The Pink Line: Journeys Across the World’s Queer Frontiers

In this expansive and deeply sourced inquiry into the 21st-century LGBTQ rights movement, South African journalist Gevisser (Lost and Found in Johannesburg) profiles gay and transgender people around the world living in “the Pink Line”—“a borderland where queer people work to reconcile the liberation and community they might have experienced online or on TV or in circumscribed places, with the constraints of the street and the workplace, the courtroom and the living room.” Gevisser’s subjects include a transgender woman from Malawi, a gay Ugandan refugee living in Vancouver, and a lesbian couple running a café in post–Arab Spring Cairo. He alternates these portraits with discussions on how “nativist nationalist politicians” in Russia and Eastern Europe demonize European Union laws protecting LGBTQ rights, the spread of antihomosexual laws from Victorian England to the British colonies, the courting of “pink-dollar tourists” in Mexico City and Buenos Aires, the recent shift of public attention from gay issues to transgender ones, and the Vatican’s longstanding advocacy against the concept of gender as a social construct. Though the book at times feels more like a collection of magazine profiles rather than a cohesive whole, Gevisser’s non-Western point-of-view and exhaustive research provide essential perspective on the threads connecting gay, lesbian, and transgender communities worldwide. This impressive work is a must-read for anyone invested in social justice and LGBTQ rights. (July)