initiatives:
(a) National gay organizations to affiliate to national sections of Amnesty International and to propose that imprisonment on grounds of sexual preference or homosexual activity should be included in Amnesty’s definition of political prisoners.
(b) Efforts to be made to obtain suitable cases to propose to Amnesty International as prisoners of conscience.Footnote 36
This mention inaugurated IGA’s participation in this concerted effort, which predated the association’s foundation and included both internal and external pressure to expand AI’s global mandate to include individuals imprisoned because of their sexual orientation. This campaign would last for almost two decades before the first substantial result was achieved.
The core terminology used by activists focused on the notions of ‘sexual orientation’ and ‘homosexuality’. It is important to note that at IGA’s founding and in its earliest years, the question of who was included under the banner of ‘gay rights’ was not self-evident. The 1974 Edinburgh congress had included sessions on ‘transvesticism [sic] and transsexuality’, for instance, but the distinction between trans and gay identities was far from the shape it would later assume in contemporary debates. As such, the focus on the campaign on ‘sexual orientation’ both reflect the moment of the historical debate (with the notion, for instance, of ‘gender identity’ only becoming more mainstream in the movement in the 1990s) and the well-known trait of queer organizational history where the demands of gay men tended to be the first ones to make it to the centre stage.Footnote 37
3. Convincing Amnesty International: Making the case for queer human rights within civil society
One year before IGA’s foundation in 1978, Amnesty International had been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize and epitomized the (re)flourishing of the human rights movement that marked the 1970s. As Nigel Warner described during our interview, Amnesty was seen as ‘the peak of human rights’.Footnote 38 Accordingly, convincing Amnesty International that discrimination based on sexual orientation was a human rights issue was the first step in reframing queer rights as human rights. In a context in which subaltern sexualities and gender expressions were inserted in an even deeper architecture of dehumanization (e.g., through the pathologization still inscribed in ICD, or the widespread criminalization in dozens of nations across the globe),Footnote 39 this discursive reframing strategy was likewise a mechanism to insert queer individuals in the mainstream understanding of humanity at the time.
While internal debates within AI on the matter dated back to at least 1974, initially prompted by its Danish section, the need for the organization to include ‘homosexuals’, as well as other people arrested on the grounds of their actual or perceived sexual orientation in its Prisoners of Conscience (PoC) programme, was also a steady item of discussion and updates within the annual IGA meetings from its foundation.Footnote 40 The PoC project, Amnesty’s most widely known initiative at the time, covered political prisoners arrested for a number of reasons that were covered by AI’s mandate. Enumerated in Article 1a of the NGO’s statute, the list at the time included: political, religious, or other conscientiously held beliefs, as well as ethnic origin, sex, colour, or language.Footnote 41 Much like IGA itself, Amnesty is a membership-based organization. This means that decisions were taken by its International Council Meeting (ICM), where all national sections of AI came together to debate and (re)orientate the organization’s plans. In this sense, rather than merely lobbying the international secretariat in London, to actually influence decision-making, queer representatives needed to reach out to transnational networks and spread their message about the inclusion of those they eventually designated as ‘people imprisoned because of their homosexuality’.Footnote 42
Even before IGA’s existence, the inclusion of homosexuality as a motive in the PoC project had already been repeatedly proposed and rejected at the ICM in 1975, 1977, and 1978, with consistent opposition from AI’s British section where ‘sodomy laws’ were still in place in some of the jurisdictions.Footnote 43 In the first newsletter of the recently created gay association, which circulated in November 1978, the topic already occupied three entire pages. A press statement released by the then Irish-based secretariat of the IGA expressed their ‘grave concern at the reactionary and illiberal stand adopted by Amnesty International on the question of homosexuality’.Footnote 44 They further stressed that the Irish delegation, in particular, had been briefed by IGA members on specific cases pertaining to homosexual prisoners but appeared to have blatantly ignored the information.Footnote 45 In the period that followed, IGA’s biggest preoccupation was to provide AI with details on the treatment of gay prisoners.Footnote 46 A significant obstacle to the naming of gay prisoners was their only defence against national persecution: to deny taking part in any same-sex sexual acts and retreat to the oppressive protection of the ‘closet’. Therefore, the public adoption of any of these cases by AI campaigning would be mostly to their detriment, inasmuch as it would offer additional elements of evidence for a prosecution case, which is why the initial embrace of sexual orientation had to occur within a discursive and principled dimension. That is, recognizing it fell under the scope of both the PoC’s and human rights, regardless of addressing concrete cases, so as to allow for political pressure over the criminalizing provisions without undermining the defence of those being prosecuted. Jan Olav Brynjulfsen, one of the activists who navigated both AI and IGA spaces, wrote in the IGA Bulletin in 1983: ‘The real gains are more to be found in the fact that an important and highly recognized international human rights organization has stated that a problem exists and that victims of a widespread but hitherto forgotten persecution are in need of assistance and protection’.Footnote 47
Finally, in 1979, in the aftermath of an extensive study presented by ‘five homosexual members of the Danish section’,Footnote 48 the ICM, while refusing the inclusion of sexual orientation in their mandate, noted that ‘the persecution of persons for their homosexuality is a violation of their fundamental human rights’.Footnote 49 The compromise, which seemed to target the growing internal and external pressure suffered by the entity, was of little practical consequence, given that Amnesty was nowhere nearer to doing any public work on the matter. Alongside the novel acknowledgement of a human rights violation, the ICM granted that a person arrested because of their ‘advocacy of homosexual equality’ could be considered a PoC, largely equating it to a form of conscientious belief. The Council likewise conceded that it fell under its mandate when ‘charges of homosexuality’ were used to imprison someone because of their advocacy work on any area, although still not directly addressing the arrests because of a specific sexual orientation where it did not intersect with other rights, such as freedom of expression or political action.Footnote 50 One of AI’s internal reports on the issue made the distinction clear:
This does not represent any addition to the categories of prisoners considered as POCs. The ‘advocacy’ in this context is associated with the right to freedom of expression. If there is a case of someone being imprisoned for sexual orientation or behaviour alone, that person would not be adopted under the present AI mandate.Footnote 51
4. Beyond advocacy: Framing gay rights as an autonomous human rights issue
A candle wrapped in barbed wire, its flame burning a piece of paper bearing the words ‘Gay Rights’; beneath the candle, the name with which this symbol is immediately associated: Amnesty International (see Figure 2). This drawing recurs throughout IGA’s bulletins over the course of the campaign. Despite the somewhat positive news coming out of Amnesty’s ICM in 1979, the beginning of the 1980s saw several frustrated attempts by gay activists to further engage with the organization. Lack of coordination between IGA’s member organizations and some of the AI members who were also part of the IGA debates seemed also to be an issue in streamlining the tactical moves to be made, even if the overlap in constituency helped with much of the communication flow between the two groups. Reporting on the scarcity of progress in one of the IGA Bulletins from 1982, Mogens Madsen, a member of the AI Danish section, wrote that, besides the ‘absence’ of concrete cases, one of the central arguments against their pledge was that ‘in countries outside Western Europe and North America public morality in this area was so strict that it would destroy AI’s work for other political prisoners in these countries’. He continued, ‘if this problem was taken up by the organization, it was also felt that the AI sections in such countries would stagnate or fall apart’.Footnote 52 The claim, which indirectly attributed the blame for Amnesty’s unwillingness to modify its mandate to postcolonial Global South states, did more than just ignore the fact that both countries in Europe and states within the US had criminalizing legislation in force in their territory.Footnote 53 Rather, it reiterated the ‘contagious’ conception of homosexuality as a threat to the broader human rights movement.Footnote 54
Convincing Amnesty International Campaign Logo in Letter with Updates by Jan Olav Brynjulfsen in IGA Bulletin 3/83 (1983)
Source: Hall-Carpenter Archives, Campaign for Homosexual Equality Collection, Loc. HCA/CHE2/12/28.
In that same year, an additional argument had surfaced out of AI’s global meeting in Rimini (Italy). According to those opposing the demand, ‘the proponents had been unable to supply a satisfactory definition of ‘sexual preference [or sexual orientation]’.Footnote 55 Underneath the apparent concern for semantics lies a discrete mobilization of moral panics associated with (homo)sexuality, not least among them the idea of ‘pedophilia’, which would still come back to haunt the queer international movement. In this context, the alleged semantic openness of ‘sexual orientation’ and related terms was instrumentalized by conservative forces to reinstate discursive phantoms that threaten the status quo and are constitutive elements of a moral panic regime, something that was particularly acute during the peak of the HIV/AIDS pandemic in the 1980s,Footnote 56 which now served as the backdrop to these debates.
The intransigency of Amnesty’s position was all the more striking considering how ‘sexual orientation’ began to feature in the discourse of official international legal bodies around the same time. Most notably, in Dudgeon v. United Kingdom (1981), the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) held, for the first time, that the criminalization of consensual homosexual acts between adults constituted a violation of Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights, formally recognizing the domain of sexual conduct as protected by international law.Footnote 57 In the same decade, seven years later, in Norris v. Ireland (1988), the same Court reaffirmed that reasoning in the case involving the Irish activist David Norris.Footnote 58 Both David Norris and Jeff Dudgeon, key figures in getting the rulings of the ECtHR, were involved with the work of IGA from an early stage.Footnote 59 This meant that the transitional activism at the time was both knowledgeable about recent legal developments and conscious of their limitations. The advances in ‘official’ European human rights institutions did not translate into a corresponding change within Amnesty International, but nor did it stop activists from pursuing AI further. Queer activists continued to invest energy in persuading the NGO even as the ECtHR was incorporating their claims in its case law, which serves again to illustrate the outsized normative authority Amnesty held as a gatekeeper of human rights legitimacy during this period. Formal legal recognition, it seemed, was not sufficient without Amnesty’s imprimatur. But these facts can perhaps also be explained in another way. Despite IGA’s narrowly European membership at the time, this did not seem to undermine the organization’s international goals. AI’s work encompassed much more than just Europe; it was in a position to influence an actual global constituency with its member organizations spread across the world. At the same time, the international landscape was far from issuing any views favourable to the recognition of sexual orientation rights, in political and legal fora alike. The UN Human Rights Committee would only deliver its first positive interpretation on the issue in a case involving criminalization of same-sex sexual acts, in 1994 in Toonen v. Australia.Footnote 60 In fact, it had already decided against the interests of queer groups at the beginning of the 1980s in the case Hertzberg v. Finland, which involved state censorship of content regarding homosexuality.Footnote 61 Moreover, an attempt to produce the first-ever report on ‘sexual minorities’ by an official UN body, pursued with the intense participation of IGA at the former UN Commission on Human Rights through the same decade, resulted in a similarly frustrating outcome.Footnote 62
Out of the frustration experienced in 1982 came the idea of setting up an IGA working group to formulate a more long-term strategy to convince Amnesty International of the importance of adopting sexual orientation, which would include the preparation of a definition of the term ‘homosexual prisoner’.Footnote 63 The idea moved at a slow pace. At the IGA’s annual conference in 1983, Jan Olav Brynjulfsen (HPA) and Mogens Madsen (F-48), both already mentioned here and with ties to Amnesty itself, were nominated, alongside the Dutch Maria Pronk (COC) and the British Peter Ashman (CHE), to coordinate the AI lobby project. Among their attributed tasks were not only the production of reports, compiling relevant information and the theoretical underpinnings of the association’s position on the matter, but also liaising with the AI secretariat in London.Footnote 64 As time passed, activists slowly but consistently worked on the project, producing more material to ground the organization’s action.Footnote 65 By the European summer of 1985, however, the working group seemed to have stagnated, and there was general concern regarding the absence of developments in what was one of the longest-lasting projects since the association had been founded in Coventry.Footnote 66
It was not until 1986 that the project would regain traction. By then, AI had nominated the Dutch activist George Siemensma as their research coordinator and tasked him with the collection, compilation, and analysis of ‘case material about people imprisoned on grounds of homosexuality’.Footnote 67 The initiative started to regain momentum when Siemensma reached out to IGA for information and attended IGA’s Eighth Annual Conference, held in Copenhagen (Denmark) in July of that year,Footnote 68 at the invitation of the association’s Information Secretariat.Footnote 69 By the end of the first trimester of 1986, the association’s campaign was again routinely acknowledged within Amnesty. In an internal report produced for AI members only, they mention in a context in which specific AI departments were working on the subject:
Amnesty sections should know that one relevant organization in the field, the International Gay Association (IGA), has decided to start a campaign to lobby AI. According to the IGA bulletin 6/85, IGA members are asked to approach AI sections in their home countries.Footnote 70
Following a decision by the ICM in 1985, the NGO’s research office, which at that point had been in contact with IGA for several years, was working on a study regarding the viability of expanding the mandate to embrace the queer demands, especially oriented at mapping cases of imprisonment. These new developments revitalized the Amnesty Project Coordination Group of the IGA, which produced for the first time a more solid advocacy document to guide and harmonize the association’s approach to different AI groups. The brochure, which would be updated when needed, contained general information about Amnesty’s structures and decision-making process, as well as a detailed history of their views on homosexuality and a plan of action for how the lobby should proceed (see Figure 3).Footnote 71
Scheme of the Lobby on Amnesty in ‘Convincing Amnesty International – Brochure for members of ILGA taking part in the Project on AI’ (June 1990)
Source: IHLIA LGBTI Heritage, International Lesbian and Gay Association (ILGA) Archives, Loc. Grey | N227460.
Despite renewed efforts, Amnesty’s International Council Meeting, this time held in Brazil at the end of 1987, again rejected ‘by a large majority’ a resolution proposed by its Dutch section to recognize gays as PoCs,Footnote 72 repeating the negative result that had likewise occurred in 1983, 1985, and the years before that.Footnote 73 On this most recent opportunity, however, the ICM decided to refer the issue to its Mandate Review Committee (MRC), tasked with evaluating the coverage of the mandate and, most importantly, taking into consideration cultural differences across the world.Footnote 74 The ICM was expected to reassess the subject in 1991.Footnote 75 After this, things appear to have rapidly converged to achieve some change within the organization.
5. ‘We have convinced Amnesty:’ The new discursive framework for gay rights in the human rights movement
In 1989, with the Swedish section of Amnesty reinstating its support for the inclusion of sexual orientation, following the trend of other sections, such as the Greek section, a year and a half prior, activists saw a burgeoning number of supporters.Footnote 76 While a two-thirds majority was needed to amend the statute and expressly alter the wording to include ‘sexual orientation’, only a 50% majority would suffice for an authoritative interpretation of the scope of the mandate.Footnote 77 In the same year, the now-renamed ILGA saw a growing number of optimistic reports indicating that AI was ‘moving towards an acceptable position’.Footnote 78 The association conducted a wide survey, submitting questionnaires to several national sections of AI to inquire into their position and the arguments supporting their views.Footnote 79 Optimism was sustained in 1990, with increasing faith that a moment of change was near. The internal ILGA coordination group also grew and by that point contained members from almost all continents, apart from Asia.Footnote 80
As the crucial year fast approached, ILGA gained two vocal allies for the campaign on US soil, despite the fact the AI section in the country (AIUSA) had already responded positively to the demand many years before, much of it thanks to the internal advocacy carried out by a group of gays and lesbians inside AIUSA. The two organizations were founded in 1990 – the International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission (IGLHRC, many years later renamed Outright International) was created in November, and the New York-based Queer Nation was founded in March by activists previously involved in the famous HIV/AIDS group ACT UP. Shortly after, in June 1990, a San Francisco branch of Queer Nation was also established. The international focus group associated with the San Francisco branch, dubbed Queer Planet, contributed to the campaign especially with the production of original visual materials and the dissemination of postcards denouncing Amnesty. Variations of the cards denounced crimes committed against people on the basis of their sexuality across the world, and read: ‘Amnesty? Only if you’re heterosexual’ (see Figure 4).Footnote 81 Both IGLHRC and Queer Planet would soon become ILGA member organizations, with the former assuming a prominent role in the years to come.
Queer Planet Leaflets Amnesty International Campaign – Amnesty? Only if you are heterosexual (1990)
Source: Hall-Carpenter Archives, Woods Collection, Loc. HCA/WOODS/2/2.
The opening of the year when the ICM was bound to rediscuss the issue, 1991, also brought ILGA members a last injection of energy to carry on with its lobbying work ever more intensively (see Figure 5). Concerns over a potential reduction in the level of support because of a ‘compromise proposal’, which narrowed the agreed scope definition of ‘homosexual prisoner’, led to new urgent appeals. An ILGA Bulletin circulated a few months into the year gives an idea of the general sentiment:
We repeat our urgent request for every ILGA Member to make a last-minute contact with your national AI section – if you have not already done so – to convince them of the need to take a positive stand when AI votes on the adoption of homosexual prisoners at its top-level meeting in Japan during the first week in September 1991.Footnote 82
ILGA/Tupilak Poster – Does anybody care? (1991)
Source: Hall-Carpenter Archives, Woods Collection, Loc. HCA/WOODS/2/2.
Another concern at that point was that AI’s International Secretariat, which had long been against the proposal, was trying to influence the Mandate Review Committee’s final reporting on the matter.Footnote 83 In February 1991, Bill Schiller, who was both a co-coordinator of ILGA’s project at the time and a long-time member of the AI movement, wrote an open letter to all sections and bodies of the NGO to share his great alarm ‘over reports that the IS [International Secretariat] has been exerting negative pressure on the MRC [Mandate Review Committee], trying to prevent it from recommending that AI finally adopt such prisoners’.Footnote 84 He concluded the letter by saying, ‘we encourage AI to follow the example set by the ANC [from South Africa] by stretching your hands out to those lesbian and gay prisoners jailed simply because they have the courage to love a consenting adult of the same sex. They belong under your mandate’.Footnote 85
Finally, in September 1991, in Yokohama (Japan), the ICM adopted ‘Resolution 563 on Homosexuality’ to ‘consider for adoption as prisoners of conscience persons who are imprisoned solely because of their homosexuality, including the practice of homosexual acts in private between consenting adults’.Footnote 86 The decision, reached by consensus, established an authoritative interpretation of the AI Statute, covering homosexual prisoners without needing to alter its wording. During the meeting, activists from the Tokyo-based OCCUR (Association for the Gay & Lesbian Movement), a Japanese ILGA-member organization, conducted protests and further engaged in last-minute endeavours to lobby Amnesty representatives (see Figure 6).Footnote 87
OCCUR Members at the Amnesty International ICM in Yokohama (Japan) in ILGA Bulletin 4/91 (September, 1991)
Source: Hall-Carpenter Archives, Woods Collection, Loc. HCA/WOODS/2/4.
While many details of how the decision would actually be implemented were still up in the air, activists who had worked on this for more than a decade finally found reasons to celebrate. In the broader discursive debate, Amnesty’s decision would prove itself an inestimable achievement for queer transnational activists, who suddenly saw their years-long campaign asserting ‘gay rights as human rights’ successfully pierce the mainstream human rights discourse structure. The boundaries of humanity and their new utopian claims for universality were finally starting to move, and they had managed to get at least one foot in the door. The first sentence in the letter sent by Hans Vonk, from COC Netherlands and one of the coordinators of the project within ILGA, to spread the news to fellow member organizations, outlines it well: ‘VICTORY! After many years of campaigning, we have convinced Amnesty’.Footnote 88
While this was an undeniably important achievement for the rights-based international movement advocating for a world free of violence and discrimination based on sexual orientation (and later gender identity), it also brings back the ambivalence of queer engagement with IHRL noted in the Introduction (Section 1) and illustrated throughout the article. Critical scholars within the field of QAIL have rightly argued that the progressive integration of queer activism into the institutional architecture of IHRL came at the cost of its domestication and led to the loss of much of its radical nature.Footnote 89 This is the result of both the force of IHRL’s ‘assimilative and normative gravitational pull’, the need for the professionalization of activism work, and the changes that inclusion within institutional structures might provoke.Footnote 90 Reflecting on the changes in the association’s workstyle, Lisa Power, who was one of ILGA’s secretaries general during part of the AI campaign, had some nostalgia about a more radical time of activism. ‘ILGA has changed massively. It’s become much more professional, but it’s also become much more po-faced’, she first noted. The organization had become ‘very proper and very correct now’, according to her. And although she could understand many of the reasons that led to this, she still found it was a pity not to see more grassroots forms of activism featuring prominently in ILGA’s actions. But the change was not framed as entirely bad. Even though she emphasized that the group had lost some of its initial ‘anarchic and chaotic’ energy, having been ‘taken over by the process queens, the people who considered that you had to use the right language to be heard’, she granted that some form of radicality still exists in contemporary queer activism. ‘Being radical in very nice suits and with a lot of formalities’, but still a form of action that reflects a ‘different phase of the movement’.Footnote 91
Lisa’s analysis reflects a certain disillusionment with the movement’s distancing from its grassroots transformative ambitions through the gradual professionalization of advocacy in ways that privileged respectable forms of claim-making, through legal discourse, over more disruptive politics and creative protest styles; something that marked, for instance, the action of the HIV/AIDS group ACT UP at the time. From this perspective, the success of the campaign directed at Amnesty was also the beginning of a longer story of the integration of queer demands into a system that, despite its promises of inclusion, delivered much less than many would have hoped. However, as Odette Mazel has argued, proposing the reading of LGBTI+ engagement with international law as ‘queer jurisprudence’, there are possible framings of these actions beyond the binary of ‘co-option or resistance’.Footnote 92
The story told in this article complicates any simple account of pre-institutional radicalism giving way to an assimilationist rights framework. It also shows that the relentless activism of the gay transnational movement was anything but naïve, activists knew the limited scope of the form of recognition being pursued. The types of protest mentioned by Lisa, and the involvement in the Amnesty campaign of organizations historically seen as more ‘radical’ actors, such as Queer Nation/Planet, made possible radical legal activism. That is, it illustrates not only that legal activism can pursue radical goals, but also how radical forms of protest can be incorporated into queer legal activism, which need not be restricted to the respectable institutional spheres to find success. In short, what this historical account adds to QAIL scholarship is to show that the battle for queer recognition in IHRL was not a straightforwardly assimilationist project but involved a range of political imaginations that sit uneasily within the categories through which that history is often narrated. As in Mazel’s work, focused on the ‘ethical practices’ invoked by queer activist in their ‘interventions’ in the world of international law, this article shows the ‘optimistic’ forces that drive and keep queer activism alive.Footnote 93
6. Beyond formal recognition: Struggles for implementation of ‘sexual orientation prisoners of conscience’ within Amnesty International
Further controversy between AI and ILGA (as well as other LGBTI+ led NGOs, such as IGLHRC) followed, who continued to pressure Amnesty to produce meaningful action aimed at the recently recognized PoCs because of their sexual orientation.Footnote 94 In 1994, AI USA would release the groundbreaking report ‘Breaking the Silence: Human Rights Violations Based on Sexual Orientation’.Footnote 95 Soon after, AI’s International Secretariat republished the document, borrowing the name and material of the project birthed within AIUSA, to offer, for the first time, a substantive report for an international audience. In the text, they acknowledged both the role of AI as an organization in discussions on the topic and the particular relevance and impact of their views on altering the world’s perception of LGBTI+ human rights advocacy. ‘As a grassroots, international human rights organization, Amnesty International plays a vital and unique role in locating gay and lesbians rights within the human rights debate’. The report continues, ‘not as special rights to freedom from discrimination on grounds of sexual orientation, but as fundamental rights of each and every member of society’.Footnote 96
ILGA and its member organizations lobbied Amnesty the same way that contemporary activists conduct advocacy to try to convince states. Indeed, in that historical context, they held as much leverage over small queer organizations as states would.Footnote 97 In a way, they had an even greater power: with state actors’ tendency to reify civil society’s positions in a single entity, or at most looking at the stance of only a few big NGOs, AI was in a unique position to invest queer demands in human rights discourse as the empowered actor who could tell others whether sexual orientation (and later gender identity) should be treated as a human rights matter or not. If they kept on denying it, there was little reason for states to listen any further. The reasoning behind Amnesty’s longstanding refusal to include sexual orientation in its mandate echoes much of the state discourse currently heard in multilateral human rights fora.Footnote 98 Besides more pragmatic explanations, such as an increase in workload or concern with reputational costs, at least three of their arguments echo some of the opposition currently also seen in global governance human rights fora.Footnote 99 First, the idea that homosexuality or sexual orientation is not recognized concept under international law, which would be the ultimate guiding parameter of AI’s mandate.Footnote 100 Second, the claim that ‘sexual orientation’ lacks a clear definition and could encompass, for instance, protection of pedophilia.Footnote 101 Third, the allegation that Amnesty was unaware of anyone being imprisoned because of their homosexuality,Footnote 102 in the same vein as heads of governments who deny the existence of sexually and gender diverse people in their country.
Along similar lines, this illustrates how Amnesty was not an ordinary NGO. On the one hand, the broad reach and strength of AI places it as a particularly influential entity in the human rights debate. AI was then the ‘principal human rights gatekeeper’, and its agenda-setting power, much more than now, had a significant capacity to define what is and what is not covered by the framework of human rights.Footnote 103 Nevertheless, this also suggests that AI, and later HRW, is likewise a symbol of the hegemonic discourse within this same human rights movement.Footnote 104 Therefore, lobbying Amnesty was an attempt to broaden the dominant discourse within human rights’ public spheres in the same way many organizations continue to do in their lobbying of states.
Robyn Linde argues that ‘the transnational LGBTQ network emerged through contestation with the human rights gatekeeper, Amnesty, and its US section, AIUSA, in the early 1990s’.Footnote 105 However, as seen above, there were many other projects of transnational/international scope at the table when IGA was initially founded, and the coordination and lobby work regarding Amnesty went much beyond the USA section. This network, which includes the most active NGOs in international spaces and of which Linde describes some of the main characteristics,Footnote 106 did not emerge through this contestation. Rather, the contestation was part of this broader tendency of human rights framing seen throughout and beyond the 1970s.Footnote 107 The struggle over the years to get people engaged in the coordination committee of the Amnesty project, previously presented, shows that it was not more central within this network than other parallel campaigns organized during the same period. Suggesting that AI was directly or indirectly responsible for the emergence of an LGBTI+ transnationally organized network overemphasizes the importance of the British-founded group, despite this specific project representing the long-term aim of the discursive reframing of queer rights as human rights.
Linde also suggests that ‘even though ILGA had been pressing Amnesty on LGBTQ issues for years, it would embrace the human rights frame later than most organizations, only officially adopting it in 1995’.Footnote 108 Yet, the mention of ‘human rights’ was present from the very inception of the association, as demonstrated at the beginning of the article. Not only was freedom from discrimination on the grounds of a person’s sexual orientation evoked as ‘a fundamental human right’ upon the association’s foundation,Footnote 109 but likewise the motto of ‘gay rights are human rights’ can be seen in different organizational documents (especially in the annual conferences’ reports) long before 1995.Footnote 110 Moreover, it makes sense to think that the inclusion of the framework within the organization’s registration documents might not have occurred before they had managed to rebrand gay rights as a human rights theme. Otherwise, including both wordings would have meant to oppose gay rights and human rights in ways that insinuated they were different issues, when, for those activists, they were not. The language chosen by IGA’s foundational document, however, leaves no doubt about its embracing of human rights from the very beginning. References to international institutions, universality, and civil and political rights in the document must be read together with the organizational context.Footnote 111 All the actors from the newly founded association engaged with other actors within the international human rights public sphere, from international organizations to the external pressure put on states, as well as the direct involvement of its members with bodies such as the ECHR. One of the questions I asked Nigel Warner was precisely about this: I wondered if the idea of human rights, or of employing human rights in correlation or together with the idea of gay and lesbian rights, was present from the beginning in IGA’s work, or if it came later on. ‘It’s there right from the beginning’, he told me. ‘Partly because it seems to have been in people’s minds [in] the countries of Europe. The thing is that, of course, the European Court of Human Rights had been making adverse judgments on gay rights, mainly the German cases, … and people were aware of that’, he continued. And finally added, ‘but more, much, much more immediate was that we’d got, at the founding meeting, David Norris and Jeff Dungeon, and Jeff had already started his case under the Convention at the Commission. … So, using the European Convention is right there from the very beginning’.Footnote 112
The choice to campaign against Amnesty International and the decision to embrace a human rights framework within the rising gay rights movements were both part of the same rationale. ‘It was [AI] what everyone associated with human rights’,Footnote 113 recalls Julie Dorf, US activist and founder of IGLHRC, who continued the lobby work against Amnesty after the 1991 victory, particularly endeavouring to see the decision’s effective implementation translate into concrete action. Dorf produced her senior essay for graduate college on the history of homosexuality in the Soviet Union, including instances of imprisonment, which would later spark her interactions with AI with an invitation to speak at one of the AIUSA conferences.Footnote 114 Both ILGA, throughout its decade-long project, and later IGLHRC, when it eventually joined efforts at the start of the 1990s, were in dialogue with internal Amnesty groups, which from the beginning had been articulating an intra-Amnesty push for the inclusion of sexual orientation, first ignited by European sections. In a way, they had different but complementary roles. ‘There was always a certain sensitivity for the need for there to be outside people putting pressure, bringing pressure to bear. It couldn’t just be people inside Amnesty. There had to be wider pressure from outside. And so that was very important’, says Nigel Warner. Lisa Power, who was ILGA’s secretary general in the late 1980s and also co-founded the British organization Stonewall, admits that she does not remember much from the conversations with AI, but one thing she noted from the meetings they had with Amnesty advocates in London was that the senior management and board were harder to convince, while ‘the staff totally got it or at least a chunk of the staff totally got it’.Footnote 115
The mutual goal of inclusion of ‘sexual orientation’ notwithstanding, divergence in views and strategy would still arise between ILGA and IGLHRC and internal queer groups within Amnesty. Dorf’s diagnosis of this dissent goes back to the analysis of AI’s almost state-like position via-à-vis the queer NGOs: ‘We worked with Amnesty, but we also campaigned against them, right? Or campaigned at them, in a way that they were not used to, they were not used to having, they were used to being the ones who protested governments. They weren’t used to having activists protest them’. She continues, ‘they didn’t understand the insider/outsider game that is what makes change in an institution. And so, they didn’t like our strategies because they felt so personally bad, I think, you know, and it took many years to repair those relationships with … the folks that were inside of Amnesty at the time who are still, you know, doing important work in this space’.Footnote 116
Alice Miller, who was one of the initial group members and founders of the HIV/Homosexuality Task Force (HIV/HOMO) within AI and was actively engaged in this initiative at the end of the 1980s, told me that they were a ‘mixture of volunteers and staff at AIUSA [… who] had been doing gay rights work, queer work, HIV advocacy since the mid-1980s, and … were appalled that Amnesty didn’t do it’.Footnote 117 Among the objectives of the HIV/HOMO Task Force was to ‘leverage the campaigning’ in order to achieve ‘change from inside’.Footnote 118
‘In the early 90s, there were some of us … in different countries, many of whom identified as lesbian or gay, who felt that there was not enough attention within Amnesty in its reporting on these issues, and we started to think strategically about how to, how are we going to change that’, reports Cynthia Rothschild, who was part of AI and who has been an important actor in different initiatives of the international queer movement throughout the subsequent decades.Footnote 119 Later on, Rothschild would also serve as the co-chair of a small volunteer committee, the International Gay and Lesbian Coordinating Committee, to mobilize around the topic across AI sections, ‘the leadership of Amnesty in the US gave us a tiny budget, tiny little baby budget. We created newsletters out of kitchens. It was that sort of thing’.Footnote 120 One of the main concerns, according to her, was to get a report on the topic, so that ‘Amnesty members could engage in the very traditional Amnesty task of writing letters on behalf of either individual people or writing letters to governments calling for investigation or addressing impunity, maybe in a situation of murder or arbitrary detention, etc’.Footnote 121 She stresses the importance of knowing how AI’s structure worked, from the inside, to do that kind of lobbying they had been working on, while still acknowledging the relevance of external pressure. ‘It was the deep, deep work that we did on the inside, and then it was some of the external pressure. It was not just ILGA and it was not just IGLHRC, but those groups had the structures to help generate some pushback’, she says. According to her, the queer organizations made bold demands, which helped to keep the overall shared goal on track, even if not without generating ‘a lot of animosity’ among the different groups. Rothschild credits much of this to a lack of understanding of how Amnesty systems worked, those looking at it from the outside could not have a complete understanding of the internal structuring and debates. Nevertheless, differently from what Dorf assumed, she saw value in the outside provocation: ‘Ultimately, I think there was an understanding that outside pressure along with inside strategic work created change in the analysis’, she concludes.Footnote 122
Alice Miller’s account of the same dynamics differentiates between the actions of ILGA and IGLHRC. While the former would engage more in inter-institutional dialogues, the latter adopted a greater public-confrontational approach. She noted that ‘although the official position [was] that they [ILGA] were campaigning against Amnesty, they understood those of us inside of Amnesty to be allies and collaborators. And so, we had regular meetings about how to think about what they were doing and what we were doing’. She concluded: ‘That was not the way in which, at that moment, … IGLHRC wanted to run things’.Footnote 123
Divergence in both strategy and political goals is a central, if not an indispensable, element in the formation of a diverse group of international queer human rights advocates. Therefore, the distinct approaches and voices coming from ILGA, IGLHRC, and LGBTI+ individuals and allies within Amnesty are all important components of this amorphous, non-monolithic collective of transnational activists who work toward a set of common objectives to allow for the recognition of everyone’s humanity regardless of their sexual orientation or gender identity. Despite the disagreements in their vision, they all simultaneously contribute to shaping a new discourse on queer human rights. Through different paths, they were working to expand the known limits of universality, which is so characteristically attached to the notion of human rights. As Julie Dorf explained, when I asked her the reasons for incorporating the framework of ‘human rights’ in the name of her organization, ‘an important piece’ of it was ‘the power of universality’. She added, ‘it was compelling, particularly at that time, right? We don’t have any AIDS drugs that work yet [at the time], right? We are dying as a community. … I mean, this was our life. And the power of something much bigger and global that we could use for, you know, as a really important tool for visibility was super compelling and validating’. Although acknowledging that there were other forms of mobilizing struggles for social justice, she argues that ‘the power of the universality of the human rights norms and concepts is one of our best tools. It’s not our only tool, but it’s a good one’.Footnote 124
In a way, that is precisely what the campaigning towards Amnesty represented for the transnational gay movement at the time: expanding the boundaries of what the ‘universality’ of IHRL was supposed to encompass. While the concept has been challenged across critical scholarship for its exclusionary potential and it masks the prevalence of a dominant perspective,Footnote 125 it also introduces an ambivalent possibility of international legal mobilization.Footnote 126 As such, the struggle for recognition within this ‘universal’ framework, as recounted in this article, through the very mobilization of the exclusionary discourse, as in the slogan ‘gay rights are human rights’, creates a performative contradiction.Footnote 127 It exposes the contingent aspect of this category that historically defines a specific group of people (and not all persons), while it performatively asserts that gay subjects are also included in this group. Therefore, this operates by suspending the assumption concerning who would be this human who is entitled to rights. It opens the possibility to redraw the boundaries that establish the difference between the human and the less-than-human. This performative contradiction then demonstrates the productive aspect of human rights. It also illustrates how the subject of rights is shaped and reshaped and how the alleged universality of human rights is expanded to include new subjects within its scope.Footnote 128 This is what made the recognition by Amnesty International so crucial. This was why activists dedicated almost two decades to convince the British NGO to inscribe ‘sexual orientation’ within their mandate. It opened the door of human rights to the queer movement, which would continue to make use of this route throughout the many years to come.
7. A continuing struggle: Amnesty’s legacy and the framing of queer rights as human rights
IGA’s (and later ILGA’s) engagement with Amnesty International demonstrates the difficult trajectory for the reception of queer demands within mainstream human rights civil society. But it also ultimately demonstrates how queer claims were not ‘naturally’ understood as a human rights issue and depended on the action of organized transnational LGBTI+ activists (at that point in time, gay activists) to come up with strategies that would allow this framing to be discursively established.
The resort to human rights was both purposeful and accidental. As seen, activists soon realized the powerful tool it represented to dress their demands in a language that would appeal to the notion of universality. The strategies were initially traced by national actors, who would then compose the recently established network of transnational activists and further encourage others to mobilize that same framework and discourse. The increased organization of the queer movement around international structures was also not a coincidence, as it followed much of the zeitgeist of the late 1970s (and then especially throughout the 1980s and 1990s) in which human rights came up as a moral and political alternative as the world witnessed the fall of other utopias.Footnote 129 Julie Dorf, who founded IGLHRC in 1990, noted that part of her motivation was to ‘prove to the international human rights world that we [queers] were a legitimate group, that we were humans, that we were persecuted for our sexual orientation and that we deserved to access all the systems that are there to theoretically protect us’.Footnote 130 The reason for including ‘human rights’ in the name of her organization was to ‘force inclusion in a way’, she explained, it was an approach to claim their space in a framework they knew they were excluded from. She also indicated how much queer human rights activism at the time had a much less legalistic, or in a way less professionalized, approach to the notion of human rights, which probably facilitated the push for many of its bold demands:
I was not a lawyer. We were a bunch of activists who came together. We were a bunch of immigrants from, particularly from Latin and Central America, or exiled from former Soviet countries. We were in San Francisco in the heart of the Act Up era, in the heart of the AIDS crisis. We knew how to organize. We knew how to get people on the streets. We knew the tools of protest. And we were learning the tools of the international human rights movement by accident. And so, yeah, so we started the International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission, which is now Outright. … We were quoting the, you know, the UN Declaration of Human Rights and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights in particular, like, we would use stuff out of those documents to make our claims, right? And write our official letters of protest. But we knew nothing about them.Footnote 131
Dorf’s NGO would assume an increasingly important role within ILGA towards the mid-1990s, when it became the association’s action secretariat. In particular, they were at the centre of two key initiatives for the queer movement’s international mobilization: the engagement at the Fourth World Conference on Women (IV WCW), which took place in Beijing in 1995; and ILGA’s bid for consultative status at the ECOSOC.
After the very occasional engagement of lesbian groups or individuals in the previous women’s conferences held in Mexico City, Copenhagen, and Nairobi,Footnote 132 and with the topic already gathering more attention at the World Conference on Human Rights (Vienna, 1993),Footnote 133 Beijing saw the intersection of gender and sexuality gain momentum at the international level.Footnote 134 If Nairobi witnessed the first-ever substantive mention of sexual orientation delivered by a state representative in a UN forum,Footnote 135 Beijing marked an outburst of debates on sexual orientation and homosexuality. Increasingly more organized, sexual rights activists had established a ‘lesbian tent’ to coordinate the action in the Chinese city, and the slogan ‘lesbian rights are human rights’ could be seen throughout the days of the Conference in documents and banners.Footnote 136 The discussions, famously heavily influenced by the lobby coordinated between the Holy See and the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC), resulted in all mentions of ‘sexual orientation’ being excluded from the final version of the Beijing Platform of Action,Footnote 137 and the word ‘gender’ almost suffered the same fate, being considered a ‘code’ for homosexuality by some of its opponents, although it was ultimately kept in the final document.Footnote 138
On another front, ILGA’s bid for consultative status before the ECOSOC had been on the organization’s agenda since its early meetings. The application was submitted in 1990, and ILGA activists, including the two Secretaries-General, Lisa Power and John Clark, went to New York at the beginning of 1991 to attend the ECOSOC hearings and lobby in favour of the organization’s request.Footnote 139 This would also reportedly be the first time in history that an openly queer activist would speak at the meeting of an official UN permanent body.Footnote 140 Despite the opposition being weaker than the activists had expected, no consensus was reached in the ECOSOC’s NGO Committee, and the application was postponed to 1993.Footnote 141 In March 1993, the association was finally successful in its bid in a session of the Committee that, for the first time, abandoned its consensus tradition to approve the consultative status of two organizations, Human Rights Watch and ILGA.Footnote 142 The excitement of finally achieving a long-dreamed of project, and having the first-ever queer organization accredited by the ECOSOC, did not last for more than a few months. As early as September 1993, a campaign spearheaded by US conservative politicians called for the suspension of ILGA’s status under the argument that the association promoted pedophilia,Footnote 143 leading to a crisis in the organization’s image.Footnote 144 Not more than a year after this, in September 1994, ILGA had its consultative status suspended, and along with it went the activists’ hope to more actively use the UN as a platform to promote the discursive transformation of queer rights into human rights.Footnote 145
The association, which, after many name changes to expand inclusion beyond gays and lesbians, would eventually drop its ‘subtitle’ to be known as only ILGA World, relocated its office from Brussels to Geneva in 2014.Footnote 146 A few years before moving its headquarters, the organization had finally regained, in July 2011, its consultative status before the ECOSOC, allowing it to more meaningfully engage with the UN Human Rights Council (HRC), and exercise a key role in the process of reconceptualizing queer rights as human rights, which would soon garner an institutional partner with the launch of the OHCHR Free & Equal Campaign in 2013.Footnote 147 To this day, ILGA World remains the only LGBTI-led international NGO based in Geneva and the main civil society actor coordinating SOGI advocacy at the UN human rights bodies in the city. It is still through the association’s efforts that the struggle to fully integrate queer rights into human rights discourse continues to unfold.
8. Conclusion
IGA’s two-decade campaign to convince Amnesty International that gay rights were human rights marks one of the early forms of queer engagement with IHRL. As this article has shown, that engagement was neither obvious nor inevitable. Queer demands were not ‘naturally’ linked to human rights. They became so through a painstaking process of advocacy, coalition-building, and discursive reframing, conducted by activists who were, in many cases, ‘learning the tools of the international human rights movement by accident’.Footnote 148 In other words, the resort to IHRL was both purposeful and accidental: a strategic choice shaped as much by the North Atlantic legal culture of the 1970s and the institutional landscape of the post-war period as by any predetermined logic of (human) rights expansion.
This article makes three contributions. First, it locates the history of queer transnational activism as an integral part of the broader history of IHRL, showing what is lost when queer engagement is treated as peripheral and kept out of historical accounts. Second, it demonstrates that human rights discourse was not a pre-existing vehicle waiting to carry queer claims but was itself reshaped by the activism that mobilized it. As a result, the meanings of the very ‘universality’ that gay groups sought to be a part of became something new as a consequence of their struggle to include queer subjects within it. Third, it recovers a complexity with which queer activism engages with IHRL discourse. The ambivalent nature of this relationship, and the accounts of IGA’s campaign, reveal that queer international activism, at least in its beginnings, was neither entirely radical nor completely assimilationist; it was, in fact, both.
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