I truly enjoy writing Global Gaze each week, exploring a range of international issues and topics relating to LGBT people worldwide. However, these posts have tended to look almost exclusively at political and legal issues, as these are what I’m most familiar with. In focusing on these important concerns, I now realize that I have ignored many of the fascinating societal and cultural aspects of the global queer experience that this blog covers so well for the American LGBT community. Now that Global Gaze has become a weekly column and there will be an opportunity to cover a broader range of issues, I’m going to try to bring a more varied look at the queer experience around the globe to the forefront.

Every adventure needs to start somewhere, however, and the first baby step in this journey is going to be looking at one of the more literal intersections of politics and LGBT culture: government censorship of queer issues and media.

In 1933, Sigmund Freud noted, “What progress we are making.  In the Middle Ages they would have burned me.  Now they are content with burning my books.” In some ways this observation seems particularly relevant to queer individuals around the globe: While being gay and performing homosexual acts is becoming increasingly legal around the world, openly “flaunting” one’s queer identity or depicting it in the media or the classroom still remains taboo and is regulated in many parts of the international community.

This seems to mirror on the global level the stages of personal acceptance described by Kenji Yoshino in his book entitled Covering: The Hidden Assault on Our Civil Rights. In the book, Yoshino describes three phases of experience for many LGBT individuals: conversion, passing and covering. In the conversion phase, a queer individual will often try to transform himself or herself into a heterosexual through methods such as therapy or prayer. In the passing phase, said individual accepts his or her orientation but keeps it from others, choosing to stay in the closet. Finally, many out homosexuals begin covering, in that they avoid “flaunting” their identity by taking steps such as refraining from same-sex public displays of affection and avoiding doing or writing “gay” things.

Interestingly, Yoshino notes, this entire process has been mirrored at the societal level in the United States by the American LGBT community’s quest for equality and civil rights: “Through the middle of the twentieth century, gays were routinely asked to convert to heterosexuality, whether through lobotomies, electroshock therapy, or psychoanalysis. As the gay rights movement gained strength, the demand to convert gradually ceded to the demand to pass. This shift can be seen in the military’s adoption in 1993 of the ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’ policy, under which gays are permitted to serve so long as we pass. Finally, at the millennium’s turn, the demand to pass is giving way to the demand to cover – gays are increasingly permitted to be gay and out so long as we do not ‘flaunt’ our identities.” I don’t think it’s too much of a stretch to see this as comparable to the process that many countries are going through now – having achieved the decriminalization of homosexuality, they are now dealing with other, more subtle ways in which queer people are discriminated against in society. It also seems to me that government censorship of gay ideas and media is a particularly effective way of keeping LGBT people from “flaunting” their identities in conservative societies.

All of this emphasizes that merely winning legal victories and changing laws is not enough to ensure true equality and a better quality of life for queer individuals throughout the international community.

In the last few weeks, issues of censorship and the LGBT community have popped up repeatedly in the international press. Probably the most notable recent example of censorship and the LGBT community comes from the country of Lithuania. Beyond media and popular culture, the government of this Baltic state has, in the last few weeks, attempted to fundamentally limit the visibility of homosexuals and queer topics for the sake of the children.  Earlier this month, the country’s parliament passed a measure, against the wishes and veto of the largely Catholic country’s President, which censors and restricts the proliferation of anything that impedes the “intellectual or moral development” of Lithuanian minors. Of course, included among the 19 examples of such banned materials is anything that “agitates for homosexual, bisexual, and polygamous relations,” right along side information on how to make bombs.

While the former President’s veto was indeed overruled, the new President, Dalia Grybauskaite, who entered office just days after the law was passed, has stated that she intends to use all of the tools at her disposal to amend the bill later this year, saying vaguely that the “human rights of all of society” are important to her.  The fact that Lithuania is a member of the EU, and has therefore signed on to the organization’s human rights protocols, further complicates matters and puts pressure on the new President to do all she can to reform the law. This issue will be one the international community should keep a close eye on, not just because of its impact on gay rights, but also its implications for freedom of speech protections as well.

Not far away, in Ukraine, if you were hoping to see Sasha Baron Cohen’s latest film, Brüno, you had better be prepared to do some traveling.  The former Soviet country has officially banned the film, claiming that the movie is being censored due to its “artistically unjustified exhibition of sexual organs and sexual relations, homosexual acts in a blatantly graphic form, obscene language, sadism [and] anti-social behaviour which could damage the moral upbringing of our citizens.”  There’s been a lot of debate on the Internet about whether Brüno actually paints homosexuals or homophobes in a bad light (if you’re, for some unexplainable reason, interested in my favorite take on the matter, read this piece. Best line: “If you trip over a rainbow flag, what it represents becomes secondary to its obstruction.”), but it’s clear that, either way, part of the reason the country banned the film was because it believed that the gay elements would offend its fairly conservative population.

Another example of, at the very least, tacit censorship truly reveals how culture and politics can be interconnected. In Belarus, another Eastern European country, a recent shipment of 25 copies of Pride magazine has been confiscated on its way into the country. The government denies anti-gay censorship and claims that customs officials seized the materials because they were sent to the group GayBelarus rather than to an individual, and GayBelarus is not an organization registered with the state.  This explanation, however, reveals that the group’s petitions to become recognized have been repeatedly declined in the country, one where homosexuality is legal but most facets of society remain hostile towards the LGBT community. This is another example of how homosexuality may be technically permitted in a country and yet queer individuals are nonetheless prohibited from fully enjoying their cultural lives.

It should be pointed out that the previous three examples all come from the same geographic region. While Eastern Europe generally has some highly visible issues relating to freedom of speech due in part to its Soviet past, it’s important to remember that these problems are not rare in other parts of the world, including some of the most politically liberal countries in the international community. The arguments made by supporters of the Lithuanian measure, particularly, sound eerily similar to those made by same-sex marriage opponents here in the US, who claim that gay marriage will lead to the teaching of gay topics in schools, as if not teaching them makes them any less real or present. It’s a reminder that the international queer community needs to remain ever-vigilant to civil rights threats, as they can come in a variety of forms.

Finally, I’ll end this post on a tangentially-related note that serves as a nice counterpoint to all of this: Apparently, the Vatican has reversed its position on queer author Oscar Wilde, now praising him after years of condemning him as immoral despite his deathbed conversion to Catholicism. Go figure.

So, what say you, Global Gaze readers? Where does censorship rank in terms of its importance and need for attention from international queer activists? Does the idea of being allowed to be gay, but not “flaunt” your gayness resonate with you? What about countries where one’s queer identity is expressed by different means than in the West? Feel completely and utterly free to make your voice heard in the comments below!