6    The Battle at the United Nations

Edwin Cameron searches through the drawers of his huge desk. He opens some closets between dozens of legal code and case law books. He remembers storing copies of the South African Constitution. He isn’t finding them. “You absolutely have to have the real thing, not just a copy,” he insists. He sends for his secretary and his assistant and speaks to them with great kindness. Everyone starts looking for these constitutional texts. And suddenly they find the precious documents: small purple books, 460 pages long, in a pile and still wrapped in cellophane. Edwin Cameron gently unfolds one of these books and opens it to the second chapter, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and reads Section 9, “Equality,” to me: “Everyone is equal before the law and has the right to equal protection and benefit of the law.” What follows are several causes of discrimination expressly prohibited by the state, including race, gender, sex, skin color, and sexual orientation. Cameron repeats: “Sexual orientation.” This is the first time ever in the world that a constitution has included this protection. South Africa is ahead of its time. Thanks to Justice Cameron.

The Constitutional Court of South Africa is located on the very site of a former famous prison during apartheid: Old Fort Number Four. Nelson Mandela was imprisoned there twice, and I visit the tiny, spartan cells, which have been preserved. Some are no bigger than a broom closet. This symbol of the pain and suffering of political prisoners has become the site of justice par excellence. At the entrance to the court, I notice a huge photograph: a gay couple who got the right to marry.

At age sixty-three, Edwin Cameron has an impressive physique and elegance. Simple, prim, he stands more than six feet four inches tall. He was born into a white family in Pretoria, half-Afrikaner on his mother’s side and half-Scottish on his father’s. “It was a very poor, working-class, uneducated family. His father was an alcoholic who had done time in prison. Very young, Edwin had to meet his parents’ needs,” Timothy Trengove-Jones, Cameron’s best friend, tells me. Despite such humble origins, Edwin Cameron was a brilliant pupil in school. He wanted to study law and was accepted to Oxford. There, far from Africa, the young Edwin proved exceptionally gifted; he left Oxford showered with diplomas, both a lawyer and a law professor. His destiny was totally mapped out: he would perform in London, among the greatest, be a “barrister,” he who signs the grand arguments and leaves his name attached to important case law. Except that Cameron hated the rigidity of British society, the pretentions of the British elite, and the refined narrow-mindedness of small little England, its airs and its polished language. He wanted to escape from Europe’s social and cultural hierarchies. He went home to Africa.

“For me, South Africa is a dry winter in July and the smell of the brown, dry grass of summer in December. I love my country,” Cameron tells me. In Johannesburg, where he settled, there was apartheid, a racist system that normalized white supremacy and confined blacks to townships and Bantu homelands. As a lawyer and above all as a white man, Ed Cameron started to defend the black cause. He was close to the African National Congress (ANC), the political party of the black majority that was declared illegal by the white minority in power in South Africa. He became an anti-apartheid lawyer and an ANC leader in 1990. Not much later, the South African racist system collapsed, and Nelson Mandela was released from prison.

“We pledge ourselves to liberate all our people from the continuing bondage of poverty, deprivation, suffering, gender and other discrimination.” So said Mandela on May 10, 1994, the day of his inauguration as the first president of a free South Africa. He who had just spent twenty-six years in prison—the most famous political prisoner in the world, registered as number 466/64—was not bitter. He did not seek revenge. He did not condemn white people. He just wanted to give birth to “a society of which all humanity will be proud.” This morality of equality, this kindness, he applied to black people as he did to white people, to social and educational issues, but also explicitly to “gender.” And with Mandela’s accession to the presidency of the “Rainbow Nation,” his former lawyer proposed to decriminalize homosexuality, the homophobic law an obsolete relic inherited from British colonialism and apartheid (a crime then punished by seven years’ imprisonment).

Edwin Cameron knew Mandela. He worshipped his sense of justice, his principles of nonviolence, and over the course of several interviews he tells me Mandela’s life story, in minute detail, as if he were Mandela’s official biographer. Mandela was grateful that Cameron had served the black cause under apartheid, and, on coming into power in 1994 he appointed Cameron immediately to the court of first instance—a rare privilege (he was later appointed to the appeals court by Mandela’s successor and finally to the Constitutional Court in 2008).

Over time, Edwin Cameron, in parallel with his black activism, discovered a second cause: the LGBT issue. “He was not openly gay when he was a student at Oxford; he even married and divorced quickly,” says his friend Timothy Trengove-Jones. Over the years, he began to display his homosexuality in a South Africa that was still very homophobic, and his determination in support of gays increased. He was among the organizers of the first Gay Pride in Johannesburg and founded the AIDS Law Project. Above all, he campaigned with Mandela and his party, the ANC, to have a ban on discrimination based on sexual orientation included in the new South African constitution. “I believed very early in the idea of a Rainbow Nation. To do away with apartheid and to be an inclusive country, South Africa also had to include gays and not leave them by the wayside,” Cameron tells me. So he got involved. Trengove-Jones says that “Edwin always knew where he wanted to go. He constantly adapted his strategy to his purpose. He was never a part of the confrontation. He sought to persuade, to convince, always with calm and determination.”

Negotiations were going to be tight. Within the ANC, there were voices against privileging a practice, homosexuality, in the Constitution because they considered it a “non-African perversion.” Some used irony, referring to the authorization of bestiality and pedophilia. But for Mandela, this debate had no reason for being. “We are not yet free; we have only achieved the freedom to be free,” he said. For him, as later for Barack Obama, there was a link between the condition of blacks and that of homosexuals. It was important to offer all citizens equal rights. Homosexuality, he said, is not “anti-African” but “just another form of sexuality that was repressed for years.”

While reading Mandela’s autobiography Long Walk to Freedom and perusing his notebooks, Conversations with Myself, on the plane to Johannesburg, I was struck by the sense of justice that always drove this man who received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1993. In them, he appears passionate, even exuberant, always anxious to be fair: with his jailers or Afrikaners in the past and now with his political opponents. “Mandela was not very comfortable, contrary to what is sometimes believed, with the question of homosexuality. He curbed himself on the topic of sexuality, and he also has very strong words to say in his memoirs about the need for sexual abstinence in prison. But there was no doubt for him regarding the fact that sexual orientation should be included in the Constitution. It was not a matter of personal opinion; it was a matter of social justice and human rights,” Edwin Cameron explains to me. Anthony Manion, director of South Africa’s Gay and Lesbian Archives, confirms that “Mandela was not particularly pro-gay. Based on all the evidence we have collected, he was rather uncomfortable about it. He promoted gay rights through his idea of national reconciliation and inclusion. It was genius of him to have anticipated the importance of the subject and to want equality for all.” Manion also shows me a famous photograph of Mandela surrounded by leaders of LGBT organizations in 1995.

For Mandela, as for Cameron, sexual orientation therefore had to be included in the Constitution. “We lobbied intensely, and Mandela knew that I was gay. I chose and very ardently wanted the expression sexual orientation included. We managed to convince the ANC to fight against both apartheid and discrimination against gays,” Cameron says. He was joined in his fight by Simon Nkoli, one of the few openly gay activists within the ANC (who died of AIDS in 1998). “I’m black, and I’m gay. In South Africa, I am oppressed because I’m a black man, and I am oppressed because I am gay. So when I fight for my freedom, I have to fight against both of these oppressions,” said Nkoli. Together with Cameron, they wrote the section of the Constitution that would include “sexual orientation” and addressed the subject honestly with Mandela. They approached the committee responsible for drafting the Constitution, and the lobbying intensified—driven in particular by Nobel Peace Prize winner, Anglican Archbishop Desmond Tutu, who wrote a letter in favor of the inclusion of sexual orientation in the Constitution: “I have no doubt that in the future, the laws that criminalize so many forms of human love and commitment will look the way the apartheid laws do to us now—so obviously wrong,” wrote Tutu. “And it worked!” enthuses Edwin Cameron. “The first postapartheid Constitution was adopted in 1994 and confirmed in 1996, including sexual orientation. First time in the world. This was the first time a constitution included the protection of homosexuals. Over twenty years have passed since, and I still can’t believe we did it.”

On the wall in Cameron’s office, a jaguar kisses a flower: it’s a beautiful figurative tapestry. A metaphor? On a shelf of the huge library, I also notice a picture of Cameron with Mandela. We talk about Makgatho, Mandela’s second son, who died of AIDS. “Mandela released his son’s cause of death along with his intention to devote the rest of his life to the fight against AIDS. I was impressed by this language of truth.” Cameron himself learned of his own HIV-positive status in 1996 and made it public three years later. “He had to come out twice: as a homosexual and as HIV positive,” says his friend Trengove-Jones. Since then, Justice Cameron has continued his tireless struggle for the rights of gays and people living with HIV.

“For me, what’s important is to steer your course, know what you want, and go there cautiously, gradually.” Cameron stresses the word gradually. “When it comes to fundamental freedoms and civil rights, you have to move ahead little by little, gradually, but never cede nor retreat,” he adds. Half an activist and half a judge—that’s his strength—Edwin Cameron always looks ahead. Next step: marriage.

This time the judiciary would enter the game. Cameron was one of the appeal judges to plead for the case to be brought before the Constitutional Court. And ten years after adopting the most gay-friendly constitution in the world, South Africa, under judicial pressure, authorized same-sex marriage in 2006. It became the first—and for now the only—African country to authorize same-sex marriage (and the fifth in the world). Mandela’s future successor, Jacob Zuma, would be a virulent opponent of this law.

South African progressivism? “I’m not optimistic, but I’m full of hope. Who would have thought we’d find treatments for AIDS? Who would have imagined the end of apartheid? Who would have predicted that I would become one of the eleven judges on South Africa’s Constitutional Court? With every day, I am happy to learn new things,” Cameron tells me. Today’s situation is no longer that of Mandela’s in 1994. Although there is still hope, optimism is no longer in fashion.

Today, South Africa, an emerging country with rapid economic growth, has joined the coveted BRIC club (Brazil, Russia, India, China, which became known as BRIICS with the addition of Indonesia and South Africa). Gay life in Johannesburg and other cities from Pretoria to Cape Town, via Durban, has been alive, and every year Gay Pride has been popular. South Africa is often considered the most gay-friendly country in Africa.

Despite these decisive breakthroughs, serious problems persist for LGBT people in South Africa. First of all, AIDS persists, a frightening epidemic. The country currently has nearly 6 million people infected with HIV, according to UNAIDS figures. And although the pandemic affects the entire population, it still affects gays even more in cities such as Cape Town and Durban and in the black ghettos, where the prevalence rate rose to 34 percent among MSM (men who have sex with men). “Here, AIDS is central to our daily lives,” says Sipho Dladla, a dynamic sociocultural activist with whom I go to Kliptown, a Soweto shantytown of corrugated iron, staggering poverty, and lack of security.

Beyond AIDS, family and social homophobia, sometimes fueled by the country’s many religions and even more by its traditions, remains deeply entrenched in South African society. In this still violent country, especially in the townships, whose criminal mortality rate is high, homophobic crimes, violence against transsexuals, and especially rapes of lesbians are frequent. “[The rape of lesbians is] a phenomenon that remains largely underestimated. This concerns people who are triply vulnerable: black lesbian women. Women are already in fragile situations in townships, and homosexuality is an aggravating risk factor. Especially since the police never take their complaints seriously,” says Noma Pakade, a black lesbian activist who comes with me to the Hillbrow ghetto. “The problem is that equality exists on paper. Not in the way people think. It’s one thing to have rights; it’s another to be able to defend oneself,” says Tiseke Kazambala, a Human Rights Watch leader who participated in a major report on “corrective rapes,” or rapes meant to “fix” black lesbians in South Africa.

Forms of segregation also persist. In gay bars in Johannesburg, I am struck by the frequent separation between black and white gays. At Liquid, on Seventh Street in the alternative district of Melville, there is a big crowd, but I am the only white person; at the Liberation café, by contrast, the majority of people are white. It is the same at Gay Pride, which in the 2000s was a mixed affair on Pretoria Street in Hillbrow, Johannesburg; today, there are two Gay Prides: a festive “parade” in the affluent, white neighborhood of Rosebank and a more political “march” in the black township of Soweto. In South Africa, race and class are often far greater determining factors than sexual orientation.

Ultimately, if Americans and Europeans sometimes appear ahead of their constitutions and laws, South Africa offers the peculiarity of being a country where the Constitution is ahead of the way its people think.

And there remains the power of those in office. The current South African president, the Zulu Jacob Zuma, never really embraced Nelson Mandela’s pro-gay arguments, even though Zuma briefly shared Mandela’s cell in prison. This proclaimed polygamist, anxious to appear a “true African,” has loudly voiced his opposition to same-sex marriages during parliamentary debates. Since his election to the South African presidency, he has led an ambiguous policy at home and an often antigay diplomatic policy in southern Africa. “President Zuma has said completely unacceptable things on the LGBT issue,” says Kgamadi Kometsi, one of the leaders of the very official Human Rights Commission of South Africa. “But he apologized. We must not only see the negative things. It is now about moving forward.” Since 2010 precisely, on the occasion of the FIFA World Cup, Zuma pledged to make the “Rainbow Nation” an exemplary country whose mission it was to respect human rights. Doubtless less sincere than opportunistic, Zuma made some gestures supporting homosexuals, and, more recently, he seems to have joined the progressive countries’ team by committing to the decriminalization of homosexuality at the United Nations.

“How LBGT rights will be considered and treated may be a good barometer for the future of South Africa,” Edwin Cameron tells me over dinner on the eve of my departure from Johannesburg. Cameron has ordered a good wine made of French grapes “and,” he says, “produced in South Africa.” I am pleased to see him relaxed, as he so often seems obsessed by work. He’s taken off his suit, cufflinks, and red tie: he is wearing jeans and would look like every other customer in this shopping mall had organizers earlier that evening during a cultural event not publicly acknowledged his presence, giving rise to lengthy applause from the audience.

Cameron dares to speak a few words of Zulu and confesses to knowing just a few hundred of them. He asks the names of the waitresses, the parking attendants, remembers them, and leaves sizable tips. His generosity and his ability to listen to ordinary people impress me. I think of Mandela. Edwin Cameron is a kind of Mandela of the LGBT cause.

“If we can set an example for the rest of Africa on the gay issue, that would be good,” Cameron says. “That’s our next battle: the universal decriminalization of homosexuality. For that, too, Mandela served as an example.” Michel Sidibé, the UNAIDS executive director and UN deputy secretary-general, says the same thing when I question him in Geneva. “Mandela’s South African Constitution set the tone. That’s our point of reference. And Mandela is still one of the voices that carry in Africa.” Alice Nkom, the main advocate of LGBT rights in Cameroon, tells me, “Nelson Mandela has shown the way. As always, he was a pioneer. It was he who had homosexuality decriminalized. South Africa embodies the example the whole continent must follow.”

“Hang Them”

“Gay bashing was declared here.” Pierre-Marie Djongo’s formulation is explicit. I am in central Yaoundé, the capital of Cameroon, in the studios of Sky 1 radio that Djongo runs. “Every night there is a live illustration of the state of African prejudices. Listeners compare homosexuals to dogs. Others believe that AIDS is a punishment sent by Satan. And some listeners also call to speak about how they suffer being gay. You can measure how far we still have to go when it comes to beliefs by listening to people talk freely on the air.” Pierre-Marie Djongo shows me around the small studio of this private radio station, which is attempting, in the face of the powerful—and not at all gay-friendly—media of Cameroon’s public broadcasting, to usher in more progressivism. “The worst,” Djongo continues, “is that political and moral authorities also maintain these homophobic prejudices. The archbishop of Yaoundé, a widely listened to authority here, denounces homosexuals in his homilies in particularly strong terms.”

Under Article 347-1 of the Cameroon Penal Code, homosexuality is punishable by six months to five years of imprisonment. There is a constant risk of blackmail and persecution. Raids even take place in some establishments suspected of being gay—eleven men, for example, were arrested in a club in Yaoundé in 2005, and a dozen others, sometimes simply for texting, in 2011. “Some of these homosexuals were raped in prison, and their guilt was ‘proved’ by degrading anal inspections. It’s clear: there is a veritable hunt for homosexuals,” confirms Alice Nkom, the Cameroonian lawyer who defends the accused and is now mobilizing to decriminalize homosexuality in Africa. In her great bright orange bubu and adorned with bracelets, Nkom, whom I meet up with in Paris, impresses me. “I had these three gay youth freed one by one. One of them was not yet fifteen years old.” This sixty-seven-year-old lawyer is one of the most respected human rights figures on the continent. For ten years now, she has fought on all fronts to protect “all marginal people.” She created an organization for the defense of homosexuals, which earned her the ironic nickname “Grandma Dyke.” Yet this mother is neither an activist nor a homosexual: she means to stand on strict legal ground to defend gays, homosexuality being for her a human right. “Homophobia is often circumstantial in Africa,” she insists. “It is not inscribed in our history. The taboo against homosexuality is primarily maintained by populist politicians and religious leaders. And the risk is not so much that of an Africa that would be backwards or retrograde, remaining in a feudal age, as some believe, but rather of an ultramodern development, à la the United States—namely, that of exalted neoevangelicals.”

The critical situation of gay rights in Cameroon is not unusual in Africa, where homophobia appears to be the norm and not the exception. On this subject, as on others, we must be careful not to evoke a single, monolithic Africa: there is no such thing as an “African man” or any uniquely African values—it is diversity that has created Africa’s greatest wealth and its identity. With globalization and demographics, the continent is changing at high speed with local circumstances and at very different rates. Today each of thirty-eight African cities has more than a million inhabitants, whereas there was only one such city in 1950. Sometimes, the birth rate nears Western standards, but in other cases it remains very high. Africa is already the youngest continent in the world. Information technologies are upsetting labor relations, modes of communication, and cultural hierarchies. Gay organizations now exist in many African countries: they are visible in South Africa, of course, but they exist also in Zimbabwe and Cameroon, and regional coalitions bring together activists from several Francophone or Anglophone countries (such as All Africa Rights Initiative, Coalition for African Lesbians, Africagay against AIDS, and African Men for Sexual Health and Rights).

In Kenya, the situation is torn between strong economic development, corrupt political power, and strong ethnic, religious, and tribal tensions. Homosexuals don’t interest anyone, and when they do make the news, it is primarily as criminals (homosexuality is a crime in the Kenyan Penal Code, which is modeled on Victorian England’s code, and punishable by fourteen years in prison). A rare movement of “overcriminalization” is under way in a country that has adopted a new constitution that does not condemn homosexuality, though the case could have been otherwise. Representatives of the three major religions in Kenya—Catholic, Anglican, and Islamic—are very opposed to each other, but they are united in their condemnation of homosexuality. Gays with whom I am able to meet in Nairobi, with some difficulty, when I am there in 2013, are particularly wary, and they tell me of arbitrary arrests, violent stigmatizations, and several serious homophobic attacks and incidents notably perpetrated by Islamists. For one of them, Gideon, “the situation is very hieratic in a country where everything can change suddenly.” According to him, “a homosexual can live a form of tranquility, frequent identified secret places discreetly [with others] as a couple, and then suddenly be a victim of denunciations and violent crowds.” Collective lynchings are not uncommon.

Kenya, however, is also part of an emerging Africa and an innovative country, especially in the digital world. I discover in Nairobi smart phone apps that are not exactly pro-gay but can be called gay-friendly. Daudi Were, one of the leaders of the Ushahidi app (the term ushahidi is Swahili for “testimony”), thinks the safety of vulnerable people should be the top priority. “There is considerable violence here, especially at election time, and this violence is too often overlooked. We don’t talk about it; we don’t document it. An application like ours aims to make violence public,” he tells me at the iHub incubator headquarters on Ngong Road in western Nairobi. This app uses the same logic employed for the start-up Map Kibera, which updates a map of the largest ghetto in the city, Kibera, with real-time water points and electricity and security issues. Several independent blogs also provide information on discrimination and violations of human rights.

And then there’s AIDS. The virus continues to wreak havoc, especially in southern Africa, where the highest HIV prevalence rate worldwide can be found (in Swaziland, Botswana, Lesotho, Zimbabwe, Zambia, and South Africa the prevalence rate always exceeds 10 percent of the adult population and in the first three reaches 25 percent). But the epidemic is also high in Malawi, Tanzania, Kenya, and Uganda, which is an excuse sometimes, but not always, for some governments to implement antigay policies. “In sub-Saharan Africa, the HIV virus spreads mainly through heterosexual relations; it can be said, and this is backed up by data, that homophobic laws, in addition to harming human rights, are completely ineffectual; and the more homosexuals hide, the more they are vulnerable. Ultimately, by reinforcing stigma, we run the risk of slowing the fight against AIDS and increasing the contamination of vulnerable populations,” says the Malian Michel Sidibé, executive director of UNAIDS.

Africa remains a continent where homophobia is too often the norm: almost forty countries have laws prohibiting homosexual relations between consenting adults. In some twenty of them, serious harm done to the human rights of homosexuals are routinely recorded. Finally, in four Muslim countries in Africa (Mauritania, North Sudan, northern Nigeria, and some parts of Somalia), homosexuality is still punishable by death. Several other nations intend even now to tighten their laws against homosexuals. The recriminalization and overcriminalization of homosexuality continue to surprise us. And they seem quite anachronistic.

In fact, they are paradoxically—like in Asia—often leftovers from colonialism. Blame the prudery of Her Majesty! English-speaking countries have frequently maintained homophobic Victorian laws, even though the British government brought its laws up to date on its own soil by decriminalizing most homosexual behavior by 1967. Not so African countries colonized by the British.

French-speaking countries, in contrast, have generally inherited the Napoleonic Code, which was silent on the question of homosexuality. Thus, linguistic borders in Africa often delineate the boundary between what is tolerated and what is forbidden: you can create a real geopolitics of LGBT rights based as much on languages as on cultural boundaries. Several French-speaking countries officially have no homophobic laws (Benin, Burkina Faso, Ivory Coast, Mali, Niger, Democratic Republic of Congo, and Chad, for example), and some of these countries are even backers of gay rights on occasion: the Central African Republic and Gabon, in particular. But this is not the case for all Francophone countries, far from it: homosexuality is illegal in Senegal (where stiff sentences were handed down after hasty rulings in 2009 and 2012), in Togo, and more so in Cameroon and Mauritania (not to mention in Francophone Muslim countries of North Africa, such as Morocco and Tunisia, which inherited the French mandate’s homophobia, and Algeria, which as a French département experienced the increased criminalization by the Vichy regime). Above all, let’s not confuse law and practices: many countries have relatively lenient laws but strong political and social homophobia (South Africa and Egypt), whereas some African countries may have officially banned homosexuality by law without prosecuting homosexuals (Mauritius, São Tomé, and Príncipe). Finally, homosexuality is legal in several Portuguese-speaking countries (Mozambique, Cape Verde, Guinea Bissau) and in the former Belgian colonies (Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo despite repenalization bills).

Nonetheless, in most other English-speaking African countries homosexuality is still curbed today. And, paradoxically, these regimes are eager to preserve the articles of their homophobic laws in the name of cultural diversity, their history, and their national identity. They refuse to give in to international pressure and criticize the West for wanting to disseminate its “decadent culture” throughout Africa—that is to say, its homosexuality, which is, of course, “foreign to the true African tradition” (to use the words of the Ugandan president). For dictator Robert Mugabe, Zimbabwe’s president, homosexuality is an “anti-African Western practice,” and for Kenya’s leader it is “contrary to African tradition.”

Ethnocentrism? No: colonialism. The tradition in question is actually, as we have seen, British and, as in India, a remnant of British colonialism, which sought to “civilize” natives by instilling a “European moral” and condemning their homosexual practices. Today you’ll find the British colonial Section 377 almost intact in the laws of some twenty African countries (for instance, Botswana, Gambia, Kenya, Lesotho, Malawi, Mauritania, Nigeria, Somalia, Swaziland, Sudan, Tanzania, Zambia). It is sometimes supplemented, whether modified or strengthened, but the matrix remains of colonial origin. Simply renumbered, Section 140 of the Ugandan Criminal Code also uses, practically verbatim, the text of Section 377 of the Victorian code.

As a figurehead in an English-speaking country, Uganda, David Kato was one of the most famous African gay rights activists.¹ In early 2011, he was beaten to death with a hammer. A few months earlier a Ugandan tabloid newspaper, Rolling Stone (unrelated to the American magazine of the same name), had published an article on homosexuals headlined “Hang Them.” There were photographs of people suspected of being gay and copy that included their home addresses. David Kato’s address was among them. Kato, a high school teacher of forty years, came out when he was in South Africa, before returning to Uganda. “My role is to fight and liberate,” he confided to a New York Times journalist. At that time, he was starting to fight for homosexuals. He could always be seen actively defending gay rights at press conferences in the capital, Kampala. He was sometimes arrested and beaten by the police. “I live my homosexuality in broad daylight, not only because I don’t want to hide, but also because people need to see that there are gays in Africa as there are everywhere.” His optimism, intact despite the anonymous death threats he received, struck all who met him. Shortly before his assassination, this small man with a shaved head who wore thick glasses and was always a bit agitated said he wanted to be a “good human rights defender, not a dead one, but an alive one.” (Kato’s murder remains unsolved. Facing emotional international reaction, the Ugandan judicial authorities said they had arrested a suspect: a young man of twenty-two who knew the victim and is said to have had some transactional sex with Kato on several occasions. If this story is true—which will be difficult to establish in a country where both the police and the judiciary are discredited—the motive may not have been homophobia, but possibly robbery by the prostitute.)

Beyond David Kato’s murder, new antigay hatred in Uganda also has external causes. Observers explain it with the strong religious revival in Uganda’s Great Lakes region and the evangelizing work of ultraconservative American churches.

Thus, in 2009, a group of evangelicals from the United States visited Uganda, preaching homophobia and denouncing “how gay men often sodomized teenage boys.” They went so far as to recommend workshops for methods to “cure” gays by making them heterosexual. Thousands of Ugandans were said to have participated in these sponsored, homophobic seminars. Soon after the evangelicals came through, Parliament discussed a bill to make homosexuality punishable by life in prison and certain cases of “aggravated homosexuality” punishable by the death penalty. The architects of this law acknowledged being inspired by American evangelists and having met Scott Lively in particular, an American missionary who presented himself as a “homosexuality specialist” and who has written questionable books on the subject. Pastor Rick Warren, who heads up a famous megachurch in California, has been on several missions to Uganda to fight against poverty and AIDS, all the while spreading his recommendations of abstinence and his antigay messages. These antigay crusades, deliberately picked up by the nation’s press, met with a wide response throughout the country and caused a number of lynching campaigns.

An antigay law was adopted in Uganda in 2014. Former US secretary of state Hillary Clinton had contacted the Ugandan president personally a few months earlier to ask him to remove this homophobic language, making American financial aid conditional on his doing so. But nothing was done. Gay organizations and general foundations in the United States have also intervened by supporting the few Ugandan LGBT organizations. (The Ford Foundation, for example, launched the Global Initiative on Sexual Minority Rights program; and on the ground in Africa but also in Vietnam, China, and the Middle East, I encountered this sort of funding for LGBT organizations. This pro-gay global strategy was confirmed to me during the course of several visits to the Ford Foundation headquarters in New York, although this work was still deliberately low profile.)

Ultimately, a strange American “culture war” is being carried out in Uganda, thousands of kilometers away from the United States, by pro-gay and antigay groups, evangelicals facing off against gay organizations, all of whom support and fund their local allies. In other words, Americans export their divisions and culture wars at Africa’s expense.

“JESUS IS.” I read these words on the license plate of a car parked at the Rhema Bible Church parking lot. I’m not dreaming. The motorist got the South African administration to provide a vehicle plate that bears the letters forming the name of Christ instead of the usual official numbers. At this evangelical megachurch located on the outskirts of Johannesburg about forty minutes from the city center, I go from one surprise to another.

After I spend a few minutes alone in a kitschy waiting room with fake plants, Rufus, the superintendent—a simpatico black employee who explains he wants to become pastor—takes me behind the scenes to the basement, flicks thirty switches, and shows me into the church, which is closed that day. Suddenly everything becomes clear. There are 8,500 empty seats before me. It’s not a church: it’s a theater! Not a chapel, but a stadium! “On Sunday, we have three services here, and they are completely full,” Rufus explains. “On this huge stage that you see here, there are more than fifty people at the same time: the pastors and the choir singers, too; it’s a real show.” I can’t believe it. I am flabbergasted at the size of the giant screens, the incredibly high ceilings, the cameras everywhere, and the super high-send projectors.

I continue my visit. In a neighboring room, I come across a hundred women packaging gifts. I ask Rufus about this. Donations of the faithful to be sent to the city’s “poor townships” of the city and even abroad, to African countries where “the needs are huge.” On the other side of the building, which is at least 200 meters long, and after walking by dozens of training facilities, an infirmary, and prayer rooms, I land in a bookstore. There are thousands of books, DVDs, and CDs. Not one kind of Bible, but a hundred different versions of it, including electronic Bibles for Kindles and iPads. The seller, a cultivated, young black man who tells me his name is Salvation, describes evangelical culture. He tells me of “Christian” blockbusters and their own “franchises” that have no reason to envy Hollywood: Jesus the Dreamer, Jesus the Hero, Jesus the Underdog, Jesus the Headliner. Do they sell rap? “Sorry, sir, we’re out of stock,” Salvation apologizes, offering me instead hundreds of Christian music singers. He seems to know all the names and all the genres. Christian books for children, for teenagers, for the blind, and for the hard of hearing; everything is available in this large supermarket of evangelical culture. Most of its products are made in the United States, but many are made on site. What strikes me most is how modern the tools are: the church has state-of-the-art websites (at rhema.co.za and rhemabiblechurch.com) as well as a strong presence on social media and YouTube.

Salvation and Rufus confirm that I am at the headquarters of the Rhema Bible Church but that the church has many branches throughout the country. So you can go to Mass on Sunday in five other churches of the same persuasion in Johannesburg or in other similar congregations in South Africa and across English-speaking Africa, from Zambia to Nigeria. And, above all, I learn that the church is affiliated with a mother religious organization in Oklahoma City, from which it borrows some of its charismatic doctrine. So this is what evangelicals have at their disposal, with millions of dollars, a ton of books and CDs ready to be shipped abroad, to convert Africa through sectarian and homophobic sermons.

Pastor Ray McCauley, a white man who was against apartheid, founded South Africa’s Rhema Bible Church and still regularly performs mass there; he has stood out in recent years for his antigay preaching. This radical preacher of Pentecostal persuasion extols the virtues of returning to family values (which did not stop him from divorcing twice) and strongly advocates the repeal of gay marriage, although it was adopted in South Africa. He is considered to be close to the current South African president, Jacob Zuma, and is said to have raised millions of dollars through his sectarian sermons. His 50,000 faithful, belonging mostly to the poor and black parts of the city, are encouraged to give 10 percent of their salary each month—to have more of a chance at a life in the hereafter.

From headquarters in the distant suburb of Johannesburg, churches such as the Rhema Bible Church, a true neo-Protestant rear base, build evangelical campaigns for the rest of Africa. Never mind that the homophobia they convey puts them in an awkward position vis-à-vis the Christian Church’s message of humanity. Anglican Nobel Peace Prize winner Archbishop Desmond Tutu said that “there is not and cannot be any place for homophobia in the Church.” These preachers still go on crusades, and from the United States or South Africa they head for the most fragile countries in sub-Saharan Africa. “Evangelicals are very powerful in South Africa, but they can hardly hope to see their antigay criticism obtain here because the Constitution protects LGBT rights. So they travel elsewhere to countries of eastern Africa, where there are no legal protections,” says Tiseke Kazambala of Human Rights Watch in Johannesburg. Like many, she is concerned about the growing sway in Africa of these clergymen who are under American evangelical influence. True enlightened Huguenots.

Strong evangelism, whether local or imported, is also responsible, as it is in South Africa and Uganda, for an upsurge of homophobia in several other African countries. Such is the case in Zimbabwe, an English-speaking country in southern Africa, where dictator Robert Mugabe, eighty-nine, has denounced human rights in general and homosexuals in particular for being “worse than dogs and pigs.” He has made “gay bashing” one of his favorite political predilections. Homosexuality is illegal in Zimbabwe, and intimidation and arrests are common currency, although Zimbabwe does have a gay rights advocacy group funded by international aid. This homophobia is a truly state-sponsored and particularly violent homophobia that relies on a critique of a decadent West, which, according to Mugabe, imports homosexuality with colonialism. But, here, too, the West and the active role of American evangelicals, especially Pentecostals, exacerbate the homophobia.

Another land whose privilege it has been to be the recipient of made-in-the-USA evangelism is Burundi, a small country in East Africa, where homosexuality was criminalized in recent years. The same tension exists in Malawi, where organizations defending gay rights are banned and where a symbolically married LGBT couple were sentenced to fourteen years of forced labor and imprisoned. (Both partners, Steven and Tiwonge, one of whom was transsexual, were eventually “pardoned” five months later by the president of Malawi and released after strong international pressure that ended with UN secretary-general Ban Ki-moon’s on-site intervention and an appeal from Madonna, who had adopted two children from Malawi and expressed solidarity with the gay couple). “The situation remains very tense. Earlier, homosexuality was condemned, but the law was not enforced. Now, it comes up all the time. There are evangelicals on one side and on the other those I call traditionalists because they defend allegedly African values. They are all very homophobic,” explains Tiseke Kazambala, a Malawian nationality activist who works at the Human Rights Watch office for East Africa in Johannesburg. Under Joyce Banda’s short presidency from 2012 to 2014, the punishment for homosexuality was lifted in Malawi, in practice if not by law.

In another vein, there is Nigeria, a large English-speaking emerging country where the situation is also critical, exacerbated this time by evangelicals in the South and Islamists in the North (where sharia law has been adopted in some areas, making it possible for homosexuals to be sentenced to death by stoning). “The two most dramatic new things homosexuals face in Africa are, first, Christian neoevangelicalism, which is often imported or inspired by the United States, and, second, political Islam, modeled on Iran or Saudi Arabia,” the Cameroonian lawyer Alice Nkom tells me. Although not in the same proportions as in Nigeria and Mauritania, homosexuals face problems in other African countries because of pressure from Islamists, such as in Gambia, a West African English-speaking country where Sunni Muslims are the majority of the population.

“I see the rise of a growing conservatism in Africa, but at the same time I also see a space for dialogue opening up. Hostility is sometimes preferable to silence. We can’t ignore the question any longer, and we can talk about it,” says the Malian Michel Sidibé. And he adds, immediately using an African-like, familiar form of address: “You know, ever since I’ve coordinated the fight against AIDS, my mother, who lives in Mali and is eight-nine, sometimes asks me, ‘Have you become gay now?’ and I answer ‘No, Mom, not yet.’ You see, it shows how difficult it is in Africa, even for my mother.” In his office, Sidibé has a large photograph of the Namibian desert, a miniature goat replica from Burkina Faso, and a hippopotamus from southern Benin. He loves Africa and tells me so: “We were discriminated against because we were blacks. That’s why we cannot now discriminate against gays because they are gay. It’s that simple. It’s a question of rights. This is what I explained to the presidents of Malawi, Senegal, Uganda, Nigeria, and even to President Zuma in South Africa: it is a matter of human rights. Often they do not see the issue in terms of human rights. But I believe that the link with the black question is obvious. I compare homophobia to apartheid. And that is why we must do everything to encourage the universal decriminalization of homosexuality. As Ban Ki-moon, secretary-general of the United Nations, said, ‘The time has come.’”

The United Nations Declaration

Paris (2005). “Makoumè: that’s what we call a ‘faggot’ in Creole. It is derogatory. In French, we might say macommère. In both cases, it is quite homophobic,” Louis-Georges Tin explains. On May 17, 2005, this young literature professor, born in Rivière-Salée, a small town in Martinique, launched the first International Day against Homophobia (IDAHO). “The idea was conceived in Canada a few years ago,” says Tin, “but it had not really materialized. I got it going again.” Why that date? “It was on May 17, 1990, that the World Health Organization removed homosexuality from its list of mental illnesses. I thought it was a symbol, a positive international date,” Tin explains in his soft voice in a café on the Place de la Bastille in Paris. A good student in the French overseas territories, where he earned a baccalaureate with honors, Louis-Georges Tin arrived in Paris at age seventeen to continue his education. He is what the French like to call a product of “Republican upward mobility” through education: hypokhâgne, the Lycée Henri IV, École normale superieure, agrégation in literature. Since then, this unusual activist has published several books with explicit titles, such as the Dictionnaire de l’homophobie (The Dictionary of Homophobia) and L’Invention de la culture hétérosexuelle (The Invention of Heterosexual Culture). He has also remained true to his other cause: black activism. He chaired the Representative Council of France’s Black Associations.

The second edition of IDAHO in May 2006 confirmed the success of the first one and spread internationally to more than sixty countries. This year Tin chose to increase pressure to decriminalize homosexuality across the world, thereby joining many other organizations and individuals who were also intending to bring this demand before the UN. A petition was launched, signed by Nobel Prize winners Desmond Tutu and Dario Fo as well as by actress Meryl Streep. He also continues to go into the field, mainly in Africa, where antigay discrimination is taking hold: Uganda, Togo, Ivory Coast. Some people, of course, blame Tin for his activism, which could backfire. “The argument that things could backfire is almost always a reactionary argument,” he responds. Tin is a rare blend of a lobbyist with sad cocker-spaniel face who can seduce with his kindness and surprise with his intransigence. Both soft-spoken and Saint-Just, he wears a kind of anxiety, an unstable marriage of black identity and gay identity, which redoubles the strength of his convictions and makes him extremely endearing.

Geneva (2005–2007). The UN area on the shore of Lake Geneva is home to many organizations and UN agencies that regularly and sometimes quite pointedly work on the issue of gay rights. This is where UNAIDS is located and also the World Health Organization, the Office of the High Commissioner for Refugees, the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, and the Council of the United Nations Human Rights. Early on, several countries created initiatives to try to get language in favor of decriminalizing homosexuality adopted by the Council on Human Rights: Brazil was a pioneer presenter of a declaration (that garnered twenty signatories) as early as 2003, followed by New Zealand in 2005 (thirty-two signatories), Norway in 2006 (fifty-four signatories), and, collectively now, the Nordic countries in 2007 (fifty-four signatories). In the hierarchy of UN standards, these documents were more or less isolated and simple declarations of intent, but their impact was already highly symbolic. The gay issue was only an emerging issue at the UN.

New York (2007). When Boris Dittrich arrived in New York to head Human Rights Watch, a flattering reputation preceded him. This Dutchman born in Utrecht, a judge by profession, was elected in 1994 to the Parliament of the Netherlands. Dittrich was quickly becoming a leader of the Social Liberal (Democratic) Party and, as a member, the architect of a bill in favor of marriage for same-sex couples. The bill was debated between 1994 and 2000 and finally adopted. The law became effective on April 1, 2001: on that day, the Netherlands became the first country in the world to make same-sex marriage legal. A section of this Dutch law was very slightly amended to state simply: “A marriage can be entered into by two persons of opposing or the same sex.” Dittrich has not forgotten the explosion of joy that the passage of the law aroused in the gay community in the Netherlands or the first marriages, unique in the world, celebrated as a turning point in the history of the global homosexual movement. In 2006, he married Jehoshua, an Israeli Dutch artist with whom he had lived for thirty years: his husband.

“I have been an activist and a politician for a long time, and after contributing to changing the Dutch law, I thought that I should continue that fight at the international level,” Boris Dittrich tells me over several hours of interviews in Amsterdam at the Mandje café. The atmosphere there is friendly, and the owner of the bar on Zeedijk Street recognizes Dittrich: he sits down at our table and tells us the story of this gay bar, the oldest in the Netherlands, established as early as 1927 by a “turned-on and sometimes a bit alcoholic” motorcycle lesbian. The whole history of the Dutch gay movement is on display in the café, in photographs, through the music, and in an impressive collection of ties hanging from the ceiling. “In 1975,” Dittrich tells me, “I was hitchhiking in the US with my girlfriend of the time, and I landed in the Castro in San Francisco. I was still a questioning heterosexual, and I met Harvey Milk. He immediately saw that I was gay, and he outed me in front of my girlfriend, who was quite traumatized by it all. He laid out my destiny: I became a gay activist, to my father’s great despair, a Czech political refugee who has been slow to accept my homosexuality.”

So in 2007 Boris Dittrich accepted a position in New York as the LGBT coordinator of Human Rights Watch, a major international NGO for human rights. He was fifty-two years old at the time. With a team of six researchers and an office in Nairobi and Beirut, the mission is to organize the monitoring of gay issues all over the world. And although Human Rights Watch is above all a research organization, it also wants to take action: “We start by documenting the situation, and then we start advocating for the cause,” explains Dittrich, who has since his appointment fought on all five continents in defense of homosexuals.

Dittrich is, literally, a “developer”—building a network, mobilizing goodwill, and bringing together actors. “Originally, the idea of reading a statement in favor of decriminalizing homosexuality at the United Nations was a Dutch idea. We started by preparing for a UN conference scheduled for late 2007, but we felt a bit alone. At the time, few countries had any interest in this cause. Gradually, after 2008, things started to move.”

When you reconstruct the history of the mobilization for the decriminalizing of homosexuality worldwide, you realize the important role organizations play. Everywhere in the major Western capitals and in some key non-Western countries such as South Africa, India, Ukraine, Israel, and Lebanon, associations and NGOs were mobilizing spontaneously. It was a bit of a messily flung together, uneven, and very decentralized movement. These organizations’ mobilization strategies ranged from staying in touch with Western governments to acting spontaneously, sometimes without any plan. “I was surprised by the fact that some gay associations didn’t want to work with us,” Louis-Georges Tin says, astonished. “Sometimes these organizations knew nothing about UN mechanics and literally proposed any old thing,” says Jacques Pellet, the diplomat, deputy director of human rights at the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs, who monitored the case. “There are many drama queens in the gay community,” cautions Boris Dittrich sympathetically; he recognized early on that “everyone worked a little in his own corner.” Step by step, almost everywhere, a sense of reality and responsibility prevailed, and in Beirut as in São Paulo and Tokyo the organizations would do the work of lobbying quite seriously, all the while focused on maintaining good collective entente.

At Human Rights Watch headquarters in New York, the LGBT program was on the front line. “We wanted to professionalize our lobbying. The UN is a very complex machine that doesn’t tolerate error. We needed to successfully wed the good will of organizations present on five continents with the very specific rules of the United Nations,” says Dittrich. And he found the means to fit his ambitions: in late 2010, Human Rights Watch received a $100 million donation from billionaire George Soros to develop a human rights defense action internationally. The universal decriminalizing of homosexuality was included among the priorities.

In 2007, three other organizations played a decisive role at the side of Human Rights Watch. The headquarters of Amnesty International in London was mobilized into battle at the UN, as was Louis-Georges Tin’s IDAHO French Committee. A third and less well-known organization, ARC International, was also active. “Without governments, nothing would happen, but without organizations [nothing would happen], either, because they need to put pressure on governments to get them to act. It’s a kind of tango between the states and the NGOs. They need each another, but it takes time to find the right tempo,” John Fisher tells me in Geneva. A New Zealander, Fisher co-runs ARC International, an organization created in 2003 to support LGBT rights globally. “When we started to mobilize, the issue was still taboo. At the United Nations, in Geneva as in New York, it was not a priority for anyone. Even France wouldn’t hear of it.”

Paris (May 2008). In France, Nicolas Sarkozy was elected president in 2007, and among his entourage no one took seriously the activity of some gay activists on the issue of decriminalizing homosexuality internationally.

And that’s an understatement. The president’s advisers were conspicuously absent. Around Bernard Kouchner, the new foreign minister, a counselor even suggested, “We will not go to war with Iran because they hang a few homosexuals.” And when Louis-Georges Tin approached Rama Yade, France’s secretary for human rights, whom he knew from having campaigned with her regarding the rights of blacks, she would not respond to his calls.

There was worse. For having protested too loudly in favor of gay rights in front of the Elysée Palace on May 15, 2008, Louis-Georges Tin and several Act Up activists were taken away. They remained at a police station for four hours for “disturbing the peace.” That night, pissed, Emmanuelle Mignon, director of the Office of the President of the Republic, called Tin by phone: “She told me that having tried to demonstrate outside the Elysée, we’d wanted to put pressure on her, that this was unacceptable since I had already made an appointment for the next day, that I had wanted to entrap her. She insulted me: ‘You’re an asshole,’ she yelled. And then she still told me to come and see her the next day anyway,” Tin recalls. Emmanuelle Mignon, whom I interview, more or less confirms this story: “I don’t remember whether I called him an asshole, but it’s quite possible. I definitely didn’t yell, though. I never yell on the phone.”

On May 16, Mignon thus received activist Louis-Georges Tin to the Elysée Palace. Surprise. Her talk and tone changed: Mignon became gay-friendly, contrary to her own culture. This Catholic, conservative woman, who could be very frank, now seemed to favor the universal decriminalization of homosexuality. “A radical Catholic and a practicing Muslim: she and I are the ones who did this! Now that’s a nice story,” Secretary Rama Yade tells me. All the same, this main adviser to President Sarkozy said at the time that the Elysée was ready to engage in the battle of gay decriminalization. And moving fast was necessary. And as it turned out, a public meeting was already being organized on the issue for the next day, May 17, around Rama Yade. Tin was invited, as were the representatives of several organizations. Mignon confirmed that France was choosing to make the decriminalization of homosexuality one of its priorities for the French presidency of the European Union. This was a turning point.

What made the difference? It is difficult to write the story when stakeholders were numerous and international. You can try to retrace the genesis of this movement using interviews with the main protagonists in several countries and consulting archives (including notes to several French ministers and about a hundred diplomatic telegrams exchanged with French ambassadors). In order to understand global trends, you can speak of “momentum”: at some point, a dynamic gets going at the same time in several countries and in different organizations, as if the right tempo has suddenly been struck and the political agenda is ideal. The issue of decriminalization of homosexuality had matured. “I had the impression that spirits were ripe,” confirms Rama Yade, who would handle the case.

One of the triggers was probably the execution of Mahmoud Asghari and Ayaz Marhouni in July 2005, two boys suspected of being homosexual whom we saw in unbearable photographs, with ropes around their necks, shortly before their hanging in a public square in Iran. These images, which made their way around the world, generated enormous anger throughout the West and well beyond the gay community. Especially since another Iranian, Makwan Mouloudzadeh, was hanged in December 2007 for a homosexual act committed when he was thirteen (and that he always denied). This time the number of petitions increased, and in early 2008 the issue of the international decriminalization of homosexuality resurfaced in the press and in people’s minds.

At the same time, many gay organizations, joined by “generalist” NGOs accredited by the UN, such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, became aware of the need to act. Each mobilized its government and observed a similar coming to awareness in Belgium, Denmark, New Zealand, the Netherlands, and Norway.

To the overall context that explains this momentum, you can add France’s particular choice to make decriminalizing homosexuality one of the priorities of the French presidency of the European Union in 2008.

Paris (May 2008). It had been a year since Bernard Kouchner had become Nicolas Sarkozy’s minister of foreign affairs. Cofounder of Doctors without Borders (for which he received the Nobel Peace Prize on behalf of the organization) and former minister of health, he was one of the architects of the “right to interfere.” He intended to update this concept and was seeking to find a concrete application for it. Being very knowledgeable about the UN, Kouchner planned to address the General Assembly early on. At the Elysée, Emmanuelle Mignon was thinking the same thing. As she reveals to me, she took it upon herself—an extremely rare act—to give this sensitive issue a green light in Nicolas Sarkozy’s name without consulting him: “The reality was that I had everyone believe that I had the agreement of the president of the Republic to make this statement against criminalizing homosexuality. In fact, I did not. Not that he would not have agreed to it, but just that I did not ask him to. Nobody was attending to these matters at the Elysée; I was not particularly invested in the subject, but I knew the networks, so I assumed my responsibilities. Since I had no doubt about Sarko’s personal thinking [I’m retaining Mignon’s use of his nickname], with whom I had already batted this topic around [when Sarkozy was minister of the interior and then of the economy], I told the prime minister that Sarkozy wanted us to recognize the International Day against Homophobia, and I told [Secretary for Human Rights] Rama [Yade] that we had to make a declaration at the UN. Well, that’s how things happened. And what was most amazing was that this had an impact!”

And so the Elysée entered the fray. The government was mobilized. Bernard Kouchner, the foreign minister, was considering what was the best strategy to follow. And he had an advantage in this battle: Ambassador Jean-Maurice Ripert, France’s permanent representative to the UN, was one of his closest friends, and he ended up playing a key role in this battle in New York. “For the Quai d’Orsay [the French Foreign Ministry], this was a completely new topic. There was considerable skepticism among French diplomats. And even among my colleagues at the embassy in New York, the person who was handling the matter, a Catholic, was against it!” Ambassador Ripert tells me, smiling, when I interview him in Geneva. He proposed a strategy to his minister and to the government: “It was important to act, and a declaration before the UN General Assembly seemed like a first step. It’s a strong symbolic text, even if it is not binding and has no legal power.”

With the green light from the Elysée and a strategy laid down by Kouchner and Ripert, it was a young minister, Rama Yade, in charge of human rights, who would throw herself into the battle at the UN. Born in Senegal of Lebou origins, Muslim, and speaker of Wolof, this young woman embodies a diverse France. “Initially, I got on board with this issue a bit by chance and urgently. I was not at all familiar with the subject, not well prepared. I come from a very religious, very conservative milieu in which homosexuality is not a very accepted subject. I didn’t have any gay friends. I never went to Gay Pride. It was not a question with which I was comfortable. My beliefs were born of a political commitment. There were homosexuals who were condemned to death because of their sexuality. This was not acceptable. For me, it suddenly made sense. There was a convergence of the fight against the death penalty and the fight against homophobia. Gradually, I made it a central axis of my politics with targets and timetables. And I became quite an activist about it,” Rama Yade tells me sincerely when I interview her in her office in 2011. Facing her, a beautiful photograph hangs on the wall: she is in the company of Nelson Mandela. Next to it, a comic strip: The Adventures of Rama in Congo. An apocryphal version of Tintin.

Paris (May 17, 2008). So, on May 17, 2008, for World Day against Homophobia and in the presence of LGBT organizations invited to the French Foreign Ministry, Minister Rama Yade announced that France would take the initiative and call for the universal decriminalization of homosexuality. In a diplomatic telegram in late May 2008, sent to all of France’s ambassadors, a carefully defined strategy was specified: this would be a European initiative presented by France under the presidency of the European Union as a “declaration” delivered at the sixty-third session of the UN General Assembly in December 2008. “The goal of this initiative, which will be transregional, is to raise the issue at the UN in order to raise awareness of the violence and discrimination against LGBT people,” the confidential telegram stated.

Meanwhile, large-scale consulting with all ambassadors abroad was undertaken to collect accurate, on-the-ground information on the “state of legislation and practices regarding LGBT people.” Each ambassador was asked to send the minister a detailed report of circumstances before June 13. And each ambassador did so before the deadline, in an administrative style, of course, but with rigor and sometimes even a bit of activism: the defense of gay rights became, in this single act that day and for the first time in its history, a sovereign mission of French diplomacy.

In the summer of 2008, the battle to decriminalize homosexuality internationally launched by Paris was presented in Brussels at the time of European negotiations and validated in New York at UN headquarters. On June 10, Rama Yade organized an important meeting in Paris in the presence of some ambassadors and several of their foreign counterparts, including the foreign minister of the Netherlands, who was a bit miffed by this French scoop since the Dutch had been at the forefront of the fight before France. He sought to remind everyone by his very presence that the initiative was a collective one and a European one. Representatives of organizations were also present. A roadmap was discussed. Some governments stated their preference for an initiative anchored in Geneva; others (such as Act Up) maintained their position by pushing for a “resolution” with a vote by the UN General Assembly in December 2008. On behalf of Human Rights Watch, Boris Dittrich sent a message asking to prioritize a simple “declaration” without a vote rather than a “resolution” with a vote: “I thought that we should not defend a resolution if we were not sure of getting a majority of the votes. Otherwise, we might have ended up with a formal UN decision against gay rights, and we would have lost the battle for several years. It seemed to me essential to begin by taking a count and tabulating how many countries would agree to support such a text before going further. That’s why we needed a statement without a vote,” Dittrich explains to me. Jacques Pellet, the French diplomat in charge, confirms: “This was also France’s position, for we are 193 countries at the UN, and we could not take the risk of a negative vote in the UN General Assembly, which would have meant a long-term setback.” As for Jean-Maurice Ripert, the French ambassador who would bring the project to the United Nations in New York, he deciphers for me the strategy he recommended: “With this kind of issue, you’re in multilateral diplomacy. It’s a bit like the debate about the death penalty. You know the strategy: you have to persuade, and you have to try to reach unanimity. Gain ground. The time factor is very important at the United Nations. You have to create some movement. You can’t force things or provoke. We knew where we wanted to go, but everything still had to be created.” Finally, Rama Yade confirmed her plan. “We sensed that the resolution might fail. We did not want to fail. We had to show progression. We needed pedagogical time. A declaration was the best solution.”

Some organizations also advocated for a declaration expanded to the issue of adoption by same-sex couples, gay marriage, and transphobia, but they were not able to persuade others. “At first, yes, the discussion was a bit delicate. Every word was negotiated. We had to let go of the idea of defending transgender people or adoption. As for marriage, it never really was a debate,” says John Fisher from ARC International. “At the UN, adoption or marriage would have led us to certain failure because we would have stepped outside the strict framework of human rights by addressing societal issues that have to be left up to the individual states. But in mentioning gender identity alongside sexual orientation, we did partly respond to the demands of transsexuals,” the diplomat Jacques Pellet specifies. “I made sure that it stayed a matter of human rights,” Rama Yade simply confirms.

Paris, Oslo, Amsterdam, Brussels (summer 2008). During the summer, the cell at the French Foreign Ministry that coordinated the draft declaration was active in its constant liaising with the Ministries of Foreign Affairs of the Netherlands and Norway. “We felt things were beginning to move. Suddenly there was a critical mass,” John Fisher from ARC International recalls. French representatives at the European Union were mobilized. Organizations were regularly consulted and participated in many meetings. Minister Rama Yade personally kept her eye on developments in this matter and refined the plan of action with her team. In the confidential diplomatic telegram addressed to French ambassadors, you can read: “In any event, in order to ensure the success of this initiative, the declaration will have to be cowritten by countries from all continents to campaign with France, so as to gather the largest possible number of cosponsorships of the document.”

At this stage, three countries in particular were mobilized: Norway, the Netherlands, and France. A contact group (the “core group”) was set up to steer the European initiative and was based in New York at the UN headquarters, where Jean-Maurice Ripert, permanent ambassador of France, was in charge of coordinating it. “I was doing breakfasts, inviting groups of ambassadors from four or five countries,” explains Ripert. “For the difficult ones, like South Africa, I invited them to meet in person, one by one, one ambassador after another. But above all I needed to make sure that my interlocutors had clear instructions from their governments, to avoid any last-minute reversals. In Paris, they mobilized our whole diplomatic network to make sure we had firm backing.” On several continents, contacts were established with countries more likely to join the “core group,” starting with Brazil, India, and especially South Africa. Diplomat Jacques Pellet tells me, “Technically, you can’t succeed in passing a declaration in the area of human rights at the UN if you take positions that are considered pro-Western or hostile to countries in the Southern Hemisphere. It was therefore vital to have allies on every continent and among the countries in the South. From that point of view, Brazil was crucial, and it immediately showed itself in favor of the declaration, first because it has always been ahead on this issue and then because it aspired to a permanent position on the UN Security Council and wanted to set an example. It was, however, much more difficult with India and South Africa.” “It’s true, the LGBT issue was first part of a Western plan,” says Boris Dittrich. “So we had to demonstrate, and it was our top priority, that this idea was universal and supported on all continents. That’s why we made such an effort with Japan, South Africa, and Brazil. We absolutely had to persuade them and have them side with us.” Dittrich, as an expert on South Africa (he was one of Mandela’s lawyers), went to Cape Town and Pretoria in person to try to persuade the South African government.

Together the countries of the “core group” were coauthors of the declaration and divvied up the tasks to collect the greatest possible number of signatures. The statement was written and discussed during long trips back and forth between the major governments. Dozens of ambassadors were mobilized to find “allies” likely to sign the declaration. Again, the emphasis was not on presenting a Western front on the gay issue, but on collecting weighty support from five continents and placing a priority on the Southern Hemisphere. Thus, as revealed in the archives I consulted, at the request of France’s Foreign Ministry, its ambassador in Gabon officially approached the government in Libreville, where he was well received. “Rama Yade put a lot of pressure on Gabon, and since Gabon is one of France’s captive markets, the Gabonese government accepted,” a French diplomat in Africa comments cynically. As for the European Union under the French presidency, over the course of several meetings in Brussels Assistant Director for Human Rights Jacques Pellet made sure that member countries were game and that they reached unanimity (despite some reservations on the part of Berlusconi’s Italy because of some activist hostility from the Vatican as well as on the part of Cyprus, Poland, and Lithuania). Some pressure, characterized in Brussels as “subtle but firm,” was also applied to European countries in line to accede to the European Union, and all of these countries (Albania, Croatia, Iceland, Macedonia, Montenegro, Serbia), except Turkey, which abstained, would sign the declaration without complaint and sometimes in spite of their convictions. The position of what were called “swing states”—symbolic countries likely to lead to others, such as South Africa, India, Ukraine, Venezuela, and Lebanon—was tested. Ultimately, eight countries cowrote the final declaration and thus formed the final core group: Argentina, Croatia, France, Gabon, Japan, Norway, the Netherlands, and Brazil.

Brasilia, Buenos Aires (summer 2008). Diversidade sexual—the expression is striking. I am at the MixBrasil headquarters in São Paulo, and André Fischer, who runs this important gay organization, uses the phrase several times. “I am pleased to see what progress the LGBT issue has made in Brazil over the last ten years. Here in São Paulo, we have the largest Gay Pride in the world. Telenovelas depict gay characters. Bars are becoming gay friendly. And we’re constantly talking about diversidade sexual: sexual diversity is really the buzzword in fashion in Brazil,” André Fischer tells me. Then he adds: “But all this comes from Brazilians themselves. It comes from organizations. From the ground up. Personally, I don’t expect much from policies. Even if, it’s true, Lula was very gay-friendly when he was president.”

As soon as Lula da Silva was elected president of Brazil in 2003, he was an activist for the gay cause: early on he created a civil union status for gay couples and put in place in high schools a public campaign under the slogan “Brazil without homophobia.” (Same-sex marriage would be legalized in 2013 under pressure from the Supreme Court.) Internationally, he also urged diplomats to defend—in a sort of isolated way at the time—a simple UN Council of Human Rights declaration supporting the decriminalization of homosexuality. So naturally in the summer of 2008 Brazil joined the “core group” set up in New York to support the new statement.

Today Latin America has emerged as one of the regions in the world to be the most in favor of gay rights. Besides Lula’s Brazil, Cristina Kirchner’s Argentina was immediately mobilized in support of the UN declaration in 2008 and subsequently became the first Latin American country to legalize marriage for same-sex couples in 2010. “Brazil and Argentina are the most developed countries on the LGBT issue, but Mexico is catching up with us,” confirms Fernando Elio, head of the Latin American section of the International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission (based in New York), whom I interview in the café of the bookstore El Atenco in central Buenos Aires.

I am struck indeed by how advanced gay rights are in the ten Latin American countries in which I conduct this survey—Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Cuba, Ecuador, Mexico, Peru, and Venezuela—even if the subcontinent also has its poor students.

Argentina, Brazil, and Mexico are the most progressive, followed by Uruguay and Colombia. Michelle Bachelet’s Chile is an in-between case. Chile is a country that is both modern and profoundly unequal. Homosexuality is legal, as are, since 2015, civil unions, but not marriage. “The situation is quite comfortable for white homosexuals, criollos [white Argentines of Spanish origin], and for those who are rather rich, but it is much more difficult for indigenous gay people, especially the Mapuche Indians,” says Luis Larrain, the president of the LGBT organization Equales, whom I interview at El Torro, a gay-friendly bar and restaurant in the Bellavista neighborhood of Santiago, Chile. The pressures of the Catholic Church, which is very influential in this country, have markedly slowed down LGBT rights and, even more, any recognition of gay marriage. “But the situation is changing. The Argentine and Brazilian models serve as a point of comparison: the church is involved in numerous cases of pedophilia; the Left wants progress on gay rights and on everything we call diversidade sexual here. I am rather optimistic,” says the writer Pablo Simonetti, cofounder of the LGBT organization Equales.

The situation is more complex in Peru. For proof, just ask Carlos Bruce. Wearing a brown suede jacket and a large watch, and sporting a small white goatee, Bruce is a key figure in the Latin American LGBT world. Twice a minister in moderate right-wing governments of Peru, he meets up with me in Lima several times in 2014 and 2015. He describes a Latin American context that is generally supportive of gay rights advances even if specific national features, as in Peru, are hampering the LGBT movement. Gay life is active in Lima, as I am able to see, especially with huge clubs such as the Downtown Valetodo in the Miraflores district. In large cities, tolerance is growing. But rights recognition runs up against the Catholic Church here, too, preventing any progress in Peru, despite the church’s moral bankruptcy owing to an increase in pedophilia cases. “Here, Cardinal Juan Luis Cipriani Thorne is very homophobic. He speaks of homosexuals as adulterated and ‘damaged goods,’ and, for him, gay marriage would be comparable, in his words, to ‘the Holocaust.’ Yet when a bishop was accused of pedophilia in the Ayacucho region, he came to his defense!” Carlos Bruce says, visibly upset. Then he adds: “Here, as elsewhere in Latin America, the main resistance to gay rights comes from the Catholic Church, but I think homophobes are losing ground.”

Bolivia is another exception, a country that also belongs to the “poor student” category in Latin America. Evo Morales, the Bolivian president, does not support LGBT rights, according to what all the LGBT activists I meet in La Paz tell me. They also point out his authoritarianism and his desire to remain in power, à la Hugo Chávez if not Fidel Castro, beyond what is provided for in the Constitution (he wanted to change the fundamental law in order to be able to run again for president). The influential opposition journalist Raul Peñaranda tells me that Evo Morales’s mistrust of gays is rooted in the prejudicial notion that homosexuality is a middle-class, capitalist, and imperialist phenomenon or, broadly speaking, a tradition foreign to American Indians. Morales, being “indigenous” and having been overwhelmingly elected by the Indian population, seems not to have managed to free himself of the homophobic vision so deeply rooted in Andean rural society. His far-Left politics is in fact a progressive politics with two speeds that exclude women and homosexuals.

The paradox exists in Ecuador, too, where Rafael Correa’s presidency was inflected by a similar hostility toward gays, especially because of Catholicism. “Correa is a progressive, not a Marxist. The social justice he defends is in the tradition of social Catholicism, which inspires him deeply,” Orlando Pérez confirms in Quito. Pérez is the editor of El Telégrafo, an Ecuadorian daily. Correa was permanently influenced by post–Vatican II radical liberation theology. At the heart of the ideology of Correa’s Ecuador, as of Evo Morales’s Bolivia, is the concept of buen vivir (living well). This innovative idea comes with a broad vision for action that enabled Correa and Morales to criticize globalization and consumerism, defend the environment, and give “rights” to nature. “The idea is that we should live in a more communal, less individualistic society. And that we should worry about the quality of life,” says Jeannette Sanchez, Correa’s former minister of economy, whom I interview in Quito. Buen vivir is also a way of criticizing the Western model of progress and imagining a new Latin American paradigm, one that is different from the US paradigm. Ultimately, the variable geometry concept seems to be an alternative to the traditional model of development—a model of development from which women and homosexuals are, in Bolivia as in Ecuador, also visibly excluded.

In Central America (where I did not go), the situation is much more critical, according to several human rights organizations’ reports. In Nicaragua and El Salvador, homosexuals are threatened and sometimes killed; in Honduras, NGOs have identified thirty-one murders of LGBT people in recent years. In the Caribbean and Guyana, where homosexuality is punishable by life in prison, state-sponsored homophobia is common, and tolerance is the exception. As for Venezuela, the current economic, political, and security collapse of the country has inevitably resulted in a great deal of violence against gays, even if that violence does not appear to be state sponsored (according to what people I meet in Caracas tell me). The Catholic Church has curbed the rights of LGBT people everywhere, and the rise of Protestant evangelicals—including in Brazil with antigay Pentecostals such as televangelist Silas Malafaia—also complicates the deal.

The situation, however, is more positive in Colombia. Toby de Lys, the site director of bogogay.com, designed to attract gay tourists—and the competition is tough—sums it up for me in Bogotá: “Buenos Aires, Bogotá, and Rio are competing to be the most gay-friendly city in Latin America.” And journalist Guillermo Osorno, interviewed in Mexico City, adds, “The tourism minister asked me to create an LGBT guide to Mexico City. They want ‘gay pesos.’”

There are LGBT organizations in all of the Latin American countries, and the situation for gays is improving. And if you want a more people-oriented example, it would be enough to mention Puerto Rican singer Ricky Martin, who symbolizes the uninhibited relationship Latinos have with gayness. The Hispanic superstar, a US citizen, came out to the world in March 2010—an important event throughout Latin America. “I am proud to say that I am a fortunate homosexual man,” Ricky Martin announced plainly on his website. Shortly after that, in New York, he married his boyfriend, Carlos, a financial analyst (and together they are raising their twins, Matteo and Valentino, born to a surrogate mother). In 2011, his new album, a real after-market sale of his coming out, was packed with pro-gay songs in which, always smiling, he explained and sang “Ya basta” (Enough), “Será será” (It will come), “No te miento” (I’m not lying to you), each one with a message directed at homosexuals. In the video for his hit “The Best Thing about Me Is You,” a hymn to equality, you see gay and straight couples with an equal sign in the background. Since then, he has continued his globalized pro-gay crusade, speaking publicly as soon as a case of homophobia comes up in Latin America, defending same-sex marriage, and calling for an end to antigay laws internationally. In December 2012, he even stood with Ban Ki-moon, the UN’s secretary-general, in New York, to demand an end to homophobic laws: “We are not asking for special rights,” insisted Ricky Martin. “We are only asking for the same rights. We don’t want to be more or less; we just want to be the same.”

Latin America was one of the regions of the world that took the lead in decriminalizing homosexuality at the United Nations in 2008, headed by Brazil and Argentina.

New York (July 31, 2008). France’s ambassador Jean-Maurice Ripert organized a core group meeting at the UN with ambassadors of mobilized countries to refine the strategy. The meeting was extended to countries likely to switch positions, such as Ukraine and South Africa. After that day, transactions were more closely controlled from the UN headquarters by diplomats, able connoisseurs of the arcane workings of the UN. On August 18, there was another meeting of the core group countries’ ambassadors, this time expanded to NGOs that were active on LGBT issues and present in New York. Boris Dittrich was there on behalf of Human Rights Watch, as were representatives from Amnesty International, ARC International, the International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission—ten organizations in all.

During the fall, the governments in question hosted several meetings in Paris, Geneva, Brussels, and New York. And gradually the idea germinated that a non-European country and, if possible, a “southern” country should read the declaration in order to minimize criticism that the declaration was based on Western values. The diplomats agreed on Gabon, a country that signed on via its ambassador in New York, a rather gay-friendly diplomat, before he suddenly had to rescind following his government’s refusal. In the end, Argentina would be charged at the last minute with presenting the declaration. On the spur of the moment.

Seoul, Rome, Brussels (2008). While Western governments were getting busy in New York, activists continued lobbying pretty much everywhere in the world. Their activity was not coordinated, but each one, using his or her own methods and means, helped put pressure on his or her government.

In Asia, for example, from Seoul, Sukhragchaa “Suki” Mijidsuren was leading work to persuade others. I met him in 2009 in South Korea, in a small restaurant in a distant suburb of Seoul. He was about thirty years old and originally Mongolian. He made an appointment with me in this unlikely place because in his nonactivist life he worked two doors away for a technology company and had only an hour’s break for lunch. We shared small traditional dishes, called banchan, and he told me about his unusual career. Suki left Mongolia, a vast, rich, and sparsely populated country where life for a gay man, he said, was “inappropriate.” He also told me about being repeatedly hassled for his homosexuality and about the risk of exclusion to which he was subjected. Through his activism, in Mongolia first and then in South Korea, he was spotted by the International Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans, and Intersex Association (ILGA), an organization for the defense of gay rights that is headquartered in Brussels. Nowadays Suki, the ILGA representative for Asia, is among those who, with limited means (they volunteer), pressured Asian governments at the time of the discussion at the UN.

“The battle at the UN was fought by many NGOs that, like ILGA, mobilized to decriminalize homosexuality worldwide long before governments did. We had been waiting for this moment for years,” comments the Italian Renato Sabbadini in perfect French (he speaks six languages). Born in Bergamo, Sabbadini made his debut with the Associazione Italiana Lesbica e Gay Italiana (Arcigay), Italy’s largest LGBT organization, founded in 1985 on the model of Communist cells. In 2008, this professional translator and expert on the European Parliament was elected secretary-general of ILGA, headquartered in Brussels, where I meet with him.

ILGA was founded early, in 1978, as a decentralized federation of gay organizations spread across the world. A dozen employees worked in its offices on the sixth floor of a building in the rue de la Charité in the center of Brussels. It received funds, from governments of northern Europe especially and, for its European, dynamic, and autonomous division, from the European Union. “We are currently in a process of institutionalization,” explains Sabbadini. The UN officially recognized ILGA in 2011.

Tel Aviv (2008). In Israel, a Labor MP, Nitzan Horowitz, led the battle in the Knesset, the parliament of the Jewish state. “These days Israel is on the side of gays. The homo question is not discussed much here anymore. We want to be modern, open, Western,” Horowitz explains when I interview him in Tel Aviv.

The green-eyed Nitzan Horowitz, dressed in a denim shirt, is the only openly gay Knesset member. He was born near Tel Aviv to an Ashkenazi family of Polish descent and retains great affection for the State of Israel of the early years: Ben Gurion’s Labor Party, Mapam’s left-wing party, the great Histadrut union (of which he is a member). He tells me he was fascinated by the sharing, the solidarity, the sense of community in Israel, which the new urban kibbutzim, for example, which bloom in cities, embody for him. “I am first a left-wing politician. Then I am gay. I do not feel like I represent gay people. Besides, the LGBT community is very divided here: it is mostly left wing, but many gays vote for the right-wing because of the Arab question, gentrification, or the Israeli entrepreneurial spirit,” Horowitz explains. He notes, in fact, that the Likud (Binyamin Netanyahu’s right-wing party) and Kadima (former prime minister Ariel Sharon’s center-right party) have grown less homophobic—political formations that emphasize, as soon as they can, that “hundreds” of persecuted Palestinian homosexuals have sought refuge in Israel. “Even ‘Bibi’ Netanyahu wants to appear pro-gay internationally. This allows him to point the finger at Arab countries. It exploits the gay question to internal political ends. He has even mentioned gays hanged in Iran. He engages in ‘pink washing’!” Horowitz tells me. (Netanyahu did actually state, in May 2011 before the US Congress, that Israel was the only country to “distinguish” itself in the Middle East, “a region where women are stoned, gays hanged, and Christians persecuted.”)

I’m in the famous Brasserie restaurant on Yitzhak Rabin Square in Tel Aviv, near where the former prime minister was assassinated. As we are talking, Nitzan Horowitz’s companion happens by: he interrupts our conversation politely to bring Soof, their beautiful dog. “Now, you’ve seen the whole family,” Horowitz tells me.

There is no civil marriage in Israel—so no marriage for gay couples. Civil unions, however, are widespread and offer significant rights; gay parenting is very common. “Israeli gays tend to choose normalcy and family life in a country that is itself very family-friendly,” Horowitz says. “Today, gays are well integrated here.”

Israeli LGBT organizations are also concerned about the international situation. “Israel was an active supporter of the UN declaration to decriminalize homosexuality,” Horowitz says, “and I myself participated in several events as an official representative of Israel. Organizations are also campaigning against homophobia in Russia, especially given the large number of Jewish Russian émigrés who live here. We have also been very active on the issue of homophobia in several African countries and, of course, in the Middle East.”

A few days later I receive concrete confirmation of these developments when I attend, north of Tel Aviv, a dinner for Pesach (Passover). Gathered by Benny Ziffer, one of the editors of Ha’aretz, the leading Israeli daily, there is a designer, a famous choreographer, a health journalist, as well as Adi Niv-Yagoda, one of the lawyers from Aguda, the main Israeli LGBT organization. I am surprised from the get-go at how each guest asks after the children of the other gays present and tells us all about the life of his own family. Gays without children express their desire to have one. “There is currently a real baby boom here in the gay community,” Adi confirms. “The increase in the number of children born to gay parents or gay individuals is spectacular.” Three options are preferred. “Shared parenting,” which is the sharing of parental authority, for example, between a gay couple and a lesbian couple; the use of a surrogate mother, usually outside of Israel, typically in India or the United States (because it is still forbidden by the Jewish state for gay couples); and, finally, adoption, although it’s less and less common in Israel.

The gay community is currently in a legal battle to improve things: “Because of the Israeli political model and the power of religious parties in Parliament, we favored a judicial fight rather than lobbying the government. We have won our battles, one after the other, for ten years now, before the Supreme Court. And gradually these victories raised awareness in Israeli society, which is increasingly gay-friendly,” says Adi Niv-Yagoda from the powerful Aguda organization.

Country? They enlist. Fatherhood? They produce children. Homosexuality? They fight. They are Israeli and gay. And indeed, over dinner the conversation turns to the army, and so all the guests share their memories of military service (compulsory for all men and women around the age of eighteen for three years, followed by a month each year up to the age of forty-five). Gays seemed proud to have served in the military and say there are no problems now about being openly gay in the Tzahal, Israeli Defense Forces. “Gays have been officially accepted in the army since 1984, and little by little over the years their integration has gotten easier and easier. Today we see commanders of combat units who have come out of the closet,” says Adi. Listening to these gay men talk companionably, our host Benny Ziffer points out to me that this sort of homo dinner and this sort of conversation would be simply unthinkable a few kilometers away, behind the Green Line, in Palestinian territory.

It is a fact: the situation of homosexuals has normalized in Israel. This is not yet the Sodom and Gomorrah paradise, but it is no longer hell. Then what is it? A normal thing, quite Americanized. The Jewish state is about to leave the Zionist model, that of kibbutzim and Ben Gurion’s socialism, and is increasingly turning toward an Americanized model, with its individualistic and pragmatic values. On gay parenting, the army, the role of the courts, and the debate over gay marriage, Israel is close to the United States. The two countries seem to influence each other. It is sometimes said anecdotally that Israel is the fifty-first American state—and as regards gays, that’s pretty accurate. “Gay rights are slowly emerging as Israeli values,” Benny Ziffer says. Ultimately in the Middle East, homosexuality is becoming kosher, but it is not yet halal.

That evening I see two Israeli flags—two blue stripes surrounding the star of David—on the pediment of Tel Aviv’s gay bars, alongside multicolored rainbow flags, all floating in the wind, intermingled, hugging each other, as though they form a single banner.

Damascus, Riyadh, Cairo, Tehran (fall 2008). It was during the autumn of 2008 that the idea of a counterdeclaration emerged in Syria, Egypt, and Iran. Well versed in UN lobbying techniques and with experience on the death penalty, these Muslim countries decided to mobilize. They managed gradually to create a coalition, albeit a disparate and circumstantial one, but one that would gather almost all Arab countries and some of the African countries with a Christian majority. They also received unexpected support from the Vatican and China.

As confirmed in the archives, the core group countries did imagine early on that there was a risk that countries against decriminalizing homosexuality might come up with a counterdeclaration. In a telegram, France’s ambassador to the UN Jean-Maurice Ripert warned the foreign minister, “Bringing forth a possible counterdeclaration, a means already used last year in the context of voting for a resolution on the death penalty, would probably be the most difficult thing to manage, to the extent that a non-polemical-looking text, satisfied, for example, to plead for ‘cultural diversity’ and for the opportunity for the States to decide their own criminal policies, could probably gather a significant number of signatures.” And that was what happened.

The main opposition against the declaration was led by Saudi Arabia, Syria, and Iran under the banner of the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC). In the Arab-Muslim world, two main international organizations share, despite their strong differences, the same hostility against the gay issue. The oldest, the Arab League, founded in 1945, was of rather socialist and nationalist inspiration (Nasser’s Egypt, Tunisia’s Bourguiba, Syria’s Hafez al-Assad). It sought Arab unity and backed the modernization of the Middle East and North Africa through a certain pan-Arabism. But it has in recent years lost much of its influence to the benefit of Islamists. The OIC, in fact, was created more recently, in 1969. It is dominated by Saudi Arabia, where it is headquartered, and Iran. In 1990, the OIC promoted the Declaration of Human Rights in Islam, which offered a reinterpretation of human rights in a framework compatible with Islam. Against the “equality” of Western countries, these countries erected “justice,” which is to say moral standards inspired by right and wrong as defined by Islamic law. Paradoxically, sometimes the OIC opposes the vision of the frozen and dated Arab League, reflecting a certain leaning toward reform and through complex back and forths trying to adapt Islam to modernity. But the homosexual question is too charged, and in Muslim lands it is an all too powerful taboo for any progress to be imagined. It is even one of the rare subjects capable of bringing together Saudi Arabia and Iran, although they are declared enemies. Ultimately, the fight against recognizing homosexuality has tended to become a strong ideological marker of OIC countries, and it is around this marker that the counterdeclaration at the UN was built.

“Early on, we saw what problems Saudi Arabia posed. In general, the OIC takes a political position, and you can negotiate. But homosexuality is not a political problem like other political problems. For Saudi Arabia, it is a fundamental issue, of a religious sort. If they decided to speak within the OIC against the declaration, we knew all Muslim countries would follow suit. And all would be lost. One day, finally, Saudi Arabia decided to speak,” says Ambassador Jean-Maurice Ripert. Minister Rama Yade recalls: “I received many ministers and ambassadors who came to explain their country’s opposition. Most of the time, they had no rational arguments. There was no head-on rejection. They told me that the problem was not their government, but public opinion, which ‘was not ready.’ That we had to be patient and give them time. They put forward the perverse effects of such a declaration. They said you had to respect their culture, their ideas. It was precisely in the name of cultural diversity that they refused to side with us. And I told them that this was not a cultural fight. That it was not the North against the South. I told them we were not questioning their religion or their culture: we were only defending human rights. That was pretty much what our conversations were like with African countries or with Poland, for example; it was never harsh. And then there came Islam, the Organization of the Islamic Conference, and then, suddenly, the battle became much more difficult.”

Between the “West” and Islam, what would China do? The latter refuses on principle any UN interference in matters relating to human rights, even if the homosexual question is not a high point of concern for it. “For China, Singapore, and for many Asian countries, the gay issue is not a central issue. If you’re careful not to make a confrontational issue of it between East and West, it is quite possible to negotiate an agreement with these countries at the UN. It’s not like with the Arab countries,” the intellectual and academic Russell Heng Hiang explains to me in Singapore. He is one of the founders of the well-known organization Gay People Like Us. So how to explain the positions of China, Singapore, and especially Malaysia? “This hostility to the international decriminalization of homosexuality is the result of a campaign that began much earlier on, in the 1990s. Some politicians, like Mahathir Mohamad, prime minister of Muslim Malaysia, or Lee Kuan Yew, who was still the strong man of Singapore, severely criticized Western ideology, and the ‘West’s reading’ of human rights. For them, this is not about universal rights, but of the will with which the West imposes its values on us. These values are often seen as immoral: freedom of expression that leads to pornography, the encouragement of adultery, the defense of homosexuality and gay marriage. In fact, the gay issue became very central to their speeches. Later China joined them in their view, but Malaysia and Singapore, on behalf of Asian values, were the first to mobilize against homosexuality,” explains Douglas Sanders, a Canadian scholar of Asian gay human rights whom I interview in Bangkok.

Such, then, more or less was the balance of power on the five continents on the eve of the meeting of the UN General Assembly in New York.

New York (December 18, 2008). And so it was that, in the prestigious environment of the UN General Assembly in New York, Argentina, as expected, on December 18, 2008, read the Declaration on Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity. As the crafters of the declaration had wanted, this resolution was not voted on but was instead a simple declaration without a vote or what in UN jargon is called a “joint statement.” Brazil, Croatia, France, Gabon, Japan, Norway, the Netherlands, and Argentina formally submitted the text. It contained thirteen articles and repeatedly mentioned the terms sexual orientation and gender identity. It concerned “violence, harassment, discrimination, exclusion, stigmatization and prejudice directed against” homosexuals (but the word homosexual itself was never mentioned, nor was the word homophobia).

The initiative received the support of sixty-six countries: all nations of the European Union signed it, as did six African countries; four Asian countries, including Nepal; thirteen Latin American countries, including Mexico (Venezuela and Cuba, too, it’s worth noting); as well as Israel, Australia, and Canada. Three OIC member countries (Albania, Gabon, and Guinea-Bissau) also approved it, as did two observer countries at the OIC (Bosnia-Herzegovina and the Central African Republic). For the first time in the history of the United Nations, nations from all continents spoke out against violations of human rights based on sexual orientation.

“It was an historic moment,” says Rama Yade, who made the trip to New York. To which she adds: “I wanted us to wage this battle in New York at UN headquarters, not only just in Geneva before the [UN] Human Rights Council. To state that it was not just an ancillary issue.” After reading the declaration, which lasted about an hour and a half, all the participants attended a “side event,” as they call it at the UN, a political gathering where allies in a cause celebrate if not their victory, then at least the work they accomplished. The actors of the declaration took the floor. The chairman of the IDAHO committee, Louis-Georges Tin, started singing “We Shall Overcome.” “There was a great deal of emotion. I was proud for my country. We were going in the history’s direction,” recalls Rama Yade. Jean-Maurice Ripert, an ambassador who has been around the block, recounts: “It was a very moving event of historic testimonies. I admit I was on the verge of tears.”

As expected, Syria, on behalf of fifty-nine countries, read at the same time, in a room just next door, a counterdeclaration about the “alleged notions of sexual orientation and gender identity.” The first versions of the text, as circulated, were particularly violent and explicitly antigay: homosexuality was notably likened to “bestiality” and “incest” (these terms occur in an undated version called “V.3,” probably from early December 2008, that I was able to get). In a tactical choice and after negotiations within the OIC, this version was attenuated in the end (Morocco and Turkey refused to approve the text as it was, and Turkey ended up abstaining, as did six other OIC member countries). The counterdeclaration focused on the defense of family as “the natural and fundamental unit of society” (a clever reference to Article 16 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights) and criticized the creation of “new rights” and “new standards” that betrayed the spirit of the UN’s reference documents. The text condemned the phrase sexual orientation in particular, which it criticized for not having any “legal UN basis” and because it would pave the way to legitimizing “many deplorable acts including pedophilia.” By explicitly brandishing the specter of pedophilia, Syria and the other OIC countries managed to come together. Nearly all of the Arab countries supported the counterdeclaration, along with thirty-one African countries (among them Cameroon, the Ivory Coast, and Senegal), several Asian countries (including Muslim Malaysia and Indonesia and, not surprisingly, North Korea) and, of course, Iran. Also in evidence were four other countries, members of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Turkmenistan), as well as some countries that do not criminalize homosexuality in their country. France tried to use its influence to try to get at least one Arab country, Lebanon, to switch but failed: “Lebanon unfortunately voted with the Arab countries. We lobbied the Lebanese ambassador to the UN intensely, but nothing worked. Lebanon is OIC aligned,” laments Georges Azzi, then president of Helem, the main gay Arab NGO, whom I interview in Beirut.

Among the countries associated with the counterdeclaration, one in particular attracted a great deal of criticism, and that was the Vatican. “It aligned itself with Iran and China; that was unacceptable. The Vatican could have abstained. But, no, it even campaigned and was very active against the declaration,” says Sergio Rovasio, president of Certi Diritti, the gay organization that was tight with the radical party, whom I interview in Florence. Then he adds sternly: “The Vatican is antigay. OK. But it never spoke up against Berlusconi’s underage prostitutes and against pedophile priests very little and very late in the game. It really is a homophobic policy. And an incoherent policy with two weights and two measures.”

Sixty-eight countries abstained, refusing to associate with either the text submitted by Argentina or the counterdeclaration submitted by Syria. These “neutral” countries included China and Singapore, Turkey, India, Thailand, Vietnam, and Russia. Also abstaining were South Korea, Ukraine, and South Africa, which was disappointing since Seoul, Kiev, and Pretoria participated in the first meetings about the declaration but disassociated themselves when the counterdeclaration emerged. In particular, Zuma’s South Africa played its own tune, both to keep up its African-leader role with respect to Nigeria, which was very hostile to the declaration, and to affirm, with India, China, and Russia, the uniqueness of emerging countries that aspire to being better represented at the United Nations—all of which, by the way, also abstained.

But the greatest disappointment in December 2008 was the United States, which decided, on the orders of George W. Bush, to abstain, too. It was the only Western country to let us down in New York! The US silence aroused strong international criticism, and many gay organizations denounced the fact that the United States took China’s side. A State Department spokesperson justified—unconvincingly—the abstention on legal grounds, internal to US law. Immediately after taking office at the White House in February 2009, Barack Obama, however, adjusted things, saying in a statement, “At the international level, I have joined efforts at the United Nations to decriminalize homosexuality around the world.” And the United States finally belatedly signed the declaration that Argentina had introduced. With the addition of late-comer Costa Rica, there are now 68 signatories to the declaration out of the 193 UN member states. End of the first round.

“Everything went much faster than I would have thought or even dreamed of. At the same time, everything was so much more complicated,” French activist Louis-Georges Tin says, clearly pleased yet cautious. Next step? “A resolution,” he says. As for diplomat Jacques Pellet, he concludes: “Negotiating at the UN takes a long time. In the short term, the idea would be to reissue a declaration to increase the number of voters. In the medium term, we can imagine a resolution. But the subject remains difficult and the results precarious. It will be a long haul. The numbers are simple: there are 193 member states at the UN, and it takes half, or 97, to pass a resolution. Since the vote was a simple majority vote, you would also bet on some abstentions. But some countries, like Cuba, which agreed to join in a declaration of principles, may oppose a more binding resolution. We must therefore continue to persuade.”

Pretoria, South Africa (2011). “Discrimination is wrong, Frédéric. It is wrong.” Without hesitating, Jerry Matjila, whom I am meeting for the first time, calls me by my first name, the African way. He repeats these words with his scratchy voice and a strong accent: “Discrimination is bad.” I am at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of South Africa, a colossal bunker in the center of Pretoria. In 2011, Matjila was South Africa’s ambassador to the United Nations in Geneva. Today, at sixty, he is the very powerful director general of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs—and South Africa’s number two diplomat. “I was in exile in Sweden during apartheid. How do you think someone like me, who’s been fighting all his life against discrimination, isn’t going to support gay rights? Things are very clear: our diplomacy is guided by the Constitution. The Constitution is against discrimination based on sexual orientation. We are therefore conducting a foreign policy that supports the universal decriminalization of homosexuality.” I ask Matjila why South Africa abstained in New York in 2008. “We tried to persuade African countries. It was difficult; we did not want to dissociate from Africa in 2008, but when I became ambassador in Geneva, I chose a different strategy. I told the minister: ‘Let’s agree to disagree with Africa on this issue.’ And that’s what we did in 2011. We used our constitution to propose a resolution against discrimination. And this time we succeeded.” Matjila pauses to exchange few quick words with his counselor in Zulu, one of the eleven official languages of South Africa. Cleverly, Matjila the diplomat now slips me a few thoughtful remarks: he reminds me that the United States also abstained in 2008 and that South Africa was the first country in the world to adopt a gay-friendly constitution. “We were also well ahead on marriage, you know; even Australian homosexuals came to South Africa to get married because they could not do so at home.” I ask how it was that one of his country’s ambassadors—namely, Jon Qwulane, stationed in Uganda—could publicly make homophobic comments. Matjila looks at me and fires: “Frédéric, people died here for our constitution to exist. Nobody has the right to disregard it. All South African diplomats must follow our constitution. That’s all.” Having tackled his recalcitrant ambassador, Matjila emphasizes South Africa’s coming strategy. “We are determined to fight on the question of sexual orientation. We have to build educational campaigns, we have to carry the debate in Africa, we have to put the issue on the agenda at the Francophone summit, but also in Commonwealth countries. We have to go forward step by step. Gradually. We have to consolidate what we have, and then we move ahead.” Will South Africa support a new resolution at the United Nations? Matjila hesitates, exchanges a few words in Zulu with his counselor, and, having suddenly found his political voice, replies: “I do not know what is on the agenda to come; that’s for the foreign minister to decide.”

What about this official position? South Africa gives me the strange feeling of its having chosen a strategy that separates it from the West before the battle at the UN and then regrouping after the declaration’s victory. In an effort to increase points of view, I meet up in Johannesburg with the key players in the debate on the universal decriminalization of homosexuality. Starting with the Human Rights Commission, an official agency of the South African government, which intervened to back the declaration to the UN. “I remember a meeting convened urgently on a Sunday morning. Members of the commission immediately spoke up as one and asked the government to respect the South African Constitution and to sign the UN declaration,” explains Kgamadi Kometsi, one of the leaders of the Human Rights Commission. In a café in the center of Johannesburg, this black physician continues: “This is no doubt a topic that still deeply divides the country. But our view is simple: South Africa has gone too far to retreat. Sexual orientation figures in the South African Constitution. Case closed.” After South Africa’s abstention in 2008, the Human Rights Commission asked the government for an explanation, and it did not fail to sue South Africa’s ambassador to Uganda, Jon Qwulane, for his homophobic comments (the matter is before the South African Supreme Court). “For us, it is not possible to defend positions internationally that are contrary to our constitution,” Kometsi adds.

LGBT organizations in South Africa take the issue very seriously. But Anthony Manion, the (white) director of the African gay organization Gay and Lesbian Memory in Action, or GALA, offers a different explanation: “The problem in South Africa is that its pro-LGBT positions are not understood in Africa. On this subject, other countries think that our government is under pressure from a white gay South African movement. They do not believe it’s a real claim of black South Africa, but only of the white minority. And as much as they respect Pretoria’s position a great deal, they do not think its battle for gay rights is genuine. They see it as a Western agenda, whose communication load is all up to South Africa.”

United Nations, Geneva, New York (2011–2016). The battle has continued since 2011, more frequently and more actively than ever. On March 22, 2011, a new statement was presented to the UN Human Rights Council, this time in Geneva, followed by another at the same place on June 17, 2011. The first one was brought by Colombia and the second by South Africa, who, in taking a leadership role on the issue, seemed to want to put behind it its silence in 2008. Although the Geneva declarations were less solemn and influential than those presented in New York at the UN General Assembly, they opened a new breach: the first was a simple statement supported by eighty-five countries (an increase of fifteen countries since the New York declaration in 2008, now including Rwanda, Mongolia, and Vanuatu, even as Gabon withdrew). The second was a resolution this time, but a more constraining one on a more specific subject: not on decriminalizing homosexuality as such, but just on denunciating violence and discrimination related to sexual orientation and gender identity. The resolution called for a report on these acts of violence and a status report on discriminatory laws and practices. It was, for the first time, followed by a vote; out of the forty-seven members of the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva, there were twenty-three votes in favor, nineteen votes against, and three abstentions (including China’s). “This marks a significant milestone in the long struggle for equality, and the beginning of a universal recognition that LGBT persons are endowed with the same inalienable rights—and entitled to the same protections—as all human beings,” Barack Obama wrote in a memo, rightly rejoicing. Meanwhile, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton increased pressure on the issue, leading very actively against homophobia and even delivering a historic speech to the UN in Geneva in December 2011. In it, she announced that American diplomacy would support international gay activists from now on: “Some have suggested that gay rights and human rights are separate and distinct, but in fact they are one and the same,” she said. “Gay rights are human rights, and human rights are gay rights.” For these particularly gay-friendly words, Hillary Clinton was warmly applauded by the UN General Assembly.

The following year, on March 7, 2012, a panel met in Geneva within the framework of the Human Rights Council to review the report that had been written in the meantime and to discuss measures to be taken over time. Before the debate started, UN secretary-general Ban Ki-moon, a new ally now campaigning openly for decriminalization, sent a message. He said: “Some say sexual orientation and gender identity are a sensitive subject. I understand. Like many of my generation, I did not grow up talking about these issues. But I learned to speak out because lives are at stake.… To those who are lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender, let me say … you are not alone … I stand with you.… A historic shift is under way.… The time has come.”

Ban Ki-moon’s statement was a crucial turning point. For the first time in the history of the UN, the secretary-general stepped up to the plate to defend LGBT people, mixing a position of fundamental principle with his personal history. “You are not alone,” he said to homosexuals the world over. The video traveled around the world, taken up by thousands of organizations on all five continents. “The time has come.”

Since then, nobody is counting speeches the same way any longer. Barack Obama took to the floor in 2012 and chose to make decriminalizing homosexuality a major goal of American diplomacy. British prime minister David Cameron hinted that he would make decriminalization a condition of aid from and cooperation of the British—before pulling back—and the House of Lords ruled unanimously in October 2012 to end “the international antigay hate” (Conservative Lord Lexden, who led the debate in the upper house, evoked the risk of persecution for more than “175 million” homosexuals discriminated against in “at least seventy-six countries”). France’s president, François Hollande, engaged on this issue in his speech to the sixty-seventh UN General Assembly in New York in September 2012: “France will continue to fight these struggles: for the abolition of the death penalty, for women’s rights to equality and dignity, for the universal decriminalization of homosexuality, which cannot be recognized as a crime [but] rather as … an orientation.”

Between 2012 and 2016, although the LGBT question often came up in international news, there were hardly any genuinely new developments at the United Nations. In 2014, the Human Rights Council in Geneva adopted a resolution on “sexual orientation and gender identity” to denounce violence against LGBT people: the vote was complex, as I saw when reviewing the minutes of the discussions, with twenty-five represented countries choosing to vote for it, fourteen against it, and seven abstaining. Once again, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Algeria as well as Pakistan and Indonesia protested against using the phrase sexual orientation and submitted several amendments to request its removal. Diplomatically, the United States was particularly active in this negotiation, confirming the will of the US administration (which also named a diplomat as “special envoy” to officially be in charge of LGBT rights).

In late June 2016, shortly after the attack on the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, the UN Human Rights Council once again adopted a resolution to create the position of “independent expert” on discrimination and violence against LGBT people. This decision—on which several Latin American countries (mainly Argentina, Colombia, Chile, Costa Rica, Mexico, and Uruguay) took the initiative, supported by the European countries—was harshly opposed by Muslim countries, even as South Africa abstained once again. Nevertheless, for the first time a special position of UN observer for LGBT people, a true watchdog, was created. This is no doubt insufficient but one more step in the long march of gays.

Throughout Europe and the United States, civil society was also mobilizing on the ground, continuing a fight that diplomats were struggling to move forward. New organizations were created to defend the rights of LGBT people. Political coalitions were also emerging: in England, the Kaleidoscope Trust was launched (kaleidoscopetrust.com), and in the United States the Washington-based Council for Global Equality (globalequality.org) brought together a dozen LGBT organizations, which are now intensely campaigning in support of universal decriminalization as well as lobbying the Democratic Party and the State Department. Human Rights Campaign, the strong US LGBT advocacy group based in Washington, launched HRC Global, with significant resources, and OutRight, a significant international LGBT human rights association, is expanding its network and diversifying its activities. And Ban Ki-moon renewed, this time in person, his global appeal for LGBT people at the UN in December 2012 and in subsequent years, including his appeal to Sochi in Russia in 2014.

The New York and Geneva battles mapped out the real geopolitics of the issues of gay and lesbian rights. Some countries are gay-friendly, some are hostile, and others remain neutral. The terms of the debate have been set. The balance of power has been measured at the UN. Muslim countries, the Arab world, Iran have assumed leadership against gay issues. But the lines will move, alliance reversals will occur, and the spirit of the times will change these positions. The battle has only just begun.

Note

1.  For this book, I did research on the ground in South Africa, Kenya, and Cameroon. For the rest of sub-Saharan Africa, where I did not go, including Uganda, my information is secondhand.