Ideas - Queer Diplomacy: Negotiating 2SLGBTQ+ Rights in a Fraught World

Episode Date: June 14, 2024

In the 1980s, Douglas Janoff marched outside the United Nations to promote 2SLGBTQ+ rights. Then, after several decades as an activist, he became a Canadian diplomat — and started pushing for change from within. He shares his experience through the complex and delicate world of queer diplomacy. *This episode originally aired on Feb. 7, 2024.

Hey there, I'm David Common. If you're like me, there are things you love about living in the GTA and things that drive you absolutely crazy. Every day on This Is Toronto, we connect you to what matters most about life in the GTA, the news you gotta know, and the conversations your friends will be talking about. Whether you listen on a run through your neighbourhood, or while sitting in the parking lot that is the 401, check out This Is Toronto, wherever you get your podcasts. This is a CBC Podcast. Welcome to Ideas. I'm Nala Ayyad.

They didn't talk about LGBT rights at the UN 30 years ago, 20 years ago. So what has happened? Why has that changed? How has that changed? And has it made an impact? Douglas Janoff has been fighting for the rights of sexual minorities for decades. Not long after the term AIDS was coined, he went to New York in 1984 to join a street march. We actually marched to the UN building and we were on the outside of the UN building with our signs and we were marching and saying we want to get in. Today, Douglas Janoff is on the inside, working as a diplomat in the Canadian Foreign Service. So here we are, 25 years later, I'm in my suit,

and I'm actually inside the UN headquarters, and I was struck by the fact that the LGBT civil society organizations and representatives were there on the inside. It's a job that requires him to negotiate LGBTQ rights, his own rights as a gay man, in a conflicted and sometimes hostile environment. You automatically get this conflict between the Western allied states that support and promote LGBT rights and the states that oppose LGBT rights and criminalize same-sex conduct.

And so when you study this dynamic, you see how diplomats are both trying to promote and strengthen LGBT rights and how they're trying to subvert and roll back LGBT rights. LGBT rights. In 2022, Janoff published a book called Queer Diplomacy, Homophobia, International Relations, and LGBT Human Rights. He's also spoken widely about his research, including a talk he gave in May 2023 at the Glad Day bookstore in Toronto. So what is queer diplomacy? Since World War II, Western liberal values such as democracy and human rights have been promoted through multilateral institutions. And coming up to 2010, one of those human rights that's been promoted has been LGBT rights. So it's been more assertively promoted as a foreign policy objective.

Today on Ideas, you'll hear excerpts from Douglas Janoff's book and talk, alongside a recent conversation I had with him about the delicate work of queer diplomacy in a fraught world. a fraught world. From your perspective, where would you say that the history of queer diplomacy actually began? I would say that it started in the 70s in women's fora, where lesbians were becoming more visible in different international committees. And then, of course, the big meeting in Beijing in the 1980s, where suddenly lesbian visibility became a global phenomenon. I think that gave courage to other parts of the LGBTQ community that, yeah, we can be visible on the global stage as well. And from there, there was a momentum that built, and it's still building today.

might give pride marches or activists more credit than diplomatic meetings for the strides that have been made by the global LGBTQ movement. But how essential do you think or do you believe diplomacy has been in establishing those rights worldwide? Well, I would say that the social movement that has emerged over the last 50 years and has given rise to these claims and the assertions of our rights as LGBTQ people around the world, that has come first, and it has come as a result of the widespread discrimination and criminalization that has taken place around the world. But it has also taken place in a very uneven way. There are certain countries where LGBT rights are enjoyed by many people, and there are other countries where there's a very different level of discrimination and criminalization taking In the 20th century, Western liberal values, including the universal notion of human rights, began to circulate globally. The 1990s were a period when a more globalized LGBT movement emerged, which began to participate more visibly in international human rights forums, particularly within the European and UN systems. So what has happened here is LGBT rights has been swept up in this Western liberal human rights discourse that diplomats have leveraged over the past many years as a way of asserting certain values, and certain priorities in their foreign policies.

So it's very common for Western countries to have a foreign policy that touches on many different aspects. Gender, it could be nuclear, it could be issues around religious freedom, and a lot of it is around human rights. And so, as the different types of human rights issues has multiplied let's say, non-Western countries and criticizing other countries' records for not respecting LGBT rights. And this creates a conflict. Right, which we'll get to in a moment. But you've described that posture by Western countries as being that queer rights had been, quote, assertively promoted as a foreign policy objective. But as you point out, that objective is not universal. So I'm curious how have the countries resisting or hostile to queer rights changed over the last few decades? Are there more of them, fewer of them? Are they more vocal? What's the situation? case. Are there more of them, fewer of them? Are they more vocal? What's the situation?

Well, it all depends on how you look at progress. I don't want to be overly pessimistic. I don't want to be overly optimistic. But I think when you look at the number of countries over the last 10 years that previously criminalized same-sex activity and look at how that decriminalization campaign has taken place, you can see that in certain areas there is a positive direction in terms of decriminalization. How much would you ascribe that to the diplomacy that's being deployed in the interests of queer rights? I think it's really hard to say. It's a case-by-case basis. I mean, we see seminal moments. For example, I write about this in my book about how in 2011, Hillary Clinton stood up at the Human Rights Council in Geneva and said, gay rights are human rights.

Like being a woman, like being a racial, religious, tribal, or ethnic minority, being LGBT does not make you less human. And that is why gay rights are human rights and human rights are gay rights. Now, I'm sure there were many representatives from many countries in the room that did not like to hear that. But what it does is it brings that onto the international agenda. It is a violation of human rights when governments declare it illegal to be gay or allow those who harm gay people to go unpunished. It is a violation of human rights when lesbian or transgendered women are subjected to so-called corrective rape or forcibly subjected to hormone treatments, or when people are murdered after public calls for violence toward gays,

or when they are forced to flee their nations and seek asylum in other lands to save their lives. asylum in other lands to save their lives. And it is a violation of human rights when life-saving care is withheld from people because they are gay, or equal access to justice is denied to people because they are gay, or public spaces are out of bounds to people because they are gay. No matter what we look like, where we come from, or who we are, we are all equally entitled to our human rights and dignity. When you think about that historical moment and the stature that Hillary Clinton had at that time,

Hillary Clinton had at that time, I see it as a real watershed moment where even for the skeptics, even for the people that were in conflict, they couldn't deny any longer that this was now a topic that was being discussed on the world stage. Suddenly Hillary Clinton is talking about that at a high-level UN meeting. And so suddenly that becomes part of the human rights, not suddenly, I should say gradually, that has become part of the human rights discourse. Like when you get that high level buy-in, when you get President Obama, you know, speaking publicly to the president of Kenya and marching in gay pride marches and that sort of thing, then I think it can't help but change how people, not just in the West, but in other countries, think about this and maybe they're saying it's not okay to criminalize this behavior. Probably even the most obdurate of diplomats would have conceded that LGBT rights had come of age. They were now a topic of legitimate debate at the highest levels of international relations. Within a little more than 100 years, the LGBT movement had become a truly global phenomenon. I just want to stay with Hillary for a moment. Were you watching that? Did you recognize what you were looking at? I'm just wondering what you were thinking when you saw that speech. I was doing human rights negotiations in another forum, in another area, but I was seeing

the writing on the wall. I was seeing this historical moment in front of me. And this is what really made me decide that it was the time to look at this as a new era, you know, as a new trend. And I think academics and analysts sometimes oversimplify things by saying, this is a watershed moment and things changed after this moment. No, I mean, in fact, I worked as a queer activist for many years in the 90s, and then I saw how things were changing in Canada, in other countries. I even participated in marches for international LGBT rights in the 80s as well. Flanked by dozens of mustachioed New York comps. We calmly marched up 6th Avenue on that beautiful September day in 1984.

The International March for Lesbian and Gay Freedom was making history. Not that we realized it at the time. As we stood in front of UN headquarters listening to speaker after speaker demand global justice, we had no way of knowing how far the global struggle for LGBT rights would eventually progress. The demonstration is long forgotten. According to Google, only one website in cyberspace acknowledges that it even occurred. However, I know it happened because I was there. A skinny, mustachioed 26-year-old wearing tight jeans, a green hoodie and Kodiak construction boots waving the maple leaf.

The crowd, mainly white North American left-wing activists, gathered in front of the UN headquarters in New York and listened to fiery speeches on the need for international solidarity. So, but there was this culmination that happened where finally diplomats had permission to be able to discuss this topic along with all the other human rights issues that they were also promoting, supporting civil society activists in these areas. And so you see this real takeoff happen in the 2010s, where suddenly you see more resolutions coming out at the UN, and it's being included more in the work of different UN organizations and agencies. So there has been a huge change in terms of the multilateral discourse.

And some people say, well, you know, there's this decriminalization happening and there are now, you know, 15 countries less that don't criminalize who did before. That is one measure of progress. But the other thing that you have to realize, and this is something that happened in Canada as well, is just because Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau said, you know, his famous bedrooms of the nation speech and decriminalized same-sex activity in Canada did not mean that the discrimination stopped. Yeah, and just exactly on that point, just go back for a minute to Hillary Clinton. As you say, it was a watershed moment, but there was also instantaneous opposition to that statement. Can you just talk specifically of what forms that opposition initially took? Absolutely. I mean, so there were diplomats that were walking out of sessions that had any discussion to do with LGBT rights. I interviewed diplomats who said that when Western diplomats raised this issue,

they were just dismissed. They weren't discussed openly. They were even derided for actually raising those issues with them because it wasn't seen as a serious issue. And it continues today. There's constant pushback in these resolutions. Every time a resolution goes forward that supports LGBT rights, there are countless national policies that are preached at, that are spoken out loud, that are saying this is not moral, this is not our values, this is not the values of our country, this goes against us. When you hear in the newspaper that the rights of sexual minorities are being suppressed in a certain country, there's a whole range of reasons why this is happening. There's issues of nationalism, religious extremism, post-colonial constructs of sexuality, state homophobia that is used to scapegoat sexual minorities in countries. So it's not for any one particular reason that this is happening. The history of queer diplomacy obviously has a deep personal significance for you.

And as you mentioned just a short while ago, before you were a diplomat, you were a gay rights activist. I'm wondering if you could take me to the moment when you decided to shift from protesting outside the halls of power to pushing for change from within? Well, that's one of those personal, the personal is political questions for sure. When I was in my 20s, I came out during the AIDS crisis. You know, I lost over 40 friends during that key period of my life. 40 friends during that key period of my life. And, uh, it's, it, it's still hard, uh, now, uh, to talk about that period. And, um, uh, I guess there's some survivor guilt that comes with that, you know, of feeling like that people fought so hard to fight against

discrimination and violence. You feel a duty, an obligation. Yeah, and so I just reacted. And so I think when I was in my 20s, I just felt that government was not a receptive place for me. It was not a place where I wanted to develop my career. I ended up working as a freelance journalist for many years. And then I decided to go back to university because I felt like I had reached the limits of my own satisfaction with where my

activism was taking me. Like I had this thirst for knowledge. I was living in Vancouver. A friend of mine had been gay bashed. I wrote this article on it and then I realized like there were no experts out there. There was nobody that knew anything in depth about what was going on in Canada. So it's one thing to talk about the problem rather than trying to tackle it. And so that's when I started interacting with people in the government and realized that there were people in government that were very interested in having some sort of dialogue. So then, as time went on, and I got more into this research, and I ended up moving back home to Ottawa, and I started looking for areas where I could work, and I ended up working back in the government and ended up working at Foreign Affairs at a really interesting point, I would say in the 2010s, where this transition was already

happening, where there was an openness to discuss LGBT rights. Now, as I went on my first posting to Washington, and I was suddenly confronted with a lot of homophobia in the human rights discourse that I was looking at, it kind of surprised me because by this point, of course, we were 10 years into equal marriage in Canada, and I really felt like my rights were respected. And I really felt like my rights were respected. And then I go on a posting to another country and see all these diplomats who are gay and are in the closet and they're starting to understand how fortunate I was as a Canadian. In my first exposure to LGBT diplomacy, I observed a bilateral consultation between a senior-level Canadian diplomat and an ambassador from a country in the Global South. The room suddenly went silent after the Canadian diplomat said, We are concerned about reports from Amnesty International about gay men who have been

targeted for physical and sexual assaults because of their sexual orientation. The ambassador appeared to be expecting this and, without missing a beat, assured the Canadian that the highest levels of government were reviewing the matter and taking it very seriously. How much of the activist did you bring to that role of a diplomat who was observing all of this? to that role of a diplomat who was observing all of this? Well, I would say that I guess I've always been an activist, but I had to learn to assert myself in different ways while working in the government. If you use the same approaches outside the government as within the government, it just doesn't work.

You don't find that same receptive audience. And this is the wonderful thing about diplomacy. It's like a different language. As a former gay activist, I felt like an insider when participating in LGBT community activities and interviewing advocates. Their enthusiasm and strong convictions made me recall a very special period of my life. At the same time, when I interviewed diplomats and UN representatives, I also felt like an insider, even though my standpoint had shifted. I also felt like an insider, even though my standpoint had shifted.

My multiple standpoints as a gay, white, cisgender man, a North American, and a diplomat were constantly overlapping. It was sometimes difficult to negotiate these seemingly contradictory identities. And yeah, as you say, there would be momentary maybe conflicts between those different identities. But I wonder what it's, speaking of conflicts, what it is like or how conflicted diplomats who are out might be, who have to serve or who choose to serve in countries that are repressive towards LGBTQ communities. Well, I mean, I could turn that question around and say home, is I think it gives us a lot of empathy. Maybe the older ones more, because in my generation, I remember when I was younger, when many activities were criminalized and stigmatized. So, I would like to feel that as respected members of the Foreign Service, you know, valued for our contributions, that we can contribute in our own way and bring a certain empathy to situations where

LGBT rights are criminalized or discriminated against or not as respected. You're listening to Ideas and to my conversation with Douglas Janoff, a Canadian Foreign Service officer and former gay rights activist. We're talking about his book, Queer Diplomacy, Homophobia, International Relations and LGBT Human Rights. Ideas is a podcast and a broadcast heard on CBC Radio 1 in Canada, on US Public Radio, across North America on Sirius XM, in Australia on ABC Radio National and around the world at cbc.ca slash ideas. Find us on the CBC Listen app and wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Nala Ayyad. Hey there, I'm David Common.

If you're like me, there are things you love about living in the GTA and things that drive you absolutely crazy. Every day on This is Toronto, we connect you to what matters most about life in the GTA, the news you got to know, and the conversations your friends will be talking about. Whether you listen on a run through your neighborhood or while sitting in the parking lot that is the 401, check out This is Toronto wherever you get your podcasts. For years, I had marched in demonstrations. I had done research. I published the first book on homophobic and transphobic violence in Canada.

So I was really trying to find a way to integrate this sensibility and consciousness of my own identity with this identity as the guy with the suit. Being the guy with the suit hasn't always been straightforward for Canadian diplomat Douglas Janoff. And in keeping with his roots as an LGBTQ activist, he's continued to question the system from within. The West's promotion of LGBT rights, part of a broader promotion of liberal values, can trigger a spiral of backlash and retribution. backlash against LGBTQ rights worldwide, Douglas Janoff has devoted himself to better understanding how queer diplomacy works, which has often required a hard look at its failures. So I developed a research project where I did interviews with 29 diplomats, human rights activists, and UN and international governmental organization experts in human rights to kind of find out what tricks do they do? How do they move the barometer forward on these issues?

As you mentioned, the LGBTQ movement became increasingly mainstream in Western countries, including obviously here in Canada. You know, with the widespread instituting of same-sex marriage, for example. I'm wondering how the diplomatic agenda responded to that, how it began to shift to reflect that reality. responded to that, how it began to shift to reflect that reality. It's interesting because I interviewed both gay and straight diplomats, as well as human rights activists and UN experts, and I asked them these questions about, well, how do you push in these international meetings? Or when you're having a one-on-one meeting with somebody from a country that has repressive policies for the LGBT community, how do you spin that? How do you manage that? And it was fascinating to hear the variety of responses. And there is no standard way that you do it.

I mean, you know, some people were telling me, well, you know, we chatted with the foreign minister and we were shocked at how homophobic he was, you know, or she was or whatever. And we were just hesitant or we had to kind of change our approach somewhat to, you know, sometimes then the LGBT gets blended into a broader basket of human rights or maybe the language changes to discuss health of minorities or, you know, HIV or gender and minority issues. So there are many ways that diplomats can transmit a message without being so explicit and looking for ways to sort of broaden the conversation so that it doesn't sound like a scolding, you know,

because then that generates the counter-reaction of how dare you preach at me because these are foreign Western values that are not part of our culture. You just can't hit people over the head and say, you know, this is bad, this is wrong. How do you go around that? There's also bilaterally quiet diplomacy, as they call it, and so that would be more working under the radar. You're in a country where LGBT rights is a very sensitive issue. You see these conflicts and issues that are going on. So how do you try and make a change without inflaming the situation? One Western diplomat I talked to said, we talk about criminalization, but we never talk about same-sex marriage. We feel like talking about same-sex marriage is a bridge too far. you know, political and civil rights, as opposed to dressing this up as something like,

you have to accept gay rights, and you have to accept that people of the same sex are going to get married in your country as well, or else you're not part of our program kind of thing, so there are different ways that people keep this dialogue going. This is a battle that takes an immense amount of diplomatic resources and political capital. It requires day marshes and capitals and plenty of arm twisting, It requires day marshes and capitals and plenty of arm twisting, not to mention months of planning. The results of a vote, yes or no, are very tangible and can be pointed to as a win. Yeah, we've all, I think anyone who's traveled probably has heard that argument that, you know,

this is a Western value system that's being forced on the rest of the world. I certainly heard it in places like some of the smaller cities in Russia, for example, where the ideaya in 2017 as a key example of how homophobia can be weaponized by a state. Can you talk about how the Chechnyan government, for example, leverages nationalist or anti-Western rhetoric to justify that kind of state violence against gay men? Well, it was a situation where this was a society where there were many violations of human rights on the basis of gender. And so basically, sexual identity was weaponized as a way of scapegoating a group of people. And this was part of their playbook is suddenly there were, you know, gay men being arrested. Their phones were being taken. They were looking at all the contacts those people had. Then those people were being arrested.

They were being tortured in detention centers. Chechnya is the site of widespread human rights violations. Its leader, Ramzan Kadyrov, has publicly condoned honor killings not only as punishment for women suspected of promiscuity, but as a pretext for homophobic violence. From February to April 2017, over a hundred gay and bisexual men in Chechnya were abducted, detained, and tortured. They opened the door, and they started just from that second, they started beating me with their feet. My body was blue, purple.

And they were asking names, gay names. Like, they tell me that they know that I'm gay. Victims interviewed by Human Rights Watch said they were electrocuted and beaten with sticks and pipes until their bodies turned blue. They put me in a wall, put bag on my head, and that guy charged his gun and put me right here on my head. And I started painting the wall with my blood. At least one man died from his injuries

and two were killed by their families. Some of the detained men, once freed, left Chechnya. Other men fled Chechnya once they learned that their friends had been detained and that their friends' cell phones had been confiscated. One man said it was just a matter of time before he would have been rounded up too. It was a campaign, and what we see over and over again in many countries is there are waves of repression so that it's it's society creates this

space where lgbtq identities are are tolerated are certain economic conditions, certain political factors which weigh into the imposition of state homophobia. It's a fascinating area. I'm not an expert on how those state homophobia policies are deployed from country to country. But I feel that this is a major area of research that we need to be really developing to see where those triggers are. The Chechnya government weaponized nationalism and Western LGBT identity in support of a regime that was already facing economic and political crisis. But what we also saw was a crystallizing of LGBT diplomacy. What we saw during the Chechnya crisis was that for the first time, leaders, world leaders were coming together to condemn what was going on.

When that campaign happened in 2017, suddenly there was a whole humanitarian need to help LGBT people escape from that region and from the country. more analysis of these critical incidents when they happen so that we can look at the warning signs and say, okay, this is something that could spill over, almost like an early warning system, you know, where we could actually say, okay, these are the conditions. Now we need to bring together humanitarian resources. We need to bring together the diplomatic resources. We need to bring together humanitarian resources. We need to bring together the diplomatic resources. We need to bring together the community resources to try and address this on multi-levels. Can you speak to how successful or unsuccessful the diplomatic response was in that specific case with Chechnya, in your view. It was very encouraging at the beginning because, you know, there were high-level interventions from, you know, Chancellor Merkel, from our Prime Minister, from other leaders around the world. There was discussion about this in the media. There was discussion about this at multilateral meetings as well. multilateral meetings as well. As I watched so many governments leap into action on this file, I couldn't help but think about how my life had gone full circle. In 1984, I had been outside Dag Hammarskjöld Plaza, imploring the UN to make LGBT rights an international affair. By 2018, through diplomatic

cooperation with intergovernmental organizations and civil society organizations, diplomats were part of a global campaign to publicly condemn state-sponsored violence. And so it was great that it galvanized the diplomatic community. And I know that the diplomats, even though they're sometimes limited during these crises in terms of what they can do, there was a real diplomatic effort and push to try and help people that were fleeing this violence to come. But the point that I make in the book is that in 2019, like after everything settled down, and then in 2019 in Chechnya, there was another surge of violence. And a lot of the same tactics and the same playbook was being used.

And that garnered a lot less international outcry. Forty more people were accused of being LGBT and detained. At least two had been tortured to death in detention, at the same facility where gay men had been detained, tortured, and killed in 2017. This time, there were fewer headlines and fewer high-profile diplomatic interventions. The grim situation made me wonder whether anything more could have been done to prevent this from happening again. whether anything more could have been done to prevent this from happening again. So I think that maybe a lesson that can be learned from this is that this idea of being very responsive to injustice and a crisis is not enough, you know, that there needs to be follow-up, that there needs to be a continued diplomatic and humanitarian effort to prevent these issues from flaring up again.

And I think in general, in international affairs, this is the part that we need to work on that we don't always get so well. We're very good at, you know, predicting things that might happen or reacting to crises that are happening. But how do we prevent this from happening so that we've got some long-term solutions? long-term solutions. Over my four years in Washington, I noticed that debates on LGBT human rights issues were becoming more and more fractious, the subject of bitter protests by many English-speaking Caribbean member states. These issues continued to surface as my career progressed in the department. We've been talking about kind of this anti-Western backlash to LGBTQ rights at the state level. And in your book and in your lecture, you talk about how you encountered a similar kind of us versus them mentality among diplomats on

both sides of this issue. How does that kind of attitude get in the way of progress on LGBTQ rights? Well, this is polarization 101. You know, like this is like first year international relations when you look at these blocks of support that emerge in these international fora. that emerge in these international fora. And what I was very surprised at was how entrenched these camps were. And there was this feeling that we, meaning we from the West, we're on the right side of history here.

We're the right ones here. We're the ones that are defending LGBT rights. And they are the ones that are against us. They're homophobic. They hate us. I heard this a lot in my interviews, you know, they can't stand me. They hate me. What I was really surprised at was how polarized this discussion was. I mean, in their own words, it was us and it was them. And they were the bad guys. We're the good guys.

They're the enemies of human rights. They hate LGBT people. They hate me because I'm gay. They used very strong language to describe the other side. And in fact, you know, you're talking about human rights, and these are diplomats that are dehumanizing the people that they're negotiating with. You know, you always think of diplomats as being kind of cool as a cucumber and sort of being able to kind of take a step back. But when you really are able to sit down with a diplomat and talk to them about what it's like to be thrown into these types of negotiations and these one-on-one

intense sessions with people that they, you know, don't have the same values with, it really did feel very personal. feel very personal. Western diplomats referred to our side and the other side without a hint of irony. In their view, there were only two sides. In my opinion, the overall effect is one of Western civilizational superiority. The flip side is that resistant non-Western nations are not only seen to be underdeveloped, but morally inferior. I wonder what it was like for you to hear that kind of personal aspect. As you say, diplomats are kind of known for being cool cucumbers and sort of Teflon-like, and their job is to be mediators. And I'm just curious, as a diplomat, as an activist, as an academic, personally, what it was like for you to hear

those difficult stories? Yeah. Well, it was very validating for me because it helped me to understand my own journey in this juggling of identities of being the diplomat, of being the activist, and of being the analyst, and understanding that there are different sides to this story, you know, and that things are not necessarily the way they appear when you read it in the newspaper or, you know, in a report afterward. But it also made me reflect on the values that we in the West project on other people in other countries through our work, and really trying to empathize more with the diplomats from other countries that maybe don't have that same leeway, they don't have that same freedom to be able to express themselves as openly as maybe we do.

In the process of having these conversations, are you able to take us to a moment that did the opposite, that gave you that gave you hope i i just remember um meeting with a muslim activist who was working a lot in a lot of these international meetings and he was queer he was mus, and I just, I saw him as, like, I just admired how out there he was and how he was, you know, approaching delegations from Muslim-majority countries and was saying to them, I think that you need to be more supportive of LGBT rights, and this is why. And he was very enthusiastic about actually using religious arguments as a plea for tolerance for oppressed and marginalized people, including LGBT people. And one thing that he said to me, which I found very interesting, was he said, you know, some of my greatest critics are my fellow Muslims who are very secular. And they say to me, why are you doing this? Because religion is the oppression, you know, like you shouldn't even be

playing with that. You should be taking that out of the conversation and just focusing on human rights. And he was saying to me, but a lot of people in other countries, religion is their framework. It's their frame of reference. That's how they view the world. And so we need to find ways to practice diplomacy where we're really connecting with other people's values on their own turf. There are UN member states that cannot publicly declare their support for LGBT rights, but seem to be open to learning more. Activities with a lower profile, such as technical meetings and programming, may afford new possibilities to find some middle

ground. Given the rise of extreme right-wing politics and ultra-nationalist strongman leaders, you know, populist leaders, what are you worried about when you look ahead in terms of the place of queer diplomacy on the international scene? Well, there's always the danger of slippage. There's always the danger of recriminalization. We see this over and over again, that activists work very hard for very many years to take issue that was relevant or was talked about a lot in the 2010s, but something that really becomes fused with our universal discourse on human rights. As an activist who landed on the doorstep of the UN 38 years ago, I cannot deny that multilateral LGBT advocacy and diplomacy have made spectacular gains since then. One question that remains is to what extent these gains will continue to translate into rights enjoyed by LGBT people representing a plurality of regions, religions, races, cultures, social classes, and gender identity categories. social classes, and gender identity categories.

How human rights violations against LGBT people are defined, highlighted, and prioritized will have a major impact on what a global LGBT rights movement could look like in the coming years. Is the movement moving into a vast tent or separating into silos? Will it coalesce and tent or separating into silos? Will it coalesce and thrive or fragment and shrink? All this will depend on whether this movement is nimble enough to coordinate a common approach to multiple threats. But do you worry that this progress is not linear, that it's not forward momentum? Yes, I mean, I worry, but I don't think worrying helped. Someone worrying in the West, you know, about these issues doesn't really help a young queer person in a country whose rights are being trampled on at the moment.

Like, I just don't see that as an option. I think there's going to be setbacks, and we just have to keep going and just believe in a better tomorrow. And when I look back on the progress that I've experienced personally in my life, I mean, it's incredible. So it can happen, and that's the way I want to keep looking at this issue of queer diplomacy. Douglas Janoff, I'm so grateful to speak with you today. Thank you so much. Thank you very much. It was a pleasure to talk to you. You've been listening to my conversation with Canadian diplomat, academic, and former activist Douglas Janoff. He's the author of Queer Diplomacy, Homophobia, International Relations, and LGBT Human Rights. This episode of Ideas was produced by Annie Bender.

Technical production, Danielle Duval. Our web producer is Lisa Ayuso. Acting senior producer, Lisa Godfrey. Greg Kelly is the executive producer of Ideas, and I'm Nala Ayyad. Rights are not conferred by government. They are the birthright of all people. It does not matter what country we live in, who our leaders are, or even who we are. Because we are human, we therefore have rights. Because we are human, we therefore have rights.

And because we have rights, governments are bound to protect them. Now there is still, as you all know, much more to be done to secure that commitment, that reality and progress for all people. I come before you with great hope and confidence that no matter how long the road ahead, we will travel it successfully together.