2020 VISION
As DNA celebrates its 20th year in this 250th issue, veteran journalist Andrew M Potts looks back at two decades of challenges and triumphs for the LGBTIQ community around the world.
As DNA celebrates 20 years, we look at two decades of LGBTIQ challenges and triumphs.
There has been a great deal of change inside the LGBTIQ community around world over the course of DNA’s 20-year history. For a start, 20 years ago, we didn’t even use the term LGBTIQ. In 2000, most people still spoke of a gay or gay and lesbian community, with trans and bisexual people largely on the margins.
Over the past two decades, however, we’ve begun to accept that, yes, bisexual people do actually exist, and begun to reflect on the biphobia within our own community.
At the same time, transgender people are becoming increasingly recognised, with their issues reflected in the mainstream. There has been an unfortunate side effect to this newfound attention, though. Having lost the fight on gay marriage, conservatives have increasingly taken to targeting transgender people in their anti-LGBTIQ attacks, particularly transgender kids and their parents. LGBTIQ people of colour have also found a larger place in the conversation. There was great debate in 2017 after the city of Philadelphia premiered a revised version of the Pride flag with black and brown stripes to draw attention to the issues of people of colour within our community.
Many argued the original 1978 pride flag was already inclusive but there have been further iterations since then, most notably Portland queer and non-binary artist Daniel Quasar’s Progress Flag which includes new arrow stripes to explicitly represent the trans community and gender non-conforming people. >>
20 YEARS GOING GLOBAL
The two decades leading up to 2020 were years in which the debate about LGBTIQ rights were increasingly globalised, with the repression of sexual minorities around the developing world taking centre stage. Equality for lesbians and gays increasingly became the standard by which human rights in Northern and Western Europe, Australia, New Zealand and the Americas were judged. Those governments also began to scrutinise the treatment of LGBTIQ people in the countries that received foreign aid, and those countries, in turn, pushed back against being held accountable.
In June of 2003, Gene Robinson was elected as the first openly gay bishop in the American Episcopal Church and the fallout threatened to split the Global Anglican Communion. It also became one of the triggers for a wave of repression against LGBTIQ people across Africa and the Caribbean where we become popular scapegoats for religious and political leaders.
Perhaps the most extreme expression of this was Uganda’s so-called Kill The Gays bill, which, in its original 2009 form, included the death penalty for “aggravated homosexuality” with consensual sex between men potentially leading to life imprisonment. The Ugandan government passed the law in 2014 despite international outcry but the country’s Constitutional Court ruled it illegal within months.
The years that followed also saw tensions between the LGBTIQ community and British Muslims as young Sunni men took to the streets of their East London neighbourhoods to conduct so-called “Muslim patrols” while Muslim parents held protests outside Birmingham’s Parkfield Community School over a school program encouraging tolerance of difference that was inclusive of LGBTIQ people.
In 2002, as part of a peace deal with Islamic militants, Indonesia granted its province of Aceh autonomy and the right to impose Sharia law on its Muslim residents. By 2015 this had been extended to non-Muslims, with alcohol consumption, premarital dating, gambling and homosexuality all punishable by whipping, fines or prison time.
That same year, the national religious Indonesian Ulema Council issued a fatwa calling for homosexuals to be punished by caning and, in some instances, the death penalty and, since 2018, Islamic lawmakers in Indonesia’s parliament have been pushing for homosexuality to be outlawed as part of a revised national criminal code.
Mass demonstrations by students in late 2019 lead to the government postponing the legislation but it is unknown when it may return to the parliament. Meanwhile, raids on gay venues and police harassment of LGBTIQ people is a regular occurrence even though the law is not currently being broken.
The US invasion of Iraq in 2003 to enact regime change against Saddam Hussein created a security vacuum in the region that unleashed a shocking series of vigilante killings of gay men by militia groups. Men who were known or merely suspected to be gay were abducted and murdered, often after being tortured. Some were thrown from roof tops, others were executed by being crushed by
cinderblocks. These targeted attacks worsened and became even more organised when ISIS took over large swathes of Iraq and Syria, declaring it an Islamic State.
During these decades, Israel experienced a backlash from its own religious extremists, appalled by its regional leadership on LGBTIQ rights. In 2009, a masked gunman wounded
15 and killed two others during an attack on the Tel Aviv branch of the Israeli LGBTIQ Association. No one has ever been held accountable.
And in 2016, Ultra-Orthodox Jewish activist Yishai Schlissel was jailed for life over a stabbing attack during the 2015 Jerusalem Pride Parade, which killed a teenager and wounded five others. He had been out of prison for just three weeks, having already been jailed over a similar attack on the parade in 2005 where he had stabbed three people.
2018 also saw the culmination of years of activism and litigation when the Supreme Court of India finally repealed the colonial era Section
377 law that banned homosexuality, striking down a law that had repressed India’s LGBTIQs since 1861.
In doing so, it liberated what the Indian government estimated as 2.5 million Indian gay men from the fear of prosecution, though, with a population of 1.35 billion that seems quite a low estimate.
The years 2000 to 2020 were also dominated by the struggle for LGBTIQ rights in Eastern Europe. As Pride marches began appearing in Russia, Ukraine, Poland and Serbia, they were condemned by orthodox churches and physically attacked by religious zealots and homophobic thugs.
Vladimir Putin began his stranglehold on the Russian presidency at the start of 2000, a year after Russia declassified homosexuality as a mental illness. Three years later, Russia achieved an equal age of consent but, that same year, Russia also banned openly gay people from serving in the military.
When a Pride march was organised for Moscow in 2006, authorities banned the event, and Russia’s clampdown on the rights of its LGBTIQ citizens began in earnest, culminating in the passing of a national ban on so-called “gay propaganda” in 2013.
Later came allegations that Russia was turning a blind eye to gay concentration camps in Chechnya at the beginning of 2017.
The tail end of the 2010s also saw the rise of anti-gay populist figures like Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, Andrzej Duda in Poland and Viktor Orban in Hungary, leading to fears that progress that had been so hard fought for could be undone.
Yet, these same years also saw many gay and lesbian political leaders come to the fore. In 2009, Jóhanna Sigurðardóttir became the world’s first openly gay or lesbian national leader when she became prime minister of Iceland. Belgium elected Elio Di Rupo as its leader two years later. Luxembourg chose Xavier Bettel as its leader in 2013, and in 2017 Ana Brnabic became leader of Serbia. That same year, Leo Varadkar became prime minister of Ireland.
In the US, openly gay political consultant
>> Fred Karger ran for the Republican nomination for president in 2012 but was never considered a serious contender. In 2019 Pete Buttigieg ran as the first openly gay presidential candidate for the Democratic Party. The charismatic young mayor of South Bend, Indiana did better than many predicted and has paved the way for the next contender.
Winning the 2016 United States election, Donald Trump became the president and began undoing the progress the Obama Administration had made around transgender people serving in the military. Trump banned transgender people from military service against the wishes of the military’s top brass.
But the decade ended with a bang with the 50th anniversary of Stonewall, celebrated in New York with WorldPride 2019, and the announcement that Australia had won its bid to host the next WorldPride in Sydney in 2023.
20 YEARS OF HIV ADVANCES
The two decades since the year 2000 have been transformative for the lives and sex lives of both the HIV-positive and negative in our community.
The HIV epidemic has changed since the peak of deaths in the ’80s and ’90s to where effective new treatments mean that people living with HIV have similar home and work lives to their HIV-negative peers and most can expect to live into old age.
In 2002, the US Food And Drug Administration approved the first rapid HIV test, meaning the agonising wait for test results was a thing of the past.
Two years later, a new generation of antiretroviral drugs were approved for use in the United States and the following year were approved for use as a Post-Exposure Prophylaxis (PEP) drug by the US Department Of Health And Human Services. People who began taking the drug within 72 hours of being exposed to HIV and who continued to take it for a month, now had a greatly reduced risk of contracting the virus.
In January of 2008, researchers from Switzerland argued that HIV-positive people who are on treatment and have a viral load of under 40 copies per millilitre of their blood could be assumed to not be able to transmit the disease to HIVnegative partners, easing fears for sero-discordant couples who had access to treatment.
Gay men who achieved and maintained an undetectable viral load no longer had to worry about passing the virus to others. Later the same year, the world was stunned when it was revealed that an American who has been undergoing treatment in Germany appeared to have been functionally cured of the virus. The so-called “Berlin Patient”, Timothy Ray Brown, had been living with HIV since 1995 but when he was diagnosed with acute myeloid leukemia his physician, Dr Gero Hutter, saw an opportunity to test an experimental procedure. Brown underwent chemotherapy to kill his bone marrow, which was then replaced by stem cells from donors with a unique mutation that made them resistant to HIV. Brown stopped taking his antiretroviral medication after receiving the transplant and within three months he had an undetectable viral load and his immune cell count had increased.
Doctors continued to monitor his progress and felt confident by 2011 to declare him completely cured. Unfortunately, this cure was unique to Brown’s particular set of circumstances and was not affordable or safe for widespread application among people living with HIV.
In 2012, PrEP (Pre-Exposure Prophylaxis) was approved as a preventative medication for men who have sex with men to prevent them from getting HIV and reduced the risk of infection by 99 per cent.
The growing availability of different sized condoms that were less likely to break during sex also improved the sex lives of those who continued with condom use.
An aggressive new strain of HIV was discovered in Cuba in 2015. It was announced that it could progress to AIDS within two to three years of infection. Many people infected with the CRF19 strain of HIV became sick before they even knew they had the virus.
In June of 2016 the United Nations held an historic high-level meeting on Ending AIDS where member states pledged to end the AIDS epidemic by 2030. However, over 50 countries blocked LGBTIQ groups from participating in the meeting and at its conclusion the final resolution barely mentioned the groups most at risk of HIV: gay and bisexual men, transgender people, injecting drug users, and sex workers.
In 2018 there was more bad news when researchers in the Philippines warned that a new subtype of the HIV virus was spreading that was more drug resistant and rapid in progressing to AIDS – another reminder that the virus can mutate.
By decade’s end there had been a dozen cases reported around the world in which people apparently acquired HIV while using PrEP, though these may have been a result of people not consistently taking their medications.
The 23rd International AIDS Conference (AIDS 2020) heard that injectable forms of PrEP now offer superior protection compared to pills.
Sadly, Timothy Ray Brown passed away in October 2020, finally succumbing to leukemia. >>
20 YEARS TO MARRIAGE EQUALITY
The first two decades of DNA’s existence were dominated by the issue of same-sex marriage, though not all of us warmed to the idea initially, and it caused a great deal of debate inside the LGBTIQ community.
DNA’s first issue came out in January of 2000 and, before year’s end, Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands had signed the world’s first same-sex marriage bill into law. Neighbouring Belgium followed suit in 2003 and later that year the Canadian province of Ontario became the first jurisdiction in the Americas to legally recognise same-sex marriages.
In November, a court in the US state of Massachusetts ruled that same-sex couples must be allowed to marry from May of 2004 if the state legislature did not resolve the issue.
Spooked by this event on the other side of the world, the Australian Parliament passed a pre-emptive ban on same-sex marriage, with the Marriage Act amended to define marriage as “the union of a man and a woman to the exclusion of all others, voluntarily entered into for life”.
In 2005 the Canadian parliament legalised same-sex marriage nationally, as did Spain, and the Constitutional Court of South Africa gave the country one year to introduce its own law. In November the following year, South Africa became the first (and remains the only) African country to legally recognise
same-sex marriages.
In 2007 Norway became the first Scandinavian country to allow gay couples to wed. But it was a case of two steps forward and one step back in 2008 when Californians supported the Proposition 8 ban on same-sex marriage at the polls and marriage equality was overturned in that state. The event was a shock for progressive Americans who saw that reforms could be rolled back.
In 2009 Sweden followed Norway allowing gay couples to marry. 2010 saw Portugal become the sixth European country to allow same-sex marriage. Then, in July, Argentina became the first country in Latin America to allow the reform, then Denmark in 2012.
In April of 2013, New Zealand legalised samesex marriage, with lawmakers breaking into song in the parliament after they passed the bill. Also that year, Uruguay became the second South American country to allow same-sex marriage, a month later Brazil joined them as the third, France became the 14th country globally to allow gay marriage and Queen Elizabeth II give royal assent to a bill legalising gay marriage in England and Wales, with Scotland passing the reform the following year.
But there was another setback in Australia in 2013 when the High Court ruled that an attempt to legislate for same-sex marriage in the nation’s capital was unconstitutional.
In June of 2015, the US Supreme Court struck down the federal ban on same-sex marriage in the case of Obergefell vs Hodges and there was, finally, marriage equality in all 50 states.
2015 also saw Luxembourg grant same-sex couples the right to marry, while the people of the Republic Of Ireland backed same-sex marriage in a national referendum. Greenland’s parliament also felt the love, backing the right of gay couples to marry in a unanimous vote by lawmakers.
In 2017 Germany finally allowed same-sex marriage, while a court struck down the ban in neighbouring Austria, though it took two years for the ruling to go into effect, and Finland become the last Nordic country to allow samesex couples to wed.
Australia endured a divisive and legally unbinding postal vote on same-sex marriage in September of 2017 that costs taxpayers $85 million, but the Yes campaign finally won and Australians celebrated as couples began to wed in December.
2019 saw marriage equality granted in Taiwan (the first Asian country to do so), Ecuador and Mexico.
Though marred by the coronavirus pandemic, 2020 celebrates as same-sex couples are legally allowed to wed in Northern Ireland, the Israeli city of Tel Aviv, and Costa Rica with Panama expected to follow them shortly.
Looking forward, the challenge of full equality will be most hard fought in Central and Eastern Europe and across the developing world. >>
20 YEARS ENTERTAINED AND HOOKED-UP
The two decades from the year 2000 have seen rapid change in the technologies through which we express ourselves and project our lives, and also the mainstreaming of LGBTIQ stories and culture into the world of art and entertainment.
When the first issue of DNA hit the printers, Gaydar was less than six months old and quickly grew to become the world’s most popular online dating platform for gay men.
However, its popularity was surpassed when Grindr arrived in 2009, bringing location-based dating to the palm of our hands via an app and increasingly smarter phones. Notoriously buggy and bad at delivering messages in the early days, it remains the most popular hook-up app in 2020, even though it’s had terrible security issues with internet scammers constantly bombarding users and people using the app to deal drugs and seek out chemsex.
This convenience of online dating is also blamed for the demise of gaybourhoods across the Western World, where once LGBTIQs would not just play but also live and work.
For many, gentrification has made our urban gay villages simply too expensive to live in. Greater social acceptance of LGBTIQ people has also meant that young people no longer need to escape to the safety of big cities to find community. Staying at home in the suburbs or the regions is now a viable option which, just a couple of decades ago, it wasn’t for many. Rents are cheaper, families are more tolerant and community increasingly exists online.
There are drawbacks, though. There is a reduced sense of actual community and involvement in the creative arts, politics and activism within the LGBTIQ world has decreased. And guys you chat to in actual bars can’t catfish you, send you fake pictures or as easily steal your credit card details.
It’s still not completely safe for us to socialise and seek romance in the straight world, so there’s still a big role for gay nightclubs and bars to play where we can also use apps for digitally augmented cruising. If you see a hottie across the dance floor, you could snoop his profile to see if he’s a top or a bottom before approaching him – or find out whether he’s already taken so that you don’t waste that time.
LGBTIQ media has also taken a hit in the decade leading up to 2020 as more mainstream and better resourced news organisations have taken up our issues more readily. Major gay websites, which were flourishing in the early 2000s have since merged, shut down or been sold on.
LGBTIQ stories are increasingly being told through mainstream film and television with an appeal to wider audiences. The start of the decade saw Queer Ask Folk cross over to America, while Will And Grace ran until
2006 only to enjoy a surprise resurrection by NBC in 2017. It finished this reincarnation in April this year.
In 2005 Brokeback Mountain proved to Hollywood that straight audiences would embrace gay stories. Heath Ledger, Jake Gyllenhaal and Michelle Williams were all nominated for Academy Awards; Ang Lee won Best Director and it also picked up Best Adapted Screenplay, but didn’t take home the Best Picture statuette. That went to a largely forgotten film called Crash.
But the glass ceiling was cracked and LGBTIQ-themed films began to attract Best Picture nominations: Milk
(2008) and Dallas Buyers Club (2013). Then, finally, in
2016, Moonlight won the top honour, with
Call Me By Your Name nominated in 2017 and both Bohemian Rhapsody and The Favourite nominated in 2018.
Ru Paul’s Drag Race brought drag to television in 2009 on the then-LGBTIQ pay channel Logo TV. Eight years later it switched over to VH1. Interestingly, the show’s biggest audience is teenage girls and young women, not the LGBTIQ viewer.
Increasingly at this time we began consuming our film and television through streaming services like HBO and Netflix which were friendlier to more adult content than free-to-air or cable television and better positioned to serve more niche interests. Show runners like Ryan Murphy and Greg Berlanti brought queer themes to the mainstream through Pose, American Horror Story, and teen drama Riverdale.
But there was also a growing debate over who should be allowed tell these stories. Should we still applaud cis straight actors for their depictions of gay and trans people? Should those roles only now go to trans and gay actors?
Major award-winning films of even five years ago, such as The Danish Girl for which Eddie Redmayne received praise for his depiction of a trans women, are now up for question – particularly as a new generation of gay and trans performers like Laverne Cox step forward who can take these roles.
The second decade of DNA also saw a new crop of gay music superstars take to the stage, and increasingly in genres where previously they were unheard. In 2012, R&B singer Frank Ocean came out as bisexual and his star has only continued to rise since. Two years later, British singer-songwriter Sam Smith came out as gay, and then again as genderqueer in 2017. Australian global pop sensation Troye Sivan has been out for his entire musical career, with a discography and iconography that is unapologetically queer.
Lil Nas X’s recent pathway to stardom began with his country rap single Old Town Road blowing up on TikTok before climbing the global music charts through 2019. When he confirmed his sexuality on Twitter during Pride Month that year he did it so casually some people thought he was joking, prompting him to re-posts, saying, “deadass thought I made it obvious!”
Perhaps we have finally reached the point where a pop star or an actor’s sexuality is not only something that audiences are willing to accept but becomes a point of difference that makes them stand out and can actually help their careers. >>
20 YEARS FACING UP TO HATE
In June of 2016 the world was shocked by the Pulse nightclub massacre in Orlando, Florida, in which 49 innocent people were killed at the popular gay club.
The killer, Omar Mateen, a 29-year-old security guard, called 911 during the standoff with police to swear allegiance to ISIS and say that the massacre is to avenge an Iraqi ISIS leader who was killed in a US airstrike a month earlier.
It was the deadliest incident in the history of hate crimes and violence against the LGBTIQ community in the US and the worst terrorist attack in the US since 9/11. For a brief time, it was also the worst mass shooting incident in US history, eclipsing the death toll from the Virginia Tech and Sandy Hook Elementary School shootings, until it too was eclipsed by the Las Vegas mass shooting just a year later.
Then-President Obama and Vice President Biden attended a remembrance service for the victims. Rainbow colours lit up the Eiffel Tower, the Sydney Harbour Bridge, the Royal Palace in Amsterdam, the San Francisco City Hall and other landmarks as the global LGBTIQ world mourned.
Both the weapons used in the massacre, a semi-automatic SIG Sauer MCX rifle and a semi-automatic Glock pistol, were legally purchased by Mateen a week earlier from a gun store, and over three hours he and the police fired 200 rounds at each other before Mateen took his own life.
Just months before the publication of the first issue of DNA, Aaron McKinney and Russell Henderson, the killers of Matthew Shepard, were sentenced to multiple life terms over his kidnapping, robbery and murder.
Members of Fred Phelps’ Westboro Baptist Church made the news by picketing his funeral and the trials, becoming the ugliest face of American homophobia for years to come.
Matthew’s parents Denis and Judy fought for justice and equality through their Matthew Shepard Foundation and in 2009 President Obama signed the Matthew
Shepard and James Byrd Jr Hate
Crimes Prevention Act into law, expanding federal hate crime protections to LGBTIQ people for the first time.
In October of 2018, with the now retired Bishop Gene Robinson presiding over the event, Matthew Shepard’s ashes were interred in the Washington National Cathedral. It was the first interment of a national figure at the cathedral since Helen Keller’s fifty years earlier.
In June of 2019, Shepard became one of 50 inaugural Americans inducted into the National LGBTIQ Wall Of Honor within the Stonewall National Monument in New York’s Stonewall Inn.
LOOKING TO THE FUTURE
As DNA moves into its third decade, what will the future hold?
Homophobia will become increasingly unacceptable. Around the world, the rights of LGBTIQ people – from relationship recognition to protection from hate crimes and discrimination – will increasingly be how countries are judged in terms of their human rights records.
We can expect same-sex marriage and civil partnerships to become more available to LGBTIQ people in Asia, with lawmakers and activists currently working towards this in Thailand, Vietnam, Cambodia and Japan.
It is likely that further Sub-Saharan African countries will move to decriminalise homosexuality as parts of efforts to combat HIV, though progress beyond that seems illusive.
In the Middle East, Israel will probably, finally, legalise same-sex marriage, bringing that reform to the region for the first time, and there is growing pressure to legalise homosexuality in Lebanon.
There will likely be some further progress on same-sex marriage in Central and Eastern Europe, though it feels like the gains are running out there.
And throughout the developed world, LGBTIQ people will live even more openly as we continue to integrate into the mainstream of culture and society.
Now if only we could do something about all the internet scammers on Grindr! •