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The right to sexual orientation and gender identity (SOGI) are integral to and manifest in LGBTIQ rights including homosexuality and same-sex marriage. International law promotes these rights and prohibits discrimination on these grounds. Many western countries endorse these rights and prohibitions in parliamentary legislation or judicial fiat. In comparison with all other jurisdictions worldwide, and within the African sub-region, only South Africa specifically prohibits unfair direct or indirect discrimination based on "sexual orientation" in its national constitution. This paper explores African approach to SOGI and LGBTIQ rights including homosexuality and same-sex marriage. It argues that despite the threat of homocapitalism, prevalent Afrocentrism and religions reject these form of "new rights" for being immoral, ungodly, unnatural and un-African, thereby underlining the limits of human rights in the sub-region. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the relation between nationalism and heteronormativity through the lens of hegemonic masculinity and shows how Turkish nationalism helps to construct the "normal" and thus strengthen heteronormative thinking in Turkish society. Utilizing in-depth interviews in Çanakkale with 16 men who carry the typical features of a privileged Turkish citizen—namely the ones self-identifying as Turkish, Sunni Muslim, heterosexual, and breadwinner—my aim in the paper is to reveal and comprehend attitudes toward non-heterosexual people in Turkey, to challenge the effect of the possible nationalist ideological tendencies on participants' discourses, and to explicate if such tendencies play a part in justifying their attitudes. I suggest that respondents' privileges are obtained in exchange for strict commitment to Turkish nationalistic values. These values not only define what constitutes "normal" but also determine and disparage anyone who deviates from such definition. Greater commitment to such values signals a more powerful heterosexual matrix and thus greater exclusion of queer people in Turkey. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Kinship has been the primary concern among young queer people in today's China and other parts of Asia under the strong and ongoing familism, who often find it challenging to come out and negotiate their sexuality with their parental family. This paper adopts the concept of stretched kinship to critically analyze the digital videos released by PFLAG China (Parents and Friends of Lesbians and Gays in China) from 2015 to 2020, focusing on the experiences of the parents in their responses to young people's coming out. It both extends and challenges the concept of stretched kinship by turning the spotlight from queer youth to their parents—a topic often overlooked in queer Asian and Chinese studies—to examine how Chinese parents reject and accept their queer child contextualized in the rapid and ongoing social change in twenty-first-century China and Asia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Until 1985 Essex was mostly preoccupied with helping his friend Joe Beam put together what would be the pathbreaking Black gay anthology I In The Life i , and in enjoying a live-in love affair with a naval career officer who broke it off after several years, leaving Essex sadly missing what he called "the domestic repetition of beauty that is found in caring for and being cared for by a lover." In 1980, Miller arranged for Essex and the Black lesbian poet/filmmaker Michelle Parkerson-she and Essex immediately bonded and became lifelong friends-to share a bill together at a poetry reading series at Howard University.[5] From that point on, Essex's contacts and publications proliferated. For additional material I'm indebted to Frances Goldin, Essex's literary agent (and at the time, my own), who located Essex's early poems for me in her back files, as well as the manuscript of his long-lost novel, "Standing in the Gap." 20 For this and the following three paragraphs: Michelle Parkerson to me, April 8, 2013; Hemphill to Assotto Saint, June 10, 1993, Assotto Saint (Yves Lubin) Papers, Schomburg Library; Goldin to Hemphill, Sept. 1, 1992, Jan. 13, 1993; Goldin to Peter Borland (NAL), Nov. 4, 1992; Hemphill to Goldin, Dec. 21, 1992, Feb. 16, July 28, Sept. 1993-all courtesy Goldin. [Extracted from the article]

Italy is an anomaly among its peers in the European Union (EU) because of its resistance to LGBTQ+ inclusion, acceptance, and legitimation. The acquisition of civil liberties—especially the right to same-sex marriage—remains a dream deferred for queer Italians, and the prioritization of transgender rights has just begun to be seen in broader political discourse. This paper investigates homophobia in Italy, and the social constructs and institutions that support it. We account for the pervasiveness of anti-queerness at the state, cultural, and interpersonal levels of Italian society, and offer recommendations for scholars conducting research in these areas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The alleged prevalence of anti-gay bias among Black communities in the United States has received ample popular and academic attention in recent decades. But just how consistent is the purported relationship between race and homophobia? In this paper, we use the American National Election Studies and the General Social Survey to show that public claims about "Black homophobia" have been dangerously overstated. Moreover, where racial differences in attitudes toward same-gender sexuality do occur, we find that the two most prevalent scholarly explanations for such gaps—religious institutions and gender ideologies—do not predict anti-gay bias for Black survey respondents. We thus derive an alternative explanation from scholarship on group threat: that perceived competition for political resources is what motivates racial differences in antagonism toward same-gender sexuality. Our results support that alternative and, in so doing, evince the importance of a relational approach to homophobia in academic and activist spheres alike. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Gay or queer relationships in Zimbabwe remain a site of discursive contestation. The rise in human rights advocacy has re/located the subject within the human rights premise, shifting the discussions away but not disconnected from the religious, political and cultural representations. This paper examined the societal constructions and attitudes toward homosexuality by analyzing Twitter exchanges that followed the disclosure on the 21st of September 2018, by a teacher (Neal Hovelmeier) of St John's College in Zimbabwe, that he was gay. The disclosure prompted substantial online and offline debates on gay and queer relationships (what is popularly known as homosexuality in Zimbabwe) and produced two discursive divisions. The first division was against homosexuality and galvanized support across cultural, political, traditional, religious and social constructions. Though less popular, the other division found support from within the gay or queer community itself, the global North diplomatic missions resident in Zimbabwe, liberal left-leaning and some civil society organizations. The former's key feature is societal resistance to homosexuality which is constructed by way of inferences to Christianity and traditional belief systems about binary gender and sex categories and sexual relations. The latter has constructed homosexuality from the premise of human rights, acceptance and tolerance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This analysis uses trial records from the 1860s to explore a same-sex male relationship that devolved into panic and murder. The paper's goal is to better understand how, during the middle of the nineteenth century, men who had sexual feeling for other men were forced into spaces that were qualitatively different than our current understanding of "the closet." The paper concludes that what we now call "coming out" was not an option during this era. In telling the story of how Samuel Andrews killed his best friend, Cornelius Holmes, this paper shows that the categories ordinarily presented as symmetrical binary oppositions in contemporary times—homo/heterosexual, closeted/out—did not work for Andrews and Holmes, and probably did not and could not have worked for others living under similar conditions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Schools are places where youth do work on the construction of their sexual identities which is intimately connected with issues around gender. Using one-on-one in-depth interviews, this article addresses how queer youth navigate dominant understandings of gender and sexuality in the context of their identity and practice. Cognizant of how gender remains a significant force in organizing social relations in schools, the youth parody and abnormalize heteronormativity calling into question the fragility of hegemonic heterosexuality. Moreover, the findings demonstrate that despite evidence that associates schooling with social exclusion, the queer youth's accounts highlight, strikingly, that queer identity and inclusion are not necessarily separate storylines. Offering an alternative view of the schooling experiences of queer youth, the paper motivates that within exclusion, in a matter of speaking with all its unduly assemblages, is inclusion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper focuses on the affective economies which materialize around race, sexuality and queerness in the British context to enable the production and mobilization of an exceptionalist discourse of gay-friendly and post-homophobic Britain (i.e., pinkwashing). The author investigates the discursive workings of pinkwashing coupled with the racialization of homophobia, through a critical reading of the BBC Two documentary Out There (2013a), written and narrated by British gay-identified writer, activist and artist, Stephen Fry. The documentary captures and is in fact captured within a global moment of human rights speculation in which some European nation-states have invested in affective discourses of queer futurities as a marker of their capacity for tolerance, in contrast to predominantly racialized subjects/communities within and outside of Europe, increasingly naturalized as always already homophobic (i.e., racializing homophobia). My reading of the documentary demonstrates the interconnection between pinkwashing and racialized homophobia as discursive inventions which depend on the mobilization of affects such as love, pride, terror, hate and (un)happiness, as currencies of governance. Far from being universal or abstract, I contend that British LGBTQ human rights speculative discourse draws on a highly racialized affective economy—which constructs racialized communities within Britain and racialized populations and states outside the West, as excessively homophobic, rendering pre-dominantly gay male British subjects (and homopatriarchy) as exceptional patriots. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A burgeoning canon of Maghrebian writers in self-imposed exiled in France has in the last decade begun to openly broach the subject of homosexuality in Arab-Muslim communities of the Maghreb. Novels of writers like Abdellah Taïa, Rachid O. and Eyet-Chékib Djaziri reflect a fascinating trans-Mediterranean construction of homosexual identity. Drawing on Svetlana Boym's critical work, particularly her observation that nostalgia "charts an affective geography of the native land that often mirrors the melancholic landscapes" of the exiled, this paper analyzes the construction of homosexuality against the notions of exile, nostalgia, and marginality. The novels of these Maghrebian writers highlight nostalgia as both cathartic and paralyzing for "gay" migrant protagonists who find themselves trapped in the subtle seam between a cherished Maghreb that is framed as homophobic in the sexual clash of civilizations and a more liberal yet inauspicious France. The nostalgic contemplation of the constitution of a homosexual subjectivity is read as a critical performance and mainstreaming of hitherto marginalized voices that now subvert and fight back against normalizing discourses of ethnicity, sexual and gender identity as well as nationality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]