In Paris, but also in Amiens, Biarritz, Calais, Carcassonne, Laval, Lorient, Nîmes and Tarbes, the 2024 edition of Pride will have a special flavour. By coincidence, the Pride parade in these cities is scheduled for Saturday 29 June – the day before the first round of the legislative elections. The vote worries many LGBT+ associations and activists, who see, for example, the homophobic attack carried out by four far-right activists in Paris on 9 June as a harbinger of what a far-right victory could mean for the safety of trans, queer and homosexual people.
If the French situation regarding LGBT+ rights may seem worrying, the international context is no less alarming. On a global scale, the trend could even be towards regression: in a summary covering the year 2023, Amnesty International particularly highlights the proliferation in Africa of laws or bills aimed at persecuting members of the LGBT+ community.
Would we attend a backlash on a large scale, this conservative backlash often observed after progress in minority rights? The adoption by the United Nations Human Rights Council in 2011 of a resolution on “human rights, sexual orientation and gender identity” today seems very distant. “It is certain that, since the 2010s, the multiplication of Western laws in favor of gay marriage, the questions raised by #metoo, but also the greater visibility given to trans people have provoked negative reactions around the world”notes Marie-Cécile Naves, director of the Gender and Geopolitics Observatory at the Institute of International and Strategic Relations.
The political scientist underlines in particular the indirect role of the entertainment and pop culture industries, today globalized, in this phenomenon of rejection: “As long as homosexuality and LGBT+ rights remained topics that were little discussed outside activist circles, they were perceived as issues confined to the West. But with the broadening and diversification of the channels for disseminating feminist and LGBT+ cultures, these issues are becoming more visible and affecting all spheres of socialization, to the point of being perceived by some actors as a cultural threat from the West.”
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The way in which, since 2018, China has regularly attacked South Korean K-pop singers deemed “effeminate” and bearers of non-Asian Western values is an example: the LGBT+ issue now seems to crystallize resentment towards the West. To the point that on May 16, in Dakar, during a discussion devoted to relations between Africa and Europe, Senegalese Prime Minister Ousmane Sonko warned his interlocutor – Jean-Luc Mélenchon –: “External attempts to impose on us the importation of ways of life and thinking contrary to our values risk constituting a new casus belli. » In its sights: LGBT+ minorities, widely considered in Senegal as a “phenomenon” of depravity in Western society. In front of an enthusiastic amphitheater and a stunned guest, the head of government then adds that the defense of these minorities can, more than political differences, nourish a “anti-Western sentiment in many parts of the world”.
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