Examine the LGBT (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender) movement in developed societies and how it is affecting the political participation in developing societies. (2017, 10 Marks)
The LGBT movement is a classic new social movement in Alberto Melucci’s sense: it seeks recognition of identity and dignity rather than material redistribution. It has travelled from the developed world to the developing through law, transnational networks and example.
The movement in developed societies
- Origins: homophile groups were followed by the Stonewall riots of 1969 in New York, which launched gay liberation and the Pride tradition.
- AIDS activism in the 1980s produced direct-action politics and forced sexuality onto the public-health agenda.
- Rights through courts and legislatures: decriminalisation, anti-discrimination law and, from the Netherlands in 2001, marriage equality, upheld in the United States by Obergefell v. Hodges (2015); 38 countries now recognise it.
- Electoral presence: openly LGBT candidates hold office, and parties court the community as a bloc.
Effect on participation in developing societies
- A new constituency: queer collectives, Pride marches and media presence have made sexual minorities a visible political actor.
- Litigation as participation: India’s Supreme Court recognised a third gender in NALSA (2014) and read down Section 377 in Navtej Singh Johar (2018), the Union leaving the matter to the Court; in Supriyo (2023) it left marriage to Parliament. Botswana’s courts decriminalised in 2019.
- Legislation: Thailand became the first Southeast Asian state with marriage equality in January 2025; Pakistan’s Transgender Persons Act (2018) recognised self-identification before its Federal Shariat Court struck key clauses in 2023.
- Electoral entry: Nepal elected the openly gay Sunil Babu Pant to its Constituent Assembly in 2008; Brazil elected its first transgender federal deputies, Erika Hilton and Duda Salabert, in 2022.
- Transnational advocacy: Margaret E. Keck and Kathryn Sikkink’s boomerang pattern, with local groups invoking soft-law norms such as the Yogyakarta Principles (2006), gives domestically weak groups leverage.
Limits and backlash
- Joseph Massad’s post-colonial critique of a Western-led “Gay International” warns that exported categories can misread local sexualities; the community also remains less organised and less electorally decisive than in the West.
- Anti-LGBT politics has itself become a mobilising tool, framed as resistance to Western imposition: Uganda’s Anti-Homosexuality Act (2023), Mali’s recriminalisation (2024), Burkina Faso’s new penal provisions (2025) and a Trinidad and Tobago appeal court’s reinstatement of the sodomy law (2025). Some 66 jurisdictions still criminalise consensual same-sex relations, Iran among those that can impose death.
Conclusion
The Northern movement has widened the repertoire and constituency of participation in developing societies, mainly through courts and transnational networks. It has also triggered nativist counter-mobilisation, so its effect is real but uneven: deepest where courts and civil society are strong, most contested where sexuality is turned into a question of sovereignty.