Queer Notes columnist Elise presents a bird’s-eye view of the advances and retrogressions in the struggle for freedom of LGBTQI+people worldwide, from Uganda and South Africa to Indonesia, from Poland and Czech Republic to the U.S. and Canada.

Queer Notes columnist Elise presents a bird’s-eye view of the advances and retrogressions in the struggle for freedom of LGBTQI+people worldwide, from Uganda and South Africa to Indonesia, from Poland and Czech Republic to the U.S. and Canada.
Takes up: The public outcry that restored a talk by a gay actor to middle school students in Pennsylvania; a bill signed by Great Britain to deport people to Rwanda, a country not safe for the LGBTQI+ community; LGBTQ+ curricula being included in Washington state’s public schools; and three extraordinary support groups for 2SLGBTQ+ in Latin America.
Rainbow Migration demanded the UK Prime Minister “end immigration detention for all LGBTQ+ people,” “scrap the Rwanda plan” and “reverse changes to the standard of proof for LGBTQ+ people’s asylum claims”; Twelve Republican-led states banned Transgender girls and women from competing in sports; and a long awaited center serving LGBTQ+ people opened on Chicago’s South Side.
Congo’s joining the East African Community epitomizes the plans being made over the heads of the African masses. The contradictions between the people, local capitalists and other power brokers, and world imperialism will intensify as these developments go forward. In effect, the elites would like to create a mechanism for mediating social contradictions in the wake of Sudan’s revolution.
Fascism has been cultivated by rulers fearing revolution and enabled by the normalization of genocides in Bosnia, Rwanda and Congo, and Syria–and by the philosophical void on the Left, a substantial part of which is still accepted as “Left” despite ideological confusion that aligned it with genocides in Syria and Bosnia.
Exploitative Chinese capital investment is what the East African Community economic zone has in common–a betrayal of their anthem “Jumiya Yetu,” which speaks of community.
Over 100 people gathered in Chicago’s Federal Plaza on Aug. 25, 2018, for a vigil on the one-year anniversary of the massacre of the Muslim minority Rohingya in Burma.
Congo’s President Joseph Kabila finally agreed to step down after his second term after large protests in Kinshasa; however, tribal militias Kamuina Nsapu and Bundu kia Kongo arose and many thousands are perishing from wars as the world looks the other way.
Raya Dunayevskaya gives a revolutionary history of the war for independence of Biafra from Nigeria while commenting on Conor Cruise O’Brien’s article published in the New York Review of Books, Dec. 21, 1968.
Violence between Christian majority and Muslim minority communities has torn the social fabric of the Central African Republic, one of the world’s poorest countries. Over 1,000 people have been killed since Michel Djotodia seized power in March 2013. Reciprocal massacres have led many observers to see a real possibility of a Rwanda-type genocide.
Review of The Child Catchers: Rescue, Trafficking, and the New Gospel of Adoption by Kathryn Joyce, which explores the religious Right’s renewed enthusiasm for domestic and international adoption.
Achebe made a great statement of responsibility toward the future. His questions are only more significant because they resonate beyond the Africa of newly-won independence to a world struggling with the meaning of history and revolution.
World in View
by Gerry Emmett
Ex-Pope Benedict’s reactionary career
Pope Benedict XVI’s sudden resignation announcement on Feb. 11 took the world by surprise. It is the first time in almost 600 years that a Pope has decided to quit. He has announced that he will continue to live in the Vatican, bearing the title “Pope emeritus,” and [=>]
World in View
by Gerry Emmett
Breivik whitewash?
Norway may not try Anders Behring Breivik for murdering 69 young people on Utoya Island last July 22. He was first declared psychotic and unfit to stand trial. After wide public outrage, the government has agreed to seek a second opinion. A no-trial decision would deny [=>]