On one side of the pink line is gay marriage and the right to choose one’s gender identity; on the other, rape, murder, and torture. Of course, the line can run within as well as between countries: Brazil has the largest Gay Pride parades in the world as well as perhaps the highest murder rates of trans women. The pink line, writes Gevisser, ‘is a borderland where queer people try to reconcile the liberation and community they might have experienced online or on TV or in safe spaces, with the constraints of the street and the workplace, the courtroom and the living room’.

Protesters wrapped in the LGBT and Brazilian flags during an #EleNão protest against Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, 2018. 'Ele Não is Portuguese for 'not him'. (photograph by Sâmia Bomfim/Flickr)

Like Gevisser, I prefer the term ‘queer’, which allows for the complexity and nuances of how people understand their sexual desires and their gender. But ‘LGBT’ has become the dominant international language, and a mark of both modernity and threats of Western imperialism. Indonesian politicians campaign against the threat of ‘LGBT’ without necessarily knowing what the acronym stands for.

Gevisser is a well-established South African journalist who has spent much time in the United States, where an Open Society Fellowship supported research for this book. He has consulted widely and read strategically; the book acknowledges a broad range of scholarship. The skilful reporting of The Pink Line is strengthened by his understanding of how our concepts of sexuality and gender are shaped by history and politics.

The Pink Line was written over a period of seven years during which Gevisser travelled widely and met people on every continent, except, sadly, ours. He became involved with the stories of perhaps a score of queers struggling with social pressures, ranging from bullying and parental disapproval to fears of imprisonment and exile.

Gevisser brings the skills of a novelist to these stories, capturing the constant negotiation through which queers in very different contexts find ways of adjusting to hostile environments. The cast list of The Pink Line is enormous: here are the stories of Malawian refugees in South Africa, lesbian parents in Moscow, Palestinian homosexuals living in Israel. Each could be read as a short story in itself. My favourite revolves around the lesbian women who established a café in Cairo in the brief period of hope ushered in by the Arab Spring.

Gevisser is aware of his privilege as an affluent white man able to travel the world, and he recognises that in sharing their stories many of his informants reasonably expect something in return. His own involvement with many of his informants is carefully acknowledged. In the last section, where he immerses himself in the complex world of kothis in Tamil Nadu, he comes to recognise that he, too, has been changed by his encounters with very different assumptions about how we construct our sexual and gendered selves.

The very term ‘LGBT’ covers several separate if interconnected identities, for homosexual desires and unease with prescribed gender identity are not necessarily the same. Indeed, one might argue that coupling the two reinforces simple stereotypes of homosexuals as women who want to be men and men who want to be women. Most homosexuals are content with their ascribed gender, and many trans people define themselves as heterosexual.

Most non-Western societies had room for gender non-conformists, whether hijra in India, waria in Indonesia, or goor-jigeen in Senegal. With the emergence of global attention to ‘LGBT rights’, these identities are increasingly scrutinised and often repressed, although across South Asia there is legal recognition of a ‘third gender’, even when, as in Pakistan, homosexuality remains criminalised.

Today, trans identities range widely between those who reject any assumption of a gender binary and those who adhere to conventional notions of masculinity and femininity and seek to change their bodies to fit what they believe to be their authentic identity. Gevisser’s stories highlight the ways in which traditional pathways for gender non-conformity compete with contemporary notions of human rights and medical transition.

The Pink Line says relatively little about HIV/AIDS, although responses to the epidemic have been crucial in creating new assertions among sexual minorities globally. Organisations like Pink Triangle in Malaysia or ABIA in Brazil that have been pivotal in campaigning for queer rights grew out of responses to the epidemic. Gevisser’s focus on ordinary queers largely ignores the professional activists lobbying at meetings of the UN Human Rights Committee or queer celebrities, like the grandson of Omar Sharif or the Indian Prince of Rajpipla.

Over the past two decades, acceptance of sexual and gender diversity has become a central fault line in many countries, as Australia experienced in the vote for marriage equality in 2017. The Australian queer movement is one of the strongest in the world, as noted in Gevisser’s passing comments on Sydney’s Mardi Gras. But it has been less aware than its counterparts in other wealthy countries of the situation of queers outside our borders.

How one supports local movements without providing fodder for those who claim queer rights are a new form of Western imperialism is an ongoing challenge. For anyone interested in thinking through this dilemma, The Pink Line is a very good starting point.