This is a visionary book based on intimate research of truly global scope. South African journalist and author Mark Gevisser studies how the complex movement for ‘queer’ civil rights and the recognition of alternative gender identities created new dividing lines – ‘pink frontiers’ – all over the world. He notes the surprising rapidity of this process, in comparison with other emancipatory movements. It was only during the last two decades that this process acquired a global scope effecting huge changes in people's lives. Yet, the main thrust of the book is that it effected changes in starkly varying forms, calling forth equally different reactions, varying from support to angry counter-offensives. He illustrates this with a series of personal stories from all over the world, alternated with thematic chapters (‘New global cultural wars’, ‘Pink folk devils’, ‘Gender-theory panic’, ‘Pink dollars’) that guide readers through all the twists and turns of debates and law making on ever new fronts of the Pink Line.
The story chapters are the result of seven years travelling all over the globe and following friends in very different situations: two LGBT refugees from Malawi and Kenya; an Egyptian lesbian couple struggling to keep their pub going in the heart of Cairo; a Muscovite transgender woman in a legal battle to retain access to her son; young trans people in Michigan; a gay Palestinian–Israeli couple in Tel Aviv; a group of alternative hijras (third sex) around a temple in a Tamil fishing village, and many more. With all these people Gevisser succeeded in building an intimate understanding so that the stories are enticing. It is almost impossible to stop reading even though the book has sixteen chapters and more than 500 pages.
Strong points include that the author keeps a distance from an ‘it's getting better’ perspective that implies unilinear progress. Rather, he shows time and again that increasing visibility provokes ever stronger backlash – in the US as much as in Nigeria, Russia or Jamaica. All his stories have an open ending. For him, listening to all these variable stories is liberating in itself. Another strong point is his keen sense of the practical context. For him, LGBT emancipation is not only about ideas, whether or not fixed in laws; it is also about economics and everyday struggles to survive. He connects the quite abrupt emergence of gay subculture out of the ghetto in the 1990s in the US to the realization in business circles that the much targeted DINKs – ‘double income, no kids’, a popular expression at the time – with their purchasing power were epitomized by gay couples. This focus on the ‘pink dollar’ is also crucial in the Tel Aviv story, but here with quite bizarre effects: Netanyahu is using the image of ‘gay Israel’ not only to promote tourism but also to advertise it as a free haven amidst Arab homophobia and bigotry. Yet he always has to balance this with his orthodox supporters. But ‘gay Israel’ has an even weirder reverse. Gevisser signals how Shin Bet (Israeli intelligence) traces young Palestinian gays in order to recruit them as informers by threatening to out them to their families. On the Pink Line, things can be turned upside down.
The pink dollar plays a different role in Gevisser's African examples. A key figure in the book is ‘Aunty’, the Malawian transgender women involved in the ‘gay marriage’ that created such a stir in the country (and globally) in 2009. She was sentenced to fourteen years in jail, liberated through the intervention of UN secretary Ban Ki-Moon in person, and then accorded asylum in South Africa with the help of Amnesty International. Since 2012, she was settled, precariously, in a township in Cape Town. A recurrent theme in this chapter – and in the one on an LGBT refugee from Uganda – is the ‘dependency trap’. Aunty became accustomed to Amnesty supporting her. Gevisser also contributed, and this created expectations that blocked her from taking responsibility for her own life. But this was also seen by others as the umpteenth proof that ‘homosexuality’ was imposed on Africa from the outside. It also reinforced popular jealousy of gays as having special ‘access’ to hidden sources of wealth. It is striking that this element – both the dependency trap and the association of homosexuality with riches – comes so strongly to the fore in the African examples. It might be relevant that this association of transgressive sex with wealth has a longer genealogy in many African settings. For Cameroon, for instance, Günter Tessmann, the first ethnographer of the Fang, already signalled in around 1900 their notion of a ‘medicine of wealth’ that turned out to be equated with same-sex practices.Footnote 1 Of course, the idea of sexual transgression as providing special access is quite general (cf. the French notion of ‘le milieu’). But the equation of same-sex practices with riches seems to have a special impact in many African settings yet seems to be neglected in current debates about homophobia.
The African interlocutors in these chapters also refer to ‘witchcraft’ (a very unfortunate term, yet generally appropriated now by Africans). Both refugees blame their gender trouble on having been bewitched in youth. This link – similarly neglected in general debates – is so strong that in many contexts ‘witch’ is used as a metonym for ‘homosexual’. Again, it might be useful to disentangle this association. The problem is the term ‘witchcraft’, with its pejorative associations. Local notions have often a more ambiguous charge, implying also enrichment and empowerment.
An inevitable question the book raises is to what extent the ‘Pink Line’ notion is helpful. It clearly did inspire Gevisser to a truly global view. I wonder whether it does not create too much unity. In the later chapters – again very rich and full of emotion – trans people are foregrounded. But do they want to be grouped under ‘pink’? Gevisser notes strong opposition among some feminists and lesbians to include them in the movement. But at least some trans people – aware of the attention lesbians and gays received in the past – might have their own ideas about this. Yet, in these chapters as well, Gevisser is an engaging guide, able to follow unexpected turns and surprising shifts through his unfailing commitment. This is also the main strength of the book: it is a shining tribute to the resourcefulness and zest for life of people in the most threatening situations.
