August 26 should have been a day of celebration for Ezz Eldin, a 26-year-old transgender man, but it ended in tragedy. He bled to death after he was prematurely discharged following a gender-affirmation surgery in an underground clinic, transgender activists told Human Rights Watch.
Ezz Eldin, who also went by Ahmed Fares, need not have died, and what should have been a life-affirming surgery instead became a life-threatening procedure in an unauthorized clinic. A dysfunctional, discriminatory system left him with no surgical alternative. This is the situation for transgender people in Egypt who are denied access to appropriate health care under a government that discriminates against them and withholds legal gender recognition.
His desperate attempts to get the care he needed arose, in part, due to discord between religious and medical authorities. The impasse originated almost two decades ago and revolves around the extent at which religious authorities should have a say in medical matters. It is based on a fatwa, or religious edict, that permitted medical intervention only for intersex people, who are born with characteristics that vary from what is considered typical for female or male bodies.
Transgender individuals, whose gender differs from the sex they were assigned at birth, were disqualified. This confusing, contradictory, and discriminatory policy has left transgender people in Egypt with very few choices—if they want surgery, unregulated and often unsafe clinics are the only options.
In 2003, Egypt’s Health Ministry established a review committee within the Medical Syndicate for people wanting “sex reassignment surgery.” However, the volunteer committee met irregularly, had no legal authority, and was required to include a representative from Egypt’s Islamic oversight body, Dar Al Ifta.
This led to the anomalous situation of a religious authority participating in medical policy, based on their understanding of religion, not science. In accordance with the fatwa, Dar Al Ifta drew a distinction between “sex change,” referring to gender affirming surgery for transgender people, and “sex reassignment,” referring to surgery for people with intersex characteristics.
Medical authorities were reluctant to refer transgender patients to surgery, out of deference for their religious counterparts. In 2003, the Medical Syndicate amended the Medical Code of Ethics to ban doctors from performing surgery on transgender patients to further please the religious authorities, who believed that sex reassigment sugries should only be allowed for intersex indvidiuals.
Doctors who perform such surgery risk a professional liability, and legal repercussions under article 244 of Egypt’s Penal Code. In several documented cases, prosecutors and judges punished doctors who had performed these operations under the guise of causing a “permanent disability” to transgender patients. This caused a spike in the cost of gender-affirming care, as fewer doctors were willing to take this risk. According to several transgender people we talked to, gender-affirming surgeries could cost anywhere from 7,000 EGP (445 USD) to 25,000 EGP (1,560 USD).
Notwithstanding these barriers, the Medical Syndicate indicated in 2013 that it was willing to consider individual transgender applicants under certain onerous conditions, including two years of psychiatric observation. This was to demonstrate to the religious authorities that the applicant tried to resolve the issue through psychiatric treatment but to no effect. But even this narrow window was closed under pressure from Dar Al Ifta in 2014.
In 2017, religious and medical representatives appeared to have resolved their differences by agreeing that the religious authorities would have the final say. However, the committee remained so dysfunctional that it asked the government to dissolve it and transfer responsibility for handling cases to the Health Ministry or Justice Ministry.
In a landmark 2016 case, a transgender man requested legal gender recognition from the state, but an administrative court denied his request, based on the aforementioned fatwa, and after the Forensic Medical Authority said that “the plaintiff underwent a sex change operation and not a sex reassignment one.” Thus, the plaintiff violated the Shari’a principles, which only allows surgeries for intersex individuals.
The court added that parliament should “issue laws to regulate the matter and to clear the confusion about the process, on the condition that the new laws would be compatible with Islamic Shari’a.” and that “the medical syndicate is a body only responsible to look after the welfare of its members and is not in a position to review requests for sex reassignment surgeries.”
This ruling highlighted the negative impact of having religious authorities determine the health care needs of transgender people, a task for which they are wholly unqualified.
Ezz Eldin could have received the care he needed had the Egyptian authorities remedied this systemic failure and established an administrative procedure that facilitates transgender people’s access to gender affirming medical care.
Egypt’s legislative and executive branches should carry out urgent reforms to create a legal gender recognition system recognized by all government departments. The Medical Syndicate should rescind its ban on surgery for transgender people, and religious bodies, such as Dar Al-Ifta, should end their interference in medical matters. Medical school curricula should also be changed to include medical training for gender affirming procedures.
By reforming its own system, Egypt can influence positive changes in other countries in the region, due to its geopolitical and cultural importance. Egypt should lead the way and establish clear and accessible legal gender recognition mechanisms, as well as allow access to gender affirming healthcare for transgender people modeled on one’s right to self-identification.
InterPride, the coalition of LGBTQ Pride organizations from throughout the world, announced early Saturday that it has selected the group Kaohsiung Pride in Taiwan over D.C.’s Capital Pride Alliance to host World Pride 2025.
Kaohsiung Pride and Capital Pride Alliance represented the only two cities that submitted bids to host the international Pride event, which draws thousands of worldwide visitors to the host city.
“With this monumental vote by InterPride members, a World Pride will be held in East Asia for the first time,” according to a statement released by InterPride. “The members of InterPride voted on the host of World Pride 2025 over four days during the 2021 General Meeting and World Conference,” the statement says.
“More than 300 member organizations worldwide participated in the voting process, workshops, plenary sessions, regional and board meetings during the 8-day virtual event,” the statement notes.
In an announcement on Sept. 21 that it had submitted a bid to host World Pride 2025, Capital Pride Alliance said the event, among other things, would commemorate the 50th anniversary of D.C.’s first LGBTQ Pride event in 1975, which began as a block party near Dupont Circle.
“The Capital Pride Alliance congratulates Kaohsiung Pride on being awarded the opportunity to produce World Pride 2025,” said Capital Pride Alliance Executive Director Ryan Bos in a statement released by InterPride.
“We extend to them our heartfelt best wishes for a successful event,” Bos said. “Capital Pride will use the next three years to continue with our long-standing plans to commemorate the 50th anniversary of pride in Washington, D.C., in June 2025,” he said in the statement.
The decision to select Taiwan over D.C. for World Pride 2025 comes five years after D.C. and Guadalajara, Mexico, lost their respective bids to host the 2022 Gay Games, the quadrennial international LGBTQ sports event. Like InterPride, the Federation of Gay Games, the U.S.-based group that organizes the Gay Games, said in its 2017 announcement that the selection of Hong Kong represented the first time that event would be held in Asia.
Gay Games organizers in Hong Kong have since announced they have postponed the event for one year, to November 2023, due to concerns related to the COVID-19 pandemic.
The Hong Kong organizers last week said plans for the event were moving forward with support from corporate sponsors and LGBTQ groups despite a crackdown by China against human rights activists in Hong Kong over the past two years that has drawn international condemnation by human rights advocates.
China has long claimed that Taiwan is part of its territory and has suggested it might take military action to “reunite” the island with China, a development that has led to tension between China and the U.S., a committed Taiwan ally.
“From Rome to Jerusalem to London to Toronto to Madrid to New York City to Copenhagen, World Pride has been a worldwide event since 1997,” InterPride said in its statement announcing the event would take place in Taiwan in 2025. The statement says Sydney, Australia, will be hosting the next World Pride set for 2023.
“Bringing World Pride to this region [Taiwan] for the first time will create a significant impact to the much-needed visibility and awareness of human rights for the LGBTQIA+ community there while providing the ability for millions more to participate from surrounding countries and territories, including China, Hong Kong, Japan, South Korea, Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand, the Philippines, Vietnam and Indonesia,” Julian Sanjivan, InterPride’s co-president, said in the statement.
Breaking with its usual practices on LGBTQ rights and issues, China launched its first medical clinic to treat transgender children and adolescents.
The Chinese state-backed media outlet The Global Times recently reported that the clinic opened at the Children’s Hospital of Fudan University in Shanghai, saying that it will “serve as a bridge between transgender children, parents, doctors and the various circles of society.”
The clinic’s opening and its celebratory coverage in Chinese state media comes as the country simultaneously works to limit LGBTQ activism and voices.
Homosexuality has not been illegal in China since 1997, but restrictions for LGBTQ people still remain.
Last week, a Chinese LGBTQ advocacy group that has led many of the country’s legal cases to expand LGBTQ rights announced that it would be halting its work “indefinitely.”
Chinese tech giant Tencent’s WeChat social media platform deleteddozens of LGBTQ accounts run by university students in July, saying that the accounts had broken Chinese internet rules. But critics argued that the wipeout of the accounts amounted to censoring LGBTQ activism.
And after 11 years in operation, Shanghai Pride canceled its annual LGBTQ celebration last year and said — without explanation — that it would no longer hold the event.
The Global Times reported that research by Chinese scholars linking transgender youths to higher rates of depression, anxiety and suicide attempts led doctors to believe that specialized care for trans minors was necessary.
In the United States, advocates and scholars have also been warning about the disproportionate rates of bullying, harassment and mental health issues plaguing trans youths.
A survey of over 35,000 LGBTQ youths and young adults this year by The Trevor Project, an LGBTQ youth suicide prevention and crisis intervention organization, found that more than half of transgender and nonbinary respondents seriously considered suicide.
It’s unclear how many children in China identify as transgender, as there is little research from the country on its trans community. However, a 2021 analysis by the Williams Institute at the UCLA School of Law found that 14 percent of over 1,000 Chinese respondents say that they have transgender acquaintances.
The Australian Human Rights Commission issued a report today analyzing the persistent practice of medically unnecessary non-consensual surgeries on children born with variations in their sex characteristics. The commission urged authorities to protect children’s rights to informed consent, and to legally regulate the operations.
Around the world since the 1950s, people born with variations in their sex characteristics, sometimes called “intersex,” have been subjected to harmful medically unnecessary “normalizing” surgeries. Surgeons popularized these cosmetic surgeries on infants to remove gonads, reduce the size of the clitoris, or increase the size of the vagina.
But these procedures are not designed to treat a medical problem, and there is no evidence they help children “fit in,” which some surgeons say is their aim. The operations carry high risks of scarring, loss of sexual sensation, incontinence, and psychological trauma. Some surgeries can sterilize the person, which an Australian Senate Committee condemned in 2013.
Its new report calls on the government to develop rights-based standards of care for children born with variation in their sex characteristics. It urges legislation to regulate the surgeries, limiting them only to when the patient has consented or where they are “required urgently to avoid serious harm” and “the risk of harm cannot be mitigated in another less intrusive way, and intervention cannot be further delayed.”
Momentum for change in Australia is afoot. Federal and local governments should urgently consider the commission’s recommendations and ensure that children born perfectly healthy – just a little different – are free to make decisions about their own bodies.
The Dutch monarchy made international news last week after announcing that royals can marry a same-sex partner without giving up their right to the throne. But while the Netherlands, which in 2001 became the first country to legalize gay marriage, has paved the wave for a queer royal to officially wear the crown, LGBTQ people have long been doing so unofficially.
While it’s difficult to assign modern labels to figures from the past, there were notable leaders from centuries — even millennia — ago, who crossed sexual and gender boundaries. Some were celebrated by their subjects, others vilified.
In light of the Dutch monarchy’s recent announcement and in honor of LGBTQ History Month, which is celebrated in October, here are 13 queer royals you didn’t learn about in school.
Emperor Ai of Han (27 – 1 B.C.)
Made emperor of the Han Dynasty at age 20, Ai was initially well received by his subjects but eventually became associated with corruption and incompetence. He was also widely known to have been romantically involved with one of his ministers, Dong Xian, though both men were married to women.
In the “Hanshu,” or “Book of Han,” Dong and Ai’s relationship is referred to as “the passion of the cut sleeve.” As the story went, the pair had fallen asleep together on a mat and, upon waking, the emperor cut the sleeve off his robe rather than disturb his lover. (The term “cut sleeve” remained a Chinese euphemism for male homosexuality for centuries.)
Dong was granted many honors, eventually being made commander of the military, and he and his family lived inside the imperial compound.
According to historian Brent Hinsch, many Han emperors reportedly had “male favorites” who were listed in both the “Book of Han” and the “Shiji,” or “Records of the Grand Historian.”
“It is not women alone who can use their looks to attract the eyes of the ruler,” the “Shiji” reads, according to Ban Gu’s “History of Early China.” “Courtiers and eunuchs can play that game as well. Many were the men of ancient times who gained favor this way.”
Emperor Hadrian of Rome (76 – 138 A.D.)
Another leader who showered his male lover with attention, Hadrian was in a politically arranged marriage to the great-niece of his predecessor — a loveless union that bore no children. It wasn’t unusual for high-powered Romans to have male partners in addition to their wives, but Hadrian was almost slavishly devoted to his young consort, Antinous.
When Antinous mysteriously drowned in the Nile in 130 A.D., Hadrian was so grief-stricken he had the young man deified and put up monuments to him everywhere.
“Hadrian was clearly bereaved and he had lots of images put up,” Thorsten Opper, who curated an exhibit on the emperor at the British Museum, told The Independent in 2008. “When a city [in Egypt] was founded close to the spot where Antinous drowned, he named it Antinopolis. It was a sort of hero cult-worship of Antinous.”
Al-Hakam II of Córdoba (915 – 976)
A 10th century caliph in Córdoba, Spain, Al-Hakam was known for his largely peaceful reign and his love of learning: His library contained more than 400,000 books, and he provided sanctuary to many writers and philosophers.
The caliph’s sexuality has been the source of some debate: According to the French medievalist Évariste Lévi-Provençal, the phrase “hubb al-walad,” found in 16th-century historian Ahmed Mohammed al-Maqqari’s compendium “Nafh at-Tib” in reference to Al-Hakam II, translates as a “preference for boys,” though other scholars maintain it refers to paternal love.
The Medieval Europe scholar Francisco Prado-Vilar wrote that knowledge of Al-Hakam’s homosexuality in the court of Córdoba “encouraged the ambitions of the factions gathered around his much younger brother, Prince al-Mughira.”
“In his youth his loves seem to have been entirely homosexual,” queer studies scholar Louis Crompton wrote in “Male Love and Islamic Law in Arab Spain.” “This exclusivity was a problem when he succeeded to the throne, since it was incumbent upon the new caliph to produce a male heir.”
Despite rumors of having a male harem, Al-Hakam did marry a Basque concubine named Subh, but reportedly gave her the masculine nickname Jafar. Subh is said to have worn the short hair and trousers of a ghulam, or young man,to garner her husband’s attention.
King Edward II of England (1284 – 1327)
King Edward II of England’s intense relationship with Piers Gaveston drew the ire of many nobles at court and forced Edward to send his favorite away more than once.
“When the king’s son gazed upon him, he straightaway felt so much love for him that he entered into a covenant of brotherhood with him and chose and firmly resolved to bind himself to him, before all mortals, in an unbreakable bond of love,” wrote one chronicler at the time.
The sexual nature of their relationship has been alluded to in Christopher Marlowe’s 1592 play, “Edward II,” and addressed more directly in queer filmmaker Derek Jarman’s 1991 film of the same name.
But even contemporaries were claiming the two men were unusually close, with some nicknaming Gaveston a “second king.”
According to English Heritage, which manages historic British monuments, “It is impossible to know the exact nature of their relationship, but there is strong evidence to suggest it was a romantic one.”
Eventually, their relationship estranged Edward from his wife, Isabella of France, and her allies at court. After he returned from exile a third time in 1311, Gaveston was hunted down and decapitated by a group of noblemen, including Edward’s cousin Thomas, the Earl of Lancaster.
In 1326, Isabella and her possible lover, Roger Mortimer, seized power and had Edward deposed and imprisoned. He died at Berkeley Castle in Gloucestershire a year later.
Rumors that Edward II had been gruesomely executed by having a red-hot poker inserted into his backside spread quickly, likely started by his political enemies.
Queen Ana Nzinga of Ndongo (1583 – 1663)
The gender-nonconforming ruler of Ndongo and Matamba in modern-day Angola, Nzinga fought off Portuguese colonialists, alternately through diplomacy, trade and guerrilla warfare.
She welcomed runaway slaves and European-trained African soldiers, and adopted kilombo, a military strategy in which male youths were taken from their families and raised communally in militias.
In a 1670 book, her Dutch bodyguard, Captain Fuller, described 60-year-old Nzinga as wearing “men’s apparel” during ritual sacrifice, “hanging about her the skins of beasts … with a sword about her neck, an axe at her girdle, and a bow and arrows in her hand.”
Fuller also described a cadre of young men whom Nzinga kept dressed in women’s clothing.
“The thing about Nzinga is her title was Ngola, and Ngola means king,” the Nigerian American photographer Mikael Owunna told NPR in 2017. “Nzinga ruled dressed in full male clothing as a king, and she had a harem of young men dressed as women who were her wives. So in the 1600s, you basically had a butch queen with a bunch of drag queens for wives leading a fight against European colonization.”
King James I of England (1566 – 1625)
The son of Mary, Queen of Scots, this British monarch, known as both King James VI of Scotland and King James I of England, has been described by the historian Michael B. Young as “the most prominent homosexual figure in the early modern period.”
Married to Anne of Denmark, James is thought to have had relationships with several male courtiers — most notably, George Villiers, whom he made the Earl and later the Duke of Buckingham. (In the early 2000s, restoration work on Apethorpe Palace revealed a secret passageway connecting James’ and Villiers’ bedchambers.)
“To the shock of many courtiers, the pair were demonstratively affectionate to each other in public, despite James’ various proclamations against homosexuality,” Daniel Smith wrote in “Love Letters of Kings and Queens.”
A popular epigram at the time compared the Jacobean monarch to his Tudor predecessor, Elizabeth I, declaring, “Elizabeth was King, now James is Queen.”
Contemporary poet Théophile de Viau put it more bluntly: “It is well known that the king of England f—- the Duke of Buckingham.”
Fending off claims of favoritism, James proclaimed, “You may be sure that I love the Earl of Buckingham more than anyone else.”
“I wish … to not to have it thought to be a defect,” he added, “for Jesus Christ did the same, and therefore I cannot be blamed. Christ had John, and I have George.”
Queen Christina of Sweden (1626 – 1689)
It’s hard to separate fact from fiction with this 17th-century Swedish royal: Her predilection for wearing men’s clothes and enjoying literature, hunting, alchemy and other male-dominated activities spurred rumors Christina was a sexual deviant or intersex.
“There is nothing feminine about her except her sex,” a Jesuit priest wrote in 1653. “Her voice, her manner of speaking, her walk, her style, her ways are all quite masculine.”
Oliver Cromwell’s secretary of state John Thurloe commented on Christina’s “Amazonian behavior” and said that “nature was mistaken in her,” while salacious French pamphlets claimed she was “one of the most ribald tribades ever heard of,” using the contemporary term for a lesbian.
But how many of those barbs were simply attempts at character assassination isn’t clear.
“The monarch has been described at best as ‘unconventional’ and at worst as an impulsive, over-emotional murderer,” historian Amy Saunders wrote in The Royal Studies Journal. “Christina’s sexuality and gender have been constantly reconstructed, re-examined, and re-interpreted.”
Since childhood, the queen’s closest companion was Countess Ebba Sparre, whom she introduced as “my bed-fellow.”
“How happy I should be if only I could see you, Beautiful One,” Christina wrote to Sparre in 1656. “But I am condemned by destiny to love and cherish you always without seeing you. I cannot be completely happy when I am separated from you.”
“It’s difficult to imagine just how Christina understood her own feelings for Ebba, and for those of other women, like the Comtesse de Suze, on whom she is said to have been keen,” Sarah Waters, author of “Tipping the Velvet,” wrote in the Feminist Review in 1994. “There was certainly gossip about Christina’s relations with women in her own day, identifying her as the aristocratic ‘tribade.’”
Christina, who abdicated rather than marry, wrote in her memoir that she felt “an insurmountable distaste for marriage” and “for all the things that females talked about and did.”
Though the 1933 film “Queen Christina” inserts a fictional heterosexual romance, the movie cemented screen goddess Greta Garbo’s status as a queer icon.
Queen Anne of England (1665 – 1714)
Anne, who suffered from frail health throughout her life, met Sarah Churchill when the two were girls. They quickly became close confidants, embarking on a relationship that lasted well into adulthood.
“If I could tell how to hinder myself from writing to you every day I would,” Anne wrote to her friend. “But really I cannot … when I am from you I cannot be at ease without enquiring after you.”
When Anne became queen in 1707, she made Sarah and her husband the Duke and Duchess of Marlborough and appointed Sarah the Keeper of the Privy Purse. Anne was married to Prince George of Denmark, but rumors circulated that the two women were having a secret romance.
Eventually Sarah became a bit too accustomed to her access and influence and Anne became more drawn to Sarah’s cousin, Abigail Masham.
In 1708, political pamphlets likely circulated by a jealous Sarah pointed to “dark deeds at night”between Abigail and the queen. After a final falling out at Kensington Palace in 1710, Sarah and Anne never spoke again.
“The Favourite,” a somewhat fictionalized 2018 account of Anne’s relationships with Sarah and Abigail — complete with lesbian liaisons — earned Olivia Colman a best actress Oscar as the conflicted queen.
Frederick the Great of Prussia (1712 – 1786)
Even in his lifetime, this Prussian royal was widely rumored to be a homosexual, though that term wouldn’t be coined till nearly 90 years after his death.
Two years after the king’s death, his physician Johann Georg Ritter von Zimmermann published a book in which he desperately tried to dispel gossip Frederick had a “Grecian taste in love.”
In “Frederick the Great: King of Prussia,” T.C.W. Blanning writes that Zimmermann claimed the king had a minor deformity on his penis that rendered him impotent. And rather than let that secret out, Frederick pretended to be gay, “so that he would continue to appear virile and capable of sexual intercourse, albeit with men.”
But Frederick’s proclivities were apparent at a young age: As a 16-year-old crown prince, he was caught having an affair with a 17-year-old page.
“We were unaware of my brother’s artifices,” his older sister Wihelmine wrote. “Though I had noticed that he was on more familiar terms with this page than was proper in his position I did not know how intimate the friendship was.”
Their father, King Frederick William, detested what he saw as his son’s effeminacy and was increasingly despotic toward him. Frederick tried to run away with another rumored lover, Hans Hermann von Katte, but the pair were caught.
Von Katte was executed in front of Frederick, shouting, “I die for you with joy in my heart!” before being beheaded.
Frederick became king of Prussia in 1740 and was considered a savvy military leader, politician and patron of the arts committed to the Enlightenment. But he did little to obscure his sexuality: Sanssouci, his palace in Potsdam, was filled with homoerotic art and, across Europe, “les Potsdamists” became slang for homosexuals.
The king allegedly pursued the Venetian philosopher Francesco Algarotti and even famed French philosopher Voltaire, who lived with him at Sanssouci, though it’s not certain if either relationship was sexual.
After Voltaire’s death in 1778, a manuscript of his memoir detailing Frederick’s homosexual tendencies in detail was stolen and published in the Netherlands.
Because of his military acumen, Frederick was glorified by the Nazis as a great German leader, though his sexuality was heavily obscured.
Princess Isabella of Parma (1741 – 1763)
Wed to Archduke Joseph of Austria, Isabella was rumored to truly be in love with Joseph’s sister, Archduchess Maria Christina, known affectionately as Mimi.
She spent all her time at court in Vienna with the archduchess, rather than her husband, and the two exchanged hundreds of letters. Maria Christina’s were destroyed after her death, but Isabella’s make her ardor apparent: “I am told that the day begins with God,” she wrote in one. “I, however, begin the day by thinking of the object of my love, for I think of her incessantly.”
The relationship was also a great source of conflict for Isabella, because it meant betraying her duties as the wife of a prince. More significantly, though, Isabella realized this was the great love of her life, but she knew that for Mimi, it was more of a youthful dalliance.
The princess died giving birth in 1763 at age 21.
Archduke Ludwig Viktor of Austria (1842 – 1919)
Being the younger brother of Austrian Emperor Franz Joseph I didn’t save Ludwig Viktor from ruin when he made an unwelcome pass at a man at Vienna’s Centralbad bathhouse.
“It appears there was a row, and the Archduke was knocked down by one of the bathers, an athletic young man of the middle classes,” The Chicago Tribune reported in 1906. “According to witnesses, the young man’s actions were justified.”
Ludwig was banished from Vienna for the remainder of the emperor’s life. “He has also been forced to resign his patronages, and most of his staff have been moved to other positions,” the Tribune reported, adding that the archduke has been “virtually ostracized” from society.
“The Viennese are very tolerant of scandals in imperial and aristocratic circles,” the paper wrote, “but Ludwig Viktor’s affairs proved to be too much even for them.”
The archduke spent the rest of his life in seclusion at Klessheim Palace near Salzburg, where he died at the age of 76 in 1919, three years after his brother’s death and one year after the Austro-Hungarian Empire was dissolved after the end of World War I.
Mwanga II of Buganda (1868 – 1903)
Discussion of Uganda’s treatment of homosexuality usually settles on President Yoweri Museveni’s “Kill the Gays” bill, but this 19th century kabaka, or king, of Buganda allegedly had sexual relationships with men along with his 16 wives.
In 1886, Mwanga II ordered the brutal torture and deaths of dozens of courtiers and pages, with many burned alive. While some sources claimed the incident stemmed from the victims’ attempt to save a British missionary, The New York Times reported the massacre was sparked by “the refusal of a Christian lad acting as the king’s page to commit an abominable crime.”
Whatever the cause, the mass slaughter earned international condemnation and further destabilized Mwanga’s rule, leading to his eventual exile and British annexation of Uganda in the 1890s.
The victims were beatified as martyrs in 1920, and then canonized in 1964. There is a shrine dedicated to them in Namugongo and Martyr’s Day is still celebrated in Uganda every June.
Over time, they became national heroes and the “founding narrative of Christianity in Africa,” political scientist Rahul Rao told The Atlantic.
More than a century later, right-wing religious and political leaders like Museveni still use the martyrs to justify attacks on the LGBTQ community in Uganda.
“I hear there was homosexuality in Mwanga’s palace,” Museveni told a crowd of thousands on Martyr Day in 2010, the Atlantic reported. “This was not part of our culture. I hear he learnt it from the Arabs. But the martyrs refused these falsehoods and went for the truth, which is why we are honoring them today.”
King Umberto II of Italy (1904 – 1983)
After Mussolini’s fall, Umberto’s father, King Victor Emmanuel III, was viewed as a Fascist sympathizer. Under pressure from Allied forces, he abdicated in favor of his wastrel son, Umberto, in 1943.
Umberto was married to Queen Marie-José of Belgium and the couple had four children. But the Orva, Mussolini’s secret police, had kept dossiers on Umberto’s male lovers, who reportedly included famed filmmaker Luchino Visconti, boxer Primo Carnero, and French actor Jean Marais.
One former fling said when he was a young lieutenant in Turin, the prince courted him incessantly, giving him a silver cigarette lighter with the inscription “Dimmi di sì!” (“Say yes to me!”).
Critics decried Umberto as dim-witted, shallow and a poor leader.
The same year he was made regent, Umberto was outed by the Fascist press in an attempt to discredit him. It worked: After just 34 days the public voted to abolish the monarchy.
Separating from his wife in 1946, Umberto lived out the rest of his life in exile. He died in Geneva at age 78.
In the fourth century BC, a fearsome army named the Sacred Band of Thebes was formed, and it was made up entirely of gay couples.
Lawmakers in countries across the world have been banning LGBT+ people from their militaries for more than a century, from America’s “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” and trans military ban, to the UK’s ban on LGBT+ people in the armed forces, which was only lifted in 2000.
While the US insisted during the era of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” that LGBT+ service members “would create an unacceptable risk to the high standards of morale, good order, discipline and unit cohesion that are the essence of military capability”, history tells a very different story.
The Sacred Band of Thebes was formed in Ancient Greece by a general named Gorgidas in 378 BC.
In forming the 300-strong army, Gorgidas took an unusual approach; he personally chose each member based on merit and ability, rather than social status, and only selected gay couples.
What at first seems like a strange decision makes perfect sense when explained by Plato.
In Plato’s Symposium, written just a few years after the formation of the Sacred Band of Thebes, he said: “And if there were only some way of contriving that a state or an army should be made up of lovers and their beloved, they would be the very best governors of their own city, abstaining from all dishonour, and emulating one another in honour; and when fighting at each other’s side, although a mere handful, they would overcome the world.
“For what lover would not choose rather to be seen by all mankind than by his beloved, either when abandoning his post or throwing away his arms? He would be ready to die a thousand deaths rather than endure this.
“Or who would desert his beloved or fail him in the hour of danger?”
And Plato was right.
The Sacred Band of Thebes became a fearsome army, tirelessly training to prepare themselves for battle at any minute, including through wrestling and dance.
They won multiple battles, even taking down the Spartan army, despite being vastly outnumbered.
The couples were each made up of a “lover”, who was older and more experienced, and a “beloved”, who was younger.
The ages of the soldiers were never recorded, but James DeVoto, in his book The Sacred Band, suggests that by comparing them to other armies at the time, it is likely they joined at around 20 to 21 years old, and retired by 30.
The word “sacred” in the name of the army is thought to reference a sacred vow that the couples made to one another.
The Sacred Band of Thebes was so awe-inspiring, even their enemies cried when they were defeated
The Sacred Band of Thebes was finally defeated in 338 BC, 40 years after its formation.
They fought in the Battle of Chaeronea, joining Athens to fight against Philip II of Macedon, but were eventually surrounded.
The ancient gay army was offered the chance to surrender, but as Plato predicted, they refused to give up in front of their lovers.
Every member was killed, but according to Plutarch, Philip II broke down in tears after defeating them.
He is recorded as saying: “Perish any man who suspects that these men either did or suffered anything unseemly.”
The president of Lithuania met with a mother concerned for her LGBT+ child’s future, and the future of every other child like them.
Gitanas Nausėda, president of Lithuania, has been vocal about his belief in what he calls traditional family values. He has rallied against what he termed “genderist propaganda” and has said that family is between a man and a woman.
“As a president of the Lithuanian Republic, I will use my powers to make sure it is so,” he said at a rally in May.
Rasa Račienė is a mother and a medical doctor, and last week penned an open letter to the president expressing her concern for her child’s welfare as a member of the LGBT+ community in Lithuania.
In the letter she asked that Nausėda and his fellow party members “use rhetoric that unites, rather than divides Lithuania”. Račienė also said that she hears abusive remarks about LGBT+ people on a daily basis in her locality.
“My heart is in pain because all these words are about my child,” she wrote. “Every day, I worry that something may happen to my child, that all the bullying and hate in the public space will destroy my child emotionally and break him. Believe me, it is unbearable, it is humiliating and it hurts me to the core.”
Račienė encouraged the president to consult with members of the LGBT+ community and NGOs which fight for the rights of the community as opposed to “third parties” such as the Catholic Church.
The letter went on to ask for the president’s “personal promise” that the country will soon enjoy respectful civil partnership laws. A vote to debate a same-sex partnership bill in May lost in parliament by several votes.
Nausėda appeared to responded to the letter with a cautiously open mind, telling reporters: “I am ready to talk; I am ready to listen.”
However he did go on to express concern for what he referred to as “the persecution” of people who hold anti-LGBT+ views.
“When the mother speaks about bullying, about threats, we all face this phenomenon today, regardless of sexual orientation. There is clearly too much confrontation in Lithuania today,” Nausėda said.
“It will be really interesting for me to talk with her about her views on the persecution of other groups in society for thinking differently than this group.”
The meeting between Račienė and Nausėda took place Monday (25 October). An advisor to the president said that “a very sensitive conversation took place between the two parents”, Žmonės.ltreported.
Račienė told reporters that she felt heard by the president.
“I understand that the president is not only the head of the country – he is also a man,” she said. She felt that she was heard “as a mother”, saying that their conversation was detailed.
On 29 August 1867, Karl Heinrich Ulrichs stood up in the Congress of German Jurists and passionately called for anti-gay laws to be repealed.
It was a momentous occasion in the worldwide history of LGBT+ rights – but it was also significant for another reason, as it became the first public coming out on record.
That incredible moment was just one chapter in Karl Heinrich Ulrichs’ long battle to win recognition for people who found themselves sexually attracted to the same gender.
Throughout his life, Ulrichs fought tirelessly to improve the standing of gay, lesbian and bisexual people in a hostile society. Fundamentally, he believed that sexual orientation was innate – a groundbreaking notion during his lifetime – and he wrote extensively about his ideas.
We remember the life and legacy of Ulrichs – a man who shocked society with his trailblazing efforts to normalise queerness during a time when LGBT+ identities were neither understood nor accepted.
Karl Heinrich Ulrichs was born in Aurich, north-west Germany, on 28 August 1825. He knew he was different from other children from an early age – he often wore girls’ clothes in his youth and preferred being friends with girls.
Ulrichs went on to study at Göttingen University and Berlin University before he embarked on a career in the Hanoverian civil service – but his time as a public servant was cut short when rumours of his same-sex affairs started to swirl. He ultimately resigned before he could be sacked and he went on to work as a journalist for German newspaper Allgemeine Zeitung.
In 1862, Ulrichs took the significant step of telling his family and friends that he was sexually attracted to other men. At that time, the word “homosexual” hadn’t even been invented – and it was many years before the word “gay” was used to describe same-sex attraction. It was for this reason that Ulrichs started penning his own essays that allowed him to explore and innovate.
By the time he came out to his family, Ulrichs had come up with the word “Urning” to describe men who were sexually attracted to other men. This word featured prominently in his first five essays, Forschungen über das Rätsel der mannmännlichen Liebe (Studies on the Riddle of Male-Male Love).
In those essays, Ulrichs coined the word “Dioning” to describe lesbians, and he also came up with terms to refer to bisexual and intersex people. His terminology was based on passages from Plato’s Symposium.
It was in those essays that Ulrichs posited the idea that same-sex love was both biological and natural – that it was an innate, something people were born with and which they could not change. That idea was revolutionary in an era when homosexuality was rarely discussed in anything but negative terms.
Naturally, Ulrichs was nervous about putting his writings out into the world – which is at least part of the reason he initially published under the pseudonym Numa Numantius. However, he later acknowledged that the writings were his own and his final volume was published under his own name.
In his groundbreaking essays, Ulrichs campaigned for the legal rights of gay people. He initially believed that homosexuality in men was caused by having a female soul or “psyche” trapped inside the male body – however, he later argued that same-sex desire was entirely natural.
Using that logic, Ulrichs argued that same-sex relationships should be legally permitted – and he even suggested that gay people should have the right to marry.
As Hubert Kennedy in his article “Karl Heinrich Ulrichs: First Theorist of Homosexuality”, writes: “This was a major departure from previous and subsequent theories that saw the practice of homosexuality/’sodomy’ as an acquired vice.”
In one essay, Ulrichs wrote: “The Urning [gay man], too, is a person. He, too, therefore, has inalienable rights. His sexual orientation is a right established by nature.
“Legislators have no right to veto nature; no right to persecute nature in the course of its work; no right to torture living creatures who are subject to those drives nature gave them.
“The Urning is also a citizen. He, too, has civil rights; and according to these rights, the state has certain duties to fulfill as well.
“The state does not have the right to act on whimsy or for the sheer love of persecution. The state is not authorized, as in the past, to treat Urnings as outside the pale of the law.”
Ulrichs defended those whose sexual nature was ‘opposite of the which is usual’
That brings us to August 1867, when Ulrichs stood up in the Congress of German Jurists and issued a passionate call for gay people to afforded equality under the law.
Speaking in Munich in front of 500 lawyers, state officials and academics, Ulrichs argued that discriminatory anti-sodomy laws should be overturned.
“Gentlemen, my proposal is directed toward a revision of the current penal law,” he said, according to Robert Beachy’s 2014 book Gay Berlin: Birthplace of a Modern Identity, as reported byThe New York Times.
In his rousing speech, Ulrichs referred to gay people as a “class of persons” who were facing state persecution simply because “nature has planted in them a sexual nature that is opposite of that which is usual”.
That moment is generally accepted as the first public “coming out” in history – standing before his peers and advocating for the rights of homosexuals left no doubt in people’s minds about his own sexual orientation.
Historian Robert Beachy once said: “I think it is reasonable to describe him as the first gay person to publicly out himself. There is nothing comparable in the historical record. There is just nothing else like this out there.”
Needless to say, Ulrichs’ speech was not well received. The men gathered in the Congress of German Jurists shouted him down and loudly objected to what he was saying. He was ultimately forced off the stage, proving that society was not yet ready for the empowering message he wanted to bring to the masses.
That wasn’t the only opposition Ulrichs faced – his essays were banned and confiscated by police during his lifetime, and he was routinely ridiculed by a hostile media. Despite his best efforts, anti-gay laws continued to thrive and criminalise queer existence for many years to come.
Ulrichs eventually left Germany and relocated to Italy in 1880. He spent the final 15 years of his life there, where he earned a living by tutoring foreign languages. He also continued to write extensively – he published a journal in his later life which argued that Latin should be revived as an international language.
Ulrichs travelled around Italy for a few years before settling in L’Aquila. In 1895, shortly before his death, the University of Naples gave him an honorary diploma for his work. He died aged 69 in L’Aquila on 14 July 1895.
Today, there are streets named after Ulrichs in Berlin, Munich, Hanover, and Bremen. In Munich, his birthday is celebrated each year with poetry and a street party in the city’s Karl-Heinrich-Ulrichs-Platz, and L’Aquila, where he is buried, holds an annual pilgrimage to his grave.
While Ulrichs didn’t succeed in his battle to have anti-gay laws overturned, his pioneering writings and speeches are remembered today for their revolutionary qualities. Ulrichs wasn’t interested in bowing down to the status quo – he worked hard to shatter social norms around sexuality.
For that, LGBT+ people today owe Ulrichs a great debt.
The number of homophobic hate crime reports in the UK has tripled and the number of transphobic hate crime reports has quadrupled over the last six years, shocking new figures reveal.
Data obtained by Vice World Newsshows there were 6,363 reports of hate crimes based on sexual orientation in 2014-15, the year same-sex weddings became legal in the UK, compared to 19,679 in 2020-21 – a total increase of 210 per cent.
For reports of transphobic hate crimes, there were 598 in 2014-15 and 2,588 in 2020-21, representing a rise of 332 per cent.
Only ten out of the 45 UK police forces recorded a decrease in hate crime, and the vast majority of those who provided data had seen a year-on-year rise in hate crime reports since 2014.
Among them were Liverpool’s Merseyside Police, which has been battling a wave of homophobic attacks in the city this year. Back in 2014-2015 the hate crime reports numbered just 64; in 2020-21 this figure soared to 834.
Leni Morris, chief executive of Galop, the UK’s LGBT+ anti-abuse charity, said she wasn’t surprised that hate crime reports went up during the lockdown period.
“Right from the beginning of the pandemic, we saw the impact that lockdown was having on the escalation in violence and abuse against our community,” she told Vice.
“We saw LGBT+ people targeted as a direct result of the pandemic – either because the pandemic was seen as a punishment for our existence, or because of our community’s association with the HIV/AIDS pandemic, and a notion that LGBT+ people were somehow at the root of this pandemic.”
“What we do know for sure, from the UK government’s own figures, is that 90 per cent of hate crimes against LGBT+ people go unreported, so these figures only represent a tiny part of the overall amount of abuse and violence faced by the LGBT+ community in the UK today.”
This rise in hate crimes has been accompanied by a sharp uptick in the demand for the services of Victim Support, an independent charity which provides specialist, confidential help for victims of crime in England and Wales.
Victim Support says overall requests for help have jumped by almost 11 per cent in the past 12 months, with calls relating to transphobic attacks surging by a shocking 45 per cent.
This is significantly higher than the 22 per cent increase in the number of people seeking help for disability hate crimes, and a 20 per cent increase in sexual orientation-related crimes.
An “overwhelming majority” of hate crimes recorded by the charity were race and nationality-related (71 per cent), with Victim Support noting a spike in referrals to its services following the Euro 2020 final in July.
“It is both concerning and disheartening that our figures reflect this significant increase in hate crimes across the country,” said Diana Fawcett, Victim Support’s chief executive, as reported by the Independent.
“We are alarmed to see that the number of victims seeking support for race and nationality-related hate remains high, and we strongly condemn all types of racist abuse.
“It’s also worrying that there has been a huge jump in the number of people seeking support for disability, homophobic and transgender-identity related hate crimes, which we’ve seen have a damaging effect on the victim’s sense of safety, well-being and self-worth.”
The rising hate crime rates were confirmed earlier this month by the investigative journalism unit Liberty Investigates, which also found that forces across England and Wales had resolved fewer cases in 2020 than five years ago.
In 2020 only 14 per cent of cases resulted in a conclusive outcome such as a caution, charge, summons, penalty notice or community resolution – half the rate of 28 per cent seen five years earlier.
“These findings are extremely concerning,” said Nadia Whittome MP, who previously worked as a hate crime project officer at the non-profit social enterprise Communities Inc.
“I am not surprised that people withdraw from the police and criminal system, given how negative an experience many people from marginalised groups have had. However, the scale of withdrawals and lack of justice represents an institutional failure of hate crime victims.”
Dame Vera Baird QC, the Victims’ Commissioner for England and Wales, said police had failed victims.
“It is shocking that police are clearly so unresponsive to this. If people are gaining the confidence to go to the police, only to be left lying by the wayside, there can’t be a clearer failure.”
Hungary’s prime minister, Viktor Orbán, used the visit by the pope to Budapest last month to advance his populist agenda. He said he had been encouraged by his meeting with Frances to advance ‘family values’. Indeed, Orbán claimed to have the pontiff’s imprimatur: ‘Moreover, he said: go ahead, go for it. And go for it we will.’
But what is Orbán ‘going for’, beyond the rhetoric?
With elections looming next year and a poor record in government so far, the increasingly autocratic Orbán has found a new target in attacking LGBT rights, in which ‘family values’ is a proxy for a whole other agenda. It started with refugees and now it is sexual and gender minorities. It is best understood as a cynical move to distract attention from Orbán’s bungling of the state response to the pandemic, as well as corruption scandals involving business oligarchs and dodgy dealings with China.
Under the banner of ‘family values’, in 2020 Hungary banned adoption by same-sex couples, barred transgender people from changing their legal gender and refused to ratify the Istanbul convention, which aims to protect women from violence. This year Hungary passed a law which equates homosexuality with paedophilia and bans ‘promotion and portrayal of homosexuality’ and gender diversity to under-18s, in sexuality education, films or advertisements.
Putin’s playbook
Orbán is taking a leaf out of Vladimir Putin’s playbook. The Russian president has used the spectre of LGBT rights as a wedge to consolidate a conservative support base at home, delineate regional zones of influence and forge global alliances. It started in earnest with the passage in 2013 of the ‘gay propaganda law’, an administrative regulation which forbids the positive portrayal of ‘non-traditional sexual relations’ where minors are present.
In effect, the law inhibits any such presentation of LGBT identities in the public domain. It has a chilling effect on freedom of expression, being vague enough to make Russians afraid to fall foul of the law. Hungary’s law has strong echoes although it goes even further, banning any depiction of LGBT people to children.
Russia’s law has had a stifling effect on teachers and counsellors and has been used to shut down an online support network for LGBT kids. It has been associated with an upturn in homophobic violence. There is no reason to think the impact of Hungary’s law will be any different.
The ‘gay propaganda law’ has proved a very effective tool for Putin—if very harmful for many Russians. On a domestic level, the negative connnotations of ‘propaganda’, with its Stalinist associations, and the positive affirmation of purported national ‘tradition’, pitted against the forces of globalisation, have proved an effective shorthand. They have mobilise Putin’s small-town and rural supporters in the face of public protests in the big urban centres (in as much as these have been allowed).
Regionally, the rhetoric has been used to contest spheres of influence between the Russian-backed Eurasian customs union and the European Union. On a global level, at the United Nations Russia has been at least partially successful in assuming the mantle of protector of ‘traditional values’—counterposed to universal norms such as human rights—and in the process forging geopolitical alliances with like-minded states.
Sustained attack
Poland under the Law and Justice Party (PiS) has become another outlier in Europe, where the independence of the judiciary, civil society and the media have been under sustained assault. The government has cast LGBT rights as a dangerous and subversive ideology, while local authorities have declared ‘LGBT-ideology free zones’.
Warsaw has systematically attacked reproductive rights and comprehensive sexuality education and threatened to withdraw from the Istanbul convention—the convention includes a reference to sexual orientation and a broad definition of gender. This was an election rallying point in 2019, designed to help the PiS secure a second term in office.
Leaders such as Orbán, or the key PiS figure Jarosław Kaczyński, and the parties they represent project an unalloyed vision of their societies. They present themselves as the authentic voice of ‘the people’, against ‘liberal elites’ accused of defying ‘common sense’.
This dangerous world of nationalist rhetoric produces ‘insiders’ and ‘outsiders’, shoring up support by concocting imagined threats to the nation. In Hungary, migrants have been vilified as a perceived external demon, while LGBT people have been cast as both an internal threat and a foreign influence.
‘Gender ideology’
Why do advances in women’s or LGBT rights elicit such apocalyptic fantasies of destruction of the social order? Connecting developments in Poland and Hungary is the concept of ‘gender ideology’. This is closely linked to the idea of traditional values but more amorphous and, it seems, better able to rally disparate groups against a common perceived enemy. First coined decades ago by the Holy See, ‘gender ideology’ has become a ubiquitous term, strategically deployed to curtail sexual and reproductive rights.
As an ‘empty signifier’ (in semiotic terms), gender ideology simultaneously means nothing and everything. This has allowed it to become the symbolic ‘glue’, uniting disparate groups in opposition—to feminism, transgender equality, the existence of intersex bodies, elimination of sex stereotyping, family-law reform, same-sex marriage, access to abortion and contraception, and comprehensive sexuality education.
The anti-gender movement is increasingly well resourced and co-ordinated, and more strategic and sophisticated than in the past. It has mobilised against gender- and sexuality-based human-rights advances at the national level, as well vis-à-vis regional and global mechanisms relating to rights, development and public health.
The anti-gender movement has even co-opted the language of human rights—positioning itself domestically as protecting free speech and religious freedom against ideological conformity and internationally as protecting national cultural integrity against imperialism. In this way, LGBT identities have come to stand in for something much bigger, being construed as a threat to the fabric of society itself.
Proceedings initiated
Last month, LGBT activist groups submitted a legal complaint to the European Commission, asserting that Poland’s ‘LGBT-ideology free zones’ and other discriminatory measures ran counter to the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights and the directive on equal treatment in employment and occupation. In mid-July, the commission initiated infringement proceedings against Poland, because of local authorities having adopted ‘LGBT-ideology free zone’ resolutions (three have since reneged), and against aspects of Hungary’s disingenuous paedophilia law falling foul of its human-rights obligations.
Aside from violations relating to trade and the free flow of information, the commission asserted, the Hungarian provisions infringed rights to non-discrimination, human dignity, freedom of expression and information and respect for private life. The Polish authorities meanwhile had failed to respond adequately to its inquiry as to the meaning and impact of municipalities becoming ‘LGBT-ideology free zones’.
These are serious allegations, with far-reaching implications, and the commission is right to identify depredations of basic human rights and core European values. Both states enjoy the economic benefits attached to EU membership, yet under their current governments eschew the associated obligations.
Supporting the rights of, and equality for, LGBT people in these settings is thus more than defending members of a minority group, vital though that is. It is defending democracy and human rights for everyone.