Recently, there has been a growing interest in the history of the gay and lesbian movement in the Nordic countries, Finland included. In this history, the role of transnational connections has proved important-not only with the widely influential US, but also within the Nordic countries themselves. This article focuses on early lesbian, gay, and bisexual (LGB) activists in Finland from the late 1960s to the 1980s, examining how transnational connections appeared in their narratives and how these connections emotionally moved and motivated the activists. Theoretically and methodologically, the study draws from queer oral history and affect theory. The analysis focuses on the narratives of four Finnish and one Swedish LGB activists, as well as archival material from Finnish and Swedish archives of LGB associations. The article argues that transnational flows of attitudes, atmospheres, and personal relationships supported early LGB activists in Finland by offering them affective empowerment.

Correction to “Public Support for Gay Rights Across Countries and Over Time”

This article maps in a comprehensive way the relationships between support for European integration, left–right ideological positions, and policy attitudes towards redistribution, immigration, and gay rights. I introduce the use of flexible non-parametric methods (generalized additive models) and more appropriate measures of dependence (the distance correlation coefficient) to explore and measure the strength and forms of these relationships across time (2004–2023), countries, and indicators of European integration support. The link between European integration attitudes and left–right ideology is weak. The exact form of the relationship depends on the operationalization of EU attitudes, country, and time period, but it rarely resembles the classic inverted-U curve suggested by existing literature and studies of party positions. In fact, average EU support is typically highest at the moderate left rather than at the center. The relationship of European integration attitudes with immigration positions is much stronger, stable, consistent, and almost linear; with support for gay rights it is also linear but considerably weaker; with support for redistribution there is practically no relationship at all. While public opinion is much less structured and less extreme than party positions, there is some evidence that—across countries—the strength of the links between EU attitudes, left–right ideology, and policy positions at the party level is associated with the strength of these links at the level of the public. Furthermore, over time the strength of the link between European integration attitudes and different policy attitudes covaries systematically with the salience (media presence) of the policy issue at the EU level.

ABSTRACT Why did the United Kingdom legalise homosexuality in Northern Ireland during the Troubles? This article is one of the first to look at the governmental dynamics surrounding the landmark case for gay rights in Europe, Dudgeon v United Kingdom (1981, 1983). Drawing on original archival research, it showcases how the diplomacy of the state was marked by balancing acts between international and internal audiences. Officials undertook actions to minimise political repercussions and safeguard the state’s legitimacy amidst the social unrest. Specifically, I argue that shame avoidance was a key driver of government decision making. Emotions, rather than material costs/benefits analyses, influenced how the British state managed gay rights during one of its most fraught political times in recent memory. This holds important insights for how diplomacy and emotions are intertwined.

In the winter of 1991, the frenzied scandal around Bret Easton Ellis’s serial killer smash American Psycho overshadowed another, no less serious literary controversy. Published less than two months after Ellis’s blockbuster, Dennis Cooper’s transgressive queer classic Frisk may have been largely ignored in mainstream cultural outlets, but in the queer community the scandal was deadly serious. Seemingly connecting queer sexuality with serial murder and pedophilia, the novel incited intensely angry demands for censorship. The controversy culminated in a very public death threat against Cooper from members of Queer Nation, a gay rights group known for its shock tactics. The critical response has mostly dismissed the scandals surrounding the novels as based on a particular kind of misreading or misinterpretation. Both works use similar narrative strategies to shock and scandalize their audience but aim to mitigate this response through the strategic use of unreliable narration. While scholars have often made the argument that the violence in the novels should be interpreted as mere fantasies of their unreliable narrators, this kind of nuanced interpretation was wholly absent in the scandalized response to the novels. The common critical defense, however, is itself based on a misunderstanding of the scandals. Fictionality and narrative reliability as such have little to do with the responses of imaginative resistance and moral disgust prompted by the representation of extreme violence. In this article, I analyze and compare the public and scholarly receptions of the novels, highlighting how scholarly discourse has often overlooked how the novels anticipated and aimed to incite the scandalized public response they ultimately provoked.

LGBT has become a global phenomenon proved by the massive movement carried out, proves that the presence of LGBT has been supported and accepted by many countries. On the other hand, LGBT also reaps a lot of resistance in several countries, one of which is in Indonesia. This is because Indonesia is a country with a majority Muslim population, which in Islam itself strongly rejects the LGBT movement. This study aims to discuss the roles and perspectives of several Islamic mass organizations in Indonesia in dealing with the LGBT phenomenon, namely the MUI, NU, and Muhammadiyah movements. This article uses the concept of the role of Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) with data collection carried out via the internet by searching and collecting bold documents from the organizations under study. This research found that the role of the three mass organizations is still quite minimal in terms of most of their activities which are still limited to short statements and protests in dealing with the problem of LGBT which has become widespread in Indonesia. This research recommends that these three Islamic organizations should act comprehensively as NGOs to contain the influence of LGBT in Indonesia. Keywords: Indonesia, Islamic Organizations, LGBT, Threats.

ABSTRACT The quality and strength of a democracy can be measured by how minority rights are protected against the interests of the majority. In the US, the rights of transgender people, a numerically small, highly marginalized population, are under attack and being deployed as a wedge issue to galvanize political power. Republican representatives push an anti-transgender policy agenda, working to separate the “T” from lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) rights, while Democratic representatives lead initiatives to protect transgender rights, despite the electoral risk. Who in the Democratic party is sponsoring legislation to protect this dispossessed subgroup of the LGBT community? Focusing on the US House, we test what affects gender identity-inclusive (GII) policy entrepreneurship and arrive at three conclusions. First, lesbians, gay men, and bisexual (LGB) members of Congress are acting as surrogate representatives for their transgender siblings. Second, liberal members advocate for transgender rights, suggesting tighter ideological congruence. Third, Black and Asian members of Congress have a stronger commitment to gender identity-inclusive policy, suggesting an expansion of their civil rights agenda. Our results offer unique insight into the value of diverse identities in Congress to provide inclusive democratic representation, critical for marginalized and oppressed populations.

ABSTRACT In the debate between the universal versus contextual dimension of attitudes toward human rights, we argue that personality can explain differences in support for human rights, and that different personality traits tend to show different predictive stability across different issues. In this proto-theoretical effort, we argue that different contexts may affect differently the direction of personality traits in support for human rights. We found that Agreeableness and Emotional Stability predicted support for women, ethnic minority, gay, and immigrant and refugee rights in the same direction, whereas the effects of Conscientiousness, Extraversion and Openness changed direction across issues. We explained such anomalies with issue salience of specific human rights, arguing that the effect of personality traits can be detected more easily in low salience human rights issues, but not so in mid and high salience issues. We analyzed a dataset of an ethically approved and preregistered public opinion survey conducted in spring 2023 in Kosovo, and found that personality traits from the Big Five model predict support for the salient issues of women, ethnic minority and gay rights along the same lines as in already established models, but significantly diverged from them in the non-salient issue of immigrant and refugee rights.

Queer Judaism: LGBT Activism and the Remaking of Jewish Orthodoxy in Israel Queer Judaism: LGBT Activism and the Remaking of Jewish Orthodoxy in Israel, by AvishaiOrit. New York: New York University Press, 2023. 320 pp. $32.00 paper. ISBN: 9781479810031.

Many socially consequential beliefs, notably political and religious ideologies, consist not of single propositions in isolation from others but as systems of many propositions. Philip Converse, one of the most influential political scientists of the twentieth century, proposed that such systems can be understood as networks of propositions and predicted that they would be highly intercorrelated in those with strong ideological commitments but less so in people who are less ideological. We used recent advances in network psychometrics to test this account in relation to the political beliefs of a representative sample of 2,058 UK adults, who rated themselves on the left-right dimension and then reported their attitudes toward 18 policy issues. We divided participants into equally-sized groups of left-wing, centrist and right-wing participants and found that, as Converse had predicted, the networks of those at either end of the left-right continuum were similar in structure, being significantly more interconnected than the networks of those who identified themselves as centrists, even though the actual beliefs were (for the most part) polar opposites. This finding, which was robust to sensitivity checks, aligns with previous research which has shown that people at the political extremes, compared to those in the centre, are more certain about their beliefs and less likely to change them over time. In each ideological group we also identified the same three communities of beliefs which mapped onto classic accounts of authoritarian attitudes, altruism and cooperativeness, and personal liberty. Attitudes towards gay rights had the highest predictability index in all three networks and was the most central node in the right and centre networks, suggesting that these attitudes play a largely unrecognised but important role in ideological positioning. Our analytical approach has implications for not only political beliefs but all organized belief systems.

Anthropological studies of LGBTQ activism around the world in recent decades offer insights into what political scientist Cathy Cohen called the “radical potential” of coalitions rooted less in LGBTQ identity than in countering interlocking oppressions. Accordingly, this article focuses on ways that anthropological scholarship has ethnographically studied LGBTQ activism not as sites of identity, but rather as scenes of unending nonsublimation of differences in embodied navigations of race, gender, sex, caste, and class. This work features scenes of transnational interlinkages in restructurations of sexual and erotic subjectivities, decolonial strivings to upend exploitative extractions of value from marginalized people and landscapes, and spiritual activism that seeks their material survival and flourishing through more just redistributions of pleasure and care.

The NGO sector is not only a contentious site in which global and national politics materializes, but also where precarity manifests itself unevenly in the gendered, racialized, and classed bodies that inhabit those spaces. In China, NGOs have become the major forms through which feminist and LGBT grassroots organizing take shape since the Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing in 1995. This paper examines how state repression and the neoliberal logics of professionalization within NGOization politicize and precaritize feminist and LGBT rights-based work. Building on critical scholarship bridging analysis of precarity as a labor condition with the notion of ontological precariousness, this paper explores how feminist and LGBT activist-workers in China negotiate labor/work along the hierarchies of gender, sexuality, race, urbanity/rurality, and seniority. I argue that precarity is both material and affective, manifesting in the differential devaluation and exploitation of activist workers’ emotional and physical labor, particularly for those facing compounded forms of oppression due to their intersectional identities, as well as the silencing of difficult feelings by hierarchical relations within movement spaces. I suggest that the feelings that fuel the resistance—such as hope, desire, and camaraderie—often lead to structurally unrealizable aspirations and reproduce racial, class, and age disparities within NGOs. It produces unintended and contradictory affective consequences of mental fatigue, frustration, and feelings of betrayal that further perpetuate precarity. This paper contributes to advancing not only state-centered studies of feminist and LGBT activism but also global aid and development literature from perspectives of labor precarity, affect, and intersectionality.

BackgroundIn Sweden, gender-neutral marriage was legalized in 2009, and antidiscrimination protections have progressively expanded. Public support for lesbian, gay, or bisexual (LGB) rights has remained above 90%. In Stockholm County, the proportion of young people identifying as LGB more than doubled between 2010 and 2021. In light of these legal and social changes, improved mental health might be expected among LGB youth. This study examined temporal trends in mental health outcomes in this population from 2010 to 2021.MethodsWe analyzed three cross-sectional surveys from the Stockholm Public Health Cohort (2010, 2014, 2021), including 10,594 participants aged 16-29. Self-administered questionnaires assessed sexual identity, recent psychological distress, lifetime cannabis use, and lifetime suicidal ideation and attempts. Antidepressant and anxiolytic use were obtained by survey year from the National Prescribed Drug Register. Results are presented as weighted prevalence with 95% confidence intervals (CIs).ResultsOverall, 10,077 (95.1%) participants reported sexual identity. Across all years, bisexual youth generally had the highest prevalence of mental health outcomes, followed by homosexual youth, relative to heterosexual youth. By 2021, among bisexual youth: psychological distress was 56.3% (95% CI: 49.3%-63.1%), cannabis use 43.2% (36.4%-50.1%), suicidal ideation 47.1% (40.2%-54.0%), suicide attempts 13.7% (9.6%-18.7%), antidepressant use 21.4% (16.1%-27.6%), and anxiolytic use 6.8% (3.7%-11.3%). From 2010 to 2021, psychological distress doubled among homosexual youth (26.8% to 53.1%), and antidepressant use among bisexual youth rose from 14.0% to 21.4%.ConclusionsDespite a favorable legal and social climate, mental health disparities persist among sexual minority youth in Stockholm County, most notably among bisexual youth. These findings highlight the need for targeted mental health support and affirming services for LGB youth.Key messages• Despite progressive legal and social changes, mental health disparities persist among sexual minority youth in Sweden, underscoring continued challenges.• Bisexual youth, amid rising visibility, face the greatest mental health risks, highlighting the urgent need for targeted and affirming public health interventions.

ABSTRACT This article critiques the global imaginary of LGBTQ rights, arguing that dominant metrics of state-based human rights frameworks, what I term the Gay Rights International Movement (GRIM), reproduce anti-Blackness by aligning queerness with whiteness, modernity, and state legibility. These frameworks enact and rely on what I theorise as Africana epistemicide: the erasure of African ways of knowing gender and sexuality. Rather than merely misrepresenting queer lives, GRIM frameworks actively undermine Black queer solidarity by enforcing Western-dominated models of identity rights and justice. In response, this article offers Solidaristic Imaginaries as a decolonial framework for rethinking queer political connection beyond nation-state borders, human rights penality, and colonial constructions of progressive vs. backwards. Through two case studies – queer activism in Nigeria’s #EndSARS movement and the CAISO Queer Archives of Trinidad and Tobago – I demonstrate how diasporic Black queer formations resist epistemic violence and enact alternative action infrastructures. These practices do not seek inclusion within GRIM’s legalist teleology, but instead foreground Black queer life as globally entangled, historically continuous, and epistemically central. The article ultimately calls for a radical respatialisation of queer political imaginaries, reorienting how Blackness is imagined in relationship to space, time and liberatory struggle.

This article explores the ethical and methodological challenges of researching anti-gender actors, particularly far-right nationalist groups, in wartime Ukraine. Rather than focusing on the far right as a political subject, it reflects on the consequences of this focus becoming central to Western and Russian interpretations of Ukrainian politics, especially in relation to lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) rights. The Russian state has long used narratives of ‘Ukrainian Nazism’ to justify its aggression, putting scholars at risk of unintentionally reinforcing disinformation. Meanwhile, the wartime context has produced new alliances between LGBTQ activists and nationalist actors, complicating the analytical and emotional terrain. Exploring this new, complicated political landscape, the article proposes applying critical feminist friendship as a research ethic, allowing for situated critique, emotional accountability and solidarity with vulnerable communities. It argues for the need to critically engage with nationalism and militarisation within queer and feminist spaces, without losing sight of geopolitical asymmetries and local complexities.

While theories at the crossroads of social movements and organizations have explored different strategies and challenges faced by insider and outsider activists, research examining their collaborations is just emerging. We contribute to this literature by introducing the concept of collaborative division of labor, which theorizes how social movement organizations (SMOs) collaborate through adoption of different roles, leveraging their distinct positions (insiders, outsiders, belonging to different sectors), postures (persuasive or disruptive), and expertise to pursue a common political agenda. Through a study of the LGBT movement in French workplaces, we examine the interactions among eight SMOs with regard to four strategies: amplifying one another’s actions, compelling organizations to respond, threatening organizations’ reputations, and engaging in complementary datactivism (the production and dissemination of data for a social movement cause). Our findings show that SMOs’ division of labor relied on multidirectional collaborations, as activists adopted roles that provided complementary, unidirectional, mutually beneficial, and indirect support to one another. In addition, our research offers counterintuitive insights about the postures of insider and outsider activists, as we argue that these postures do not always align with what is expected in the literature. Last, we reveal how this collaborative division of labor led to several intermediate outcomes, thereby enhancing our understanding of the effects of interactions that go beyond competitive dynamics among groups within the same movement.

ABSTRACT A remarkable episode in the history of the queer rights movement is Pennsylvania’s pioneering role in the late 1970s, championed by Governor Milton Shapp and coordinated through the country’s first Council for Sexual Minorities. By examining the Council’s records at the State Archives, along with oral histories, this paper argues that Pennsylvania’s leadership was less the product of structural conditions and instead the result of a unique convergence of an activist-executive alliance. After tracing the origins of this collaboration in how Governor Shapp’s progressive agenda combined with activist demands, the Council’s approach to gaining gay rights is examined. Realizing legislative reforms were largely unfeasible, they instead focused on embedding progress in the administrative workings of the state. Although momentous, much of their success proved fragile, as it was too reliant on executive action and thus vulnerable to legislative resistance and political turnover. By foregrounding the Council’s work, this article complicates the narrative that queer political power emerged from urban activism or federal-level campaigns. State-level initiatives, particularly those outside of the public’s eye, deserve closer scholarly attention for the light they shed on the potentials and limitations of top-down strategies in minority rights struggles. Pennsylvania’s experience underscores how transformative, but fleeting, such progress can be.

BackgroundInfectious diseases (ID) fellowship match rates have declined over the last decade. Previous studies have identified factors that influence interest in ID and fellowship match rates, but the association of state legislation restricting reproductive and/or lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) rights with ID fellowship match rates is unknown.MethodsAll adult ID fellowship programs in the United States from 2017 to 2025 were categorized as located in states, districts, or territories with or without restrictions on reproductive and/or lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender rights. Programs were also categorized by academic status as academic, university-affiliated community, or pure community programs. Match rates were compared between programs when stratifying by state restrictions, academic status, and both status using χ2 tests.ResultsIn 6 of the 9 years studied, match rates of adult ID fellowship programs were higher to a significant degree for academic programs in permissive states than for those in restrictive states (2017–2018, 2021–2023, 2025; P = .002 to P = .02). In the same period, there were no differences in match rates between university-affiliated community programs or pure community programs in states with and without restrictions.ConclusionsThe presence of legislation restricting reproductive and/or LGBT rights was associated with significantly reduced match rates in academic programs but not in university-affiliated community programs or pure community programs. Academic fellowship programs represent the majority of ID fellowship programs and must make note of this when recruiting fellows.

ABSTRACT Moral beliefs, values, and attitudes differ across cultures and change over time. This contingency can invite anxiety about endorsing particular values and about the possibility of non-circular claims of moral progress. One way of addressing this anxiety is through vindicatory genealogies of value. This paper develops such a genealogy for the value of ‘Choice’, a value associated with support for gay rights, legal abortion, and the right to divorce, which has been robustly measured by the World Values Survey (WVS) since 1995. I argue that existing vindicatory genealogies, such as Nicholas Smyth’s vindication of emancipative values, suffer from methodological flaws due to problems of measurement invariance in the WVS, the dataset that ostensibly supports them. By contrast, ‘Choice’, as a specific value within the WVS framework, withstands rigorous statistical tests and is a more defensible target for vindication. With ‘Choice’ defended as an apt target for genealogy, I propose a vindicatory mechanism based on Bernard Williams’ genealogy of liberty, which I label the withering of justification. I apply this mechanism to the value of ‘Choice’, offering an empirically precise and normatively compelling vindicatory genealogy, and positioning ‘Choice’ as a key topic for future research in the philosophy of moral progress.

Cultural foundations of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender rights