Today is the International Day Against Homophobia and Transphobia, and it is just sixteen years since the WHO removed homosexuality from its list of mental illnesses. The fact that I can live openly in an increasingly tolerant and much less discriminating society here in the UK is testament to what has been achieved in the relatively short period of time since the major blocks to this tolerance and equality were removed.
As with many things though, I have been very lucky to be born in western Europe. Yesterday the Slavic Gay Pride march in Moscow was violently broken up by Russian police, while an anti-gay march was allowed to proceed elsewhere in the city. This followed the failed attempts of the city council of Riga to ban the Baltic Gay Pride march. These very public expressions of homophobia are outrageous, but they are the manifestations of homophobic societies, and it is the everyday discrimination and inequality faced by millions of people around Europe and around the world that does the most harm.
I don’t ever think I will actually understand what drives people to hate others like this. Fear of what is different, stoked by misguided religious thought, can be offered as suggestions; to me though, this still doesn’t explain the capacity to actively hate and discriminate in the way that is seen with homophobia—or indeed any other form of bigotry.
What is clear however is that LGBT people, and people with a capacity to accept and respect LGBT people as equals, are the ones who are right. How else would we have made the progress in western Europe that we have made? It might take time, but eventually we will prevail against the homophobic views expressed in Russia and Latvia so recently, and expressed around the world every single day. Gay people will exist in Iran (link), homosexuals in African states won’t have to listen to such words as, “Maybe in European countries, not here. They should not have rights here,” (link), and two men will be able to, holding hands, walk through a park in Maastricht without the fear of being beaten up (link).