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Preroll: PolicyCast explores research-based policy solutions to the big problems we’re facing in our society and our world. This podcast is a production of the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University.

Intro (Tim McCarthy): Our State Department is doing a lot of really good work now under the Biden-Harris administration and Jessica Stern who's the special envoy to advance human rights for LGBTQI+ people. They're doing a lot of interagency work, really bold work at the State Department level, but we also have situations where we have U.S. embassies who are denying visas to people who are seeking asylum because they can't live in the countries like Russia and Uganda and other places that are most treacherous in the world. And so our embassies and our State Department has to be working in concert with the movements for human rights, because you can’t just talk about human rights. You have to walk human rights.

Intro (Diego Garcia Blum): Make space for LGBTQ people in your cabinet, in your leadership positions, in your parties. Empower them to run for office themselves, to show visibility. Sharing our stories does a lot of that myth-busting work. But that requires other allies and leaders to elevate people, to bring them in, to call them in and to share their platforms.

Intro (Ralph Ranalli): Anti-LGBTQI+ (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer and Intersex) discrimination is on the rise, both in the United States, where hate crime statistics are climbing, and globally, with the increase in right-wing populist governments weaponizing public sentiment against marginalized people. But there are also rights advocates around the world pushing back, despite threats of physical harm, prosecution, and even death. The Carr Center for Human Rights Policy’s Timothy McCarthy and Diego Garcia Blum are leading a new program to support those advocates called the Global LGBTQI+ Human Rights Program. The program recently held a summit at ����vlog���� featuring 20 leading rights advocates from countries including Kenya, Russia, Brazil, Bangladesh, Morocco, and Pakistan, who came to explore research-based methods to build social movements and how to dismantle myths and stigmas harming their communities. McCarthy, a lecturer at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, is the program’s faculty chair. Garcia Blum is program director and a member of the Carr Center staff. Together they also co-teach the course “Queer Nation: LGBTQ+ Protest, Politics, and Policy in the United States” at ����vlog����. They’re here today to talk about the new program, the advocates it will serve, and some possible policy solutions to a growing threat to a vulnerable population.

Ralph Ranalli: Tim, Diego, welcome to PolicyCast.  

Tim McCarthy: Hello, thank you.  

Diego Garcia Blum: Thank you for having us.  

Ralph Ranalli: So, unfortunately, the background to what we’re talking about is that, domestically, anti-LGBT hate crimes are on the rise and the mobilization of anti- LGBT groups are on the rise. Meanwhile, the world has seen a rise in right wing populist governments who often use campaigns against marginalized people to whip up public sentiment. So it was heartening to hear about this new program at the Kennedy School that you are both leading, Tim, you’re the faculty program chair and Diego, you're the director, and it’s the Global LGBTQI+ Human Rights Program at the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at Harvard Kennedy School. Can you two just start by talking a little bit about how this program came about and maybe a little bit about your respective backgrounds and how your experiences led you here. Diego, would you like to start?  

Diego Garcia Blum: Yes. So, I don't think that, especially growing up in the 90s, you grew up thinking, “I want to be an LGBTQ activist.” It’s something that happens to you. And especially me. I am an immigrant from Colombia, and I also grew up in the evangelical Christian tradition. I grew up thinking that there was something broken inside of me because that's what I was hearing from my church. And that led to a profound mental health crisis that eventually led me to a point where I either had to choose my life, or start living authentically and also losing what I knew was my life at that moment, my church, my family, etc.

And I guess for me, those are very deep scars. Some folks choose to forget a lot of those scars that they had in the closet. But for me, they’re a reminder of why I do this work. And so, shortly after coming out, I became a community organizer with the Human Rights Campaign, which is the United States’ largest LGBTQ human rights organization. And that also led me to interact with their global team. I think I was very drawn to the international context, one because I’m an immigrant and there was always this veil of information between what I would share with my family in the United States, and my family in Colombia because I just knew things were so much different there. And then, when I started learning that it was still criminalized, at that point I think it was over 15 countries that had the death penalty. It just made me realize that I was just lucky that I was in the United States because there are folks who don't even have the choice to come out—as hard as it was for me.

And so I embarked on this journey. I actually was a nuclear scientist and engineer before this. And I underwent kind of this transformation into advocacy, first through immigration reform and then through my work with the Human Rights Campaign. But, when I came to the Kennedy school, it showed me that it had so much to offer. All of the activists, the brave people out there trying to be heard and trying to make a difference, what we needed was a program that could make that accessible for them. So that’s how the idea of the program came around.

Tim McCarthy: So my story’s a little bit different. The most striking difference between Diego’s story and my story is I was never a nuclear engineer.  

Ralph Ranalli: Isn’t that a normal path of career progression? Nuclear engineer to anti-discrimination activist?  

Tim McCarthy: You know, queer people don't place a high premium on normal. Diego’s absolutely not normal. Neither am I, but anyway. But where I think we have similar kinds of backgrounds, I’m not an immigrant myself, but I grew up in a family of immigrants, from Europe, and specifically an Irish and Italian Catholic family. And so we have the Christianity, Catholicism in common. And I grew up in a working-class family, and I was the only grandchild and the only child. I started middle school when Ronald Reagan was elected president in 1980. Now I’m dating myself. And I graduated from high school in the spring of 1989, shortly after George H. W. Bush took the presidency. So I came of age during the Reagan Bush presidency and the AIDS crisis and in the last part of the Cold War, which was not insignificant either.  

So I grew up in a climate of fear and repression and conservatism, and I was none of those things. I wasn’t really afraid in a big sense. I was afraid of myself. I was afraid of who I was, because I knew then that I was gay and actually acted on it. And so I really knew. But I also knew that I was someone who was committing a sin because of the teachings of my church. And that I was probably destined to go to hell, and that I would probably die early from this plague. And that really shapes a person, not in a positive way. And so I came out late, relatively speaking, certainly relative to my students. I came out in my late twenties, early thirties.  

But I also came of age during a time of world historical transformation of the end of apartheid in South Africa, the fall of the Berlin wall, the revolutions in Europe, the activism of ACT UP activists and others who were fighting the government and trying to save people’s lives. And so I grew up with AIDS as a crisis and a plague and then also as a catalyst for activism. And so I knew early on, even though I was in the closet, that I had these two things in me. I was gay, and I also knew I had an activist spirit and that I wanted to be part of that. In a sense, I could see my becoming before I became it.  

And I came out later on and then became an activist and I’ve always been an activist, but I came to the LGBTQ movement relatively late because I came out late and I avoided it at all costs, even though I knew people who were in Queer Nation and ACT UP and other organizations. But I was inspired as a college student activist to study social movements, and then I decided I wanted to be a historian of social movements. So I went, got my PhD in history at Columbia, and I've been a historian of social movements, studying how these people have come together to build power to change the world. And so, that's always been something that I’ve wanted to do. As I became more comfortable with myself, I became more comfortable embracing LGBTQ history, the movement. I became an activist myself and started teaching this stuff and learning this stuff. Everything that I teach in our Queer Nation course at the Kennedy School is stuff that I have learned after I got my Ph.D. So in terms of, when people call me an expert on this It's an expertise that I went and got myself. I was not trained in this field, but I was trained to study social movements and social movement history.  

And so, when I came to the Kennedy school, I was really a misfit there. There aren’t a lot of historians. I was the first openly gay faculty member, and there wasn’t a course and there wasn’t a program and there wasn’t anything. And so I did whatever I could with my students and some other faculty and allies to build programming, right? One shot kind of things and student support conferences and so forth. And gradually over time, we created a little bit more space. And by the time Diego came to the Kennedy School, there were some pieces and parts there. But then he comes in with all of his energy and brilliance and organizing background and has this vision for something that’s not just programming, but a program. And my impulse to try to create space within the institution then fed into his desire to institutionalize something. And together we’ve been able to do that across generations, but together in this work and it’s been thrilling to see it emerge and come into fruition.

Diego Garcia Blum: And if I may plug into that, when I was looking to apply to a grad program to develop myself in this field, I saw Tim’s work. I saw the class, I saw the conference, I saw the journal. Which was the product of a lot of work. And I actually have it in my application—I now work as a director, but I started as a student here—that this is why I wanted to come here. So, at the end of the day, Tim’s origin story leads to also the origin story of me coming to the Kennedy School and the program coming together.  

Tim McCarthy: Can I add one quick more thing? I know you want to get to other questions, but I’ve said before, and I’ll say it again, but I want to say it here that I believe deeply that, as a friend of mine says, if you don't have mentors who are younger than you, then you're not living your life properly. And Diego… I of course was a mentor to Diego, but Diego is very much a mentor to me. And that, reciprocity I think is an energy that helps to create this program and hopefully sustain it too.

Ralph Ranalli: So your partnership on this has resulted in now your second summit, which you just held, of gathering in these activists from hot spots around the world for discrimination—places like Kenya, Russia, Brazil, Morocco, Pakistan. For people who may not be familiar with the circumstances in the countries that they’re coming here from, can you just give a little bit of a sense of what they're facing? Because I was listening to them tell their stories in a couple of different forums during the summit, and their stories are really extraordinary.  

Diego Garcia Blum: Yeah, so I think this is also a point of awareness that we need to build within, not only the U. S., but in the Global North more generally. I guess I had a sense of what that is when I visited Colombia in the early 2000s and just felt the difference of what it means to be an LGBTQI- plus person in the world, outside the U. S. There are 63 countries where, under some kind of statute, sex intimacy is criminalized. Now sexuality is a normal part of being a human being. We see it with young kids and how cute it is that they hold hands or as they get older, first kiss and the media makes it cute. Somehow, that has been so stigmatized for LGBTQ people that when we start realizing that we're not like that, not only do we know that that will be not accepted, but we could go to jail in some of these countries, right?

And so that’s when the dark, painful part that happens internally starts to really grow in folks. So even worse than just talking about the number of countries that criminalize this, including 12 right now that have the death penalty for it, I think about the millions and millions of people that will never get caught for this, but will feel broken, and stigmatized, and live uncharacteristic lives of who they really are because they're drowning in the silence all over the world. So that to me is a real crisis. And because it’s been the status quo in so many places, is not even seen as an urgent thing to act on right now. We have to kind of lift the rock to show what people are going through, just so people can understand: “Oh, they need help.” So that's how I would say I see the picture.

Tim McCarthy: Yeah. I mean, one thing that I think is important... as a historian, I think context is everything, and putting things in their proper context and seeing what forces cause what, and how things change over time, is at the core of what we do. And so, always when we talk about global anything, or a collective anything, I think it’s really important to put the context in as specific a light as possible. And one of the things that we see—we had 20 participants and activists from 19 countries, as you said, some of the most treacherous terrains that we have in the world. But each of them is dealing with their own particular context and their own particular governmental structure. Some are democracies, some aren’t. The laws: some criminalize certain aspects of homosexuality or LGBTQ life, and others are punishable by death. Different regions, different languages, different religious challenges and opportunities. So, each of these countries and each of these folks who came here is dealing with a particular kind of context, but there are through lines and that’s where I think it is useful to see both the specific and the particular context and also the global and the maybe not universal, but certainly the more general texture of this.

And two things I would say to that: One is a historical point that, in those 63 countries, the majority of them have laws on the books currently that are vestiges of or are informed by the vestiges of colonial penal codes from the long period of colonization. And so many of these countries are post-colonial in the sense that they’ve achieved some kind of independence or sovereignty in their own right, but they are still living under the weight of British colonialism and Spanish colonialism and all of these European projects of extraction and exploitation that live on in the legacies of these penal codes in these bills that are operating on the ground now. And so there’s a historical dimension and there’s a longer history of treachery that isn’t exactly linked directly to LGBTQ life, but absolutely bears down on it.

And then the other thing that I think is really important, is that there are through lines in terms of what people are up against. People are up against the kinds of stigmas that are deep seated and long standing: that we harm children, that we're pedophiles or predators in some way, right? Many of the people in these countries are dealing with religious fundamentalism, which fuels a kind of homophobia and transphobia and treachery and violence against LGBTQI+ people, whether it’s Islam, or Judaism, or fundamentalist Christianity, or Catholicism—it may be a different kind of religious faith tradition, but nonetheless the repression is there, and it’s inflected through religious texts, and so they’re definitely feeling that as well.

And the other thing that I think they’re all experiencing in some form—nd we can talk more about this if we want—is a global backlash. There is a backlash to the progress that has been made in certain parts of the world, in certain countries in the world. Certainly the U.S. is one of those places where you see progress. But in my work, I talk about a paradox of progress, which is that oftentimes you see—in moments of clear progress or the advancement of rights or freedom, quality, dignity—you see a backlash among the forces that were there in opposition in the first place that now become forces of resistance to the progress. And so there’s a paradox there, and we also can talk about that backlash, and we have to talk about that backlash, and they’re all feeling it. Every single one of them had stories about being up against more now than they’ve been. And one dimension of that is that some of these laws that have been recently added to the books are not just criminalizing same sex behavior—intimacy—criminalizing and pathologizing sexuality and gender variation; but they’re also criminalizing allyship, they’re criminalizing the circulation of materials that would raise consciousness about this stuff. Institutions that may be in solidarity or allyship with the activists who are in the community. And so they’re being punished too. So it’s actually more punishable now to be an ally in some of these countries than it ever has been historically, and that’s new too. And many of them gave voice to that.

Ralph Ranalli: Yeah, I thought that was interesting. I read about the colonial aspect of this, and I think in 2018, Theresa May, who was then the Prime Minister of Britain, famously apologized for that specific legacy of colonialism.

Tim McCarthy: There’s literally a British penal code that shows up in dozens of laws...  

Diego Garcia Blum: 3-7-7.  

Tim McCarthy: 3-7-7.  

Diego Garcia Blum: It’s the same one in India, it’s the same one in...  

Ralph Ranalli: And I think it’s put some countries on this list that are genuinely puzzling. Take Barbados, for example. That one surprised me. and then I realized, of course, that that’s probably a vestige of colonialism right there. But I thought it was really interesting, the interplay between the political, roots of this discrimination, the religious, and then the cultural, and how they mix with each other and influence each other. And there, there are different combinations in different contexts. Like, in Russia, the Orthodox Church recently came out in favor of a new, more restrictive, anti-LGBTQ law that Putin had advanced. I’d like to turn to sort strategies and the methodologies you were teaching at the summit for building these movements. And I wanted to start with a question about those different wellsprings of discrimination. Do you have different strategies for tackling those different sources?

Tim McCarthy: I know that Diego is about to talk about something that he loves to talk about, which is the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. So I’m going to defer to him because he takes a certain amount of glee every time he talks about this.  

Diego Garcia Blum: So, you actually almost said an entire framework we teach every year in the Queer Nation class here. And it comes from one magazine, which is the first magazine that kind of made LGBTQ advocacy in the United States possible. And it was created by the Mattachine Society, which was the first enduring organization in the United States.  

Tim McCarthy: Founded 1950 in Los Angeles.  

Diego Garcia Blum: By Harry Hay. So, they put together a framework that was called the Four Horsemen. I guess it wasn’t a framework back then. It was just an essay that we've transformed into a framework.

Tim McCarthy: We’ve turned it into a framework.  

Diego Garcia Blum: Which is very ����vlog���� of us.  

Tim McCarthy: Right, the Kennedy School is where liberation goes to become a framework.  

Diego Garcia Blum: But if it helps people learn.  

Tim McCarthy: Whatever, whatever happens.  

Diego Garcia Blum: I’m very proud of it anyway.  

Tim McCarthy: Theory and practice.  

Diego Garcia Blum: It goes into the four horsemen that haunt LGBTQ people. The political: the politicalization of our identities. The social: how that translates then into how your family treats you, how your friend treats you. The law: the law actually labels us in some cases as people doing acts against nature, this is stigmatizing in itself. And a very important one—you almost had it all right—but it was science and medicine: when we were labeled mentally ill and basically as broken by scientific and medical authorities.

So bringing it all together, we give that framework that’s actually one of the first sessions we do at the summit to help people understand how this stigma is built upon these intersecting layers in society. How a lot of these stigma are also connected to different authorities in society. It could be a political leader that scapegoats LGBTQ people. Because it’s easy to lay a problem on a population that can’t defend itself. And to later run against them. But in the United States, for example, the American Psychiatric Association in the late 60s and early 70s also labeled us mentally ill. And so there was a very concerted effort by the Mattachine Society of Washington, D.C., Frank Kameny, Barbara Giddings, to get a gay psychiatrist—which at that point you couldn't be because you would lose your job—to just say that the gay psychiatrists existed and that they were normal. And they too were part of this oppressive set of distinctions that were being made. And all that activism, led the APA to reconsider homosexuality and take it off the DSM, which is their mental health handbook, as not being a mental illness.  

And so one, we try to have a foundations piece in the summit, and we can go into detail a little more later, but it goes into the different layers of foundational advocacy that we see in this space. And that includes understanding stigma, it includes talking to people, faith, just basic advocacy principles with people like Cornell Brooks, and how you run a social movement.

Ralph Ranalli: Marshall Gans...  

Diego Garcia Blum: Marshall Gans...

Ralph Ranalli: ...with public narrative. But on the science, I also noticed that you had Michael Ferguson from Harvard Medical School, whose research is about the neuroscience of sexual orientation and gender identity...

Tim McCarthy: And religious fundamentalism.

Ralph Ranalli: Right. I thought that was really interesting that you are ranging that far and wide for those different perspectives. So say I’m an advocate and I’ve come all the way to Harvard Square. What best practices, what nuts and bolts strategies am I learning? Are you teaching me at the summit?

Tim McCarthy: Well, one of the things about this four horsemen framework is that each of those four horsemen are both kind of forces and practices in society, but they're linked to institutions. They’re linked to political institutions, legal institutions, social institutions, scientific and medical institutions, and they do require different kinds of tactical and strategic interventions and disruptions. And so one of the things that when we give them a framework is to think about how these things intersect and interlock, but also how they may actually be autonomous forces and they may require their own. And one of the things that you see, and we see this in the United States, which is the most religious so-called democracy, probably on the planet. Then you see other countries that are more fundamentalist and authoritarian, but still very much religious. So you see the intersection of the social and religious components with the political components that are yoked together. So sometimes that gets confusing because they come in the same package, and then sometimes they’re separate.  

And so one of the things that we try to do is to give them different understandings of institutions, of those forces, and then think about what kinds of strategies and tactics or tools they might need to make those interventions. So when you think about Marshall Ganz’s public narrative framework, that’s a storytelling practice that is in service to a call to action to change the world that is values-based. That is much more a tool that you would use when you're trying to do culture change, when you're trying to use storytelling and values-based storytelling in order to change hearts and minds and to turn fear into hope and these kinds of things.  

But when you think about other kinds of things, we had a session on impact litigation and using the law to change the law, and to fight discrimination in that way. And that would be something that would be used as a different kind of intervention, going through the courts, using the law, figuring out which kind of precedents and jurisprudence are going to work in which places, thinking about the relationship between laws that exist within countries and at the level of the nation, and laws that are perhaps not as forcefully enforced, but still exist in an international realm, like human rights law.

One of the things that we talked a lot about is where stigma resides, how it’s created and, and how it’s sustained. And, obviously, if there are scientific and medical institutions and journals and professions like the APA, that are engaged in this work, then you need to find doctors and scientists and nurses and medical professionals and other people with that kind of training to do that work. That may not be the work that the community organizer who's running public narrative workshops in order to change hearts and minds is going to do. And so one of the things that we hope will come out of this and that we learn from the participants themselves—and this was very much a two way street in terms of teaching and learning, that we’re learning from them and they're learning from us—and we’re trying to build knowledge together in this way and try to figure out: How do these four horsemen work in your context and what's going to work as a form of intervention and hopefully transformation.

Diego Garcia Blum: We want them to see the world in a tactical map. For example, we say...

Tim McCarthy: In Technicolor…

Diego Garcia Blum: ...this is a way to see the experience that you’re living through. So, we think about the stigma. I also want to think about this new framework I’m developing on myths, misconceptions and misunderstandings. There are some myths that are always there that need to be debunked. And the myths are used by specifically a set of people that want to scapegoat LGBTQ people for power. People, and some leaders around the world, know they’re not real. But they can use them to get elected. They can use them to gain power. So that’s one. The second is the people that are affected by the myths, which I call the misconceptions, which are people that know we exist, but have all these misconceptions based on the myths, etc. And then the last one is really this epistemological part of it, which is misunderstanding, which is some folks don’t even have the vocabulary to describe what’s happening to them. And we actually saw how powerful it is when an LGBTQ person understands who they are because someone gave it language.  

So intersex, the “I,” is sometimes lost in the global movement. But there are these people born with different intersex characteristics that are then shamefully put through different, surgeries and told to hide that as if they’re some kind of broken person. And one of the activists, I don’t want to expose too much, but just realizing that that is an advocacy movement that doesn’t want to hide or be shamed by something that they were born with, just gave them a whole new sense of agency. So, myths, misconception, misunderstandings, understanding stigma, and then the authority in society that holds it. And then what we do is we have them pick different validators in those in groups. Who can we win that using their influence can then influence more people? And we give them certain sets of tactics to influence the institutions and people.

Tim McCarthy: Yeah.  

Ralph Ranalli: Tim, you mentioned—and I was glad you did—that it was a two-way learning process. I found some of this fascinating. One thing I was particularly struck by was when I heard Saru Imran, who is the transgender activist from Pakistan who survived a brutal mob attack. And Saru talked about the importance of economic independence, which was something that was really like, oh my gosh, I had not even thought of this, specifically for transgender people, but also for other marginalized people who are financially dependent on their abusers.  

Tim McCarthy: Mm hmm.  

Ralph Ranalli: So she launched the PINK Center, which is the first space for transgender entrepreneurs in Pakistan, and that was something I just had not thought of or conceived of. Were there any other things that you learned or really surprised you at the summit that you came away thinking: “Wow, this just opened my mind on this particular thing.”

Tim McCarthy: Well, it didn’t quite surprise me because there’s lots of precedent for this, but one of the things that came up over and over and over again is just how much the stigma and the myths and misconceptions and misunderstandings that fuel the discriminatory policy, don’t just disenfranchise and devalue people. It also creates a context within which they have little access or relatively little access—certainly unequal access—to material resources. And basic needs: housing, food, water, other kinds of shelter, education—these kinds of things that all have material consequences. And so one of the things that we heard from the activists—Saru is a perfect example in the work that she's done in Pakistan—which is that this entrepreneurial piece, which is about economic empowerment, is actually crucial that people can actually gain power before they have power, if they have material resources that they can mobilize. One of the things in social movement studies is we talk about resource mobilization as one aspect of social movements. You have to figure out how, within a disenfranchised group of people, we can find power, whether it’s material power or it’s moral power or it’s creative power. And how do you do that?

And so a lot of them were talking about interventions in the economic inequities of the country, which are both a byproduct of anti-LGBTQI prejudice and discrimination, but also then something that prevents them from being able to do the activist work which might change those laws. So that piece of it was really interesting. And some of the activists have very robust critiques of capitalism and global capitalism and what global capitalism has done—a kind of new form of colonialism and the 21st century of land grabs and other kinds of extraction exploitation and domination of different regions and peoples. And they’re anti-capitalist or they’re critical of capitalism. Other folks are leaning fully into entrepreneurial ventures where they're working within the context of capitalism, either at a local level or national level or global level, in order to gain economic power in that way. So there’s no one approach to economic independence or economic autonomy or equality. Sometimes you get there by dismantling the ravages of capitalism, and other folks have found creative ways to use capitalism to their advantage. And so those kinds of learnings actually, for me, remind me that there’s no one way to do this work, and that we can’t be too precious or pure about how we approach it. And this is one thing that I think was helpful as a reminder. It didn’t so much surprise me, but it reminded me of a truth about this activism that these activists really understand in their bones.  

Diego Garcia Blum: And this fits perfectly into the next part of the summit. So I talked about the foundations piece, where kind of the faculty and we teach frameworks. The second part is called sustaining collaborations, where we have this “bright spots” terminology—it comes actually from Samantha Power's class here—that basically says a lot of people have already found things that work for them and instead of everyone trying and failing, let’s just share what worked and then have that more dispersed around the world. Some of the things that really resonated for me that I learned was people saying: “We need to write down our stories.” In our culture, people just tell it to each other, but they don’t write it down and they don’t make it available. So writing it, putting it in the language for their folks and sharing it. Also we use LGBTQI+ and as much as it’s a mouthful, that’s a political coalition that was born out of the United States. There are different people around the world that, talk about it differently. And so they need to also indigenize their language, talking about sexuality and gender identity and expression. Another interesting piece of it too, is one of our participants is working on reinterpreting Islam to be inclusive LGBTQI people. And how amazing and brave is that to take that work, in the context that they work in.  

So, they shared with each other all of these bright spots that they have- it’s like: Oh, we’re going to throw a lawsuit at the government. We know we’re going to lose, but it’s a strategic loss. People will know that we did something...  

Tim McCarthy: And it’ll get press attention...  

Diego Garcia Blum: ...and it’ll get press attention. And even just ways that people were claiming agency with the history of their country. So we have someone from Namibia say: “I come from a history of people who fought apartheid in South Africa and here in Namibia and we’re supposed to be the born free generation, my generation, and yet we’re not, because we still have the shackle, which was a German statute that criminalized homosexuality.” The person who came, Omar from Namibia, had just fought to get that off the books. And they reinterpreted that history in terms of LGBTQI experiences. And I think everybody opened up their eyes because a lot of these people come from countries that have revolutions of their own. And they said, well, we can do that too, because a lot of the time this homophobia transphobia was never here. It was brought here too.  

Tim McCarthy: One of the activists from Namibia talked about the fact that his father’s generation had fought apartheid and the energy, the political energy, the revolutionary energy of an anti-apartheid success that leads to a post-colonial situation then fuels a kind of energy that can then be translated into other realms for LGBTQI activism. That was also delightful and inspiring to hear the connections that they were making in terms of the intergenerational and inter movement sparks and spots and so forth.  

Ralph Ranalli: Right. So, I had one impression from the dinner that just stuck with me—the closing dinner for the summit that I went to—and that was this almost palpable sense of fragility. These are people who are extraordinarily brave, but also face enormous dangers. How do you arm them with strategies and tools to go out and, make change, but also tell them, don’t get killed. Is there a way to do that? How do you address that ever present danger that they face in this training?  

Tim McCarthy: Yeah. I don’t think we tell them what to do, because they know what to do because they’re living on the front lines of that. And whereas, we may have been, in our own experiences, subjected to certain kinds of violence, we’re not living, or at least I’m not living, I’ll speak for myself, living under the constant threat of death, or of imprisonment, or of rape. That’s what fuels the urgency, I think, but also the insight, because, getting back to the point about economic inequities, so often folks who are disenfranchised, people who are LGBTQ, have lots of stories about being kicked out of their homes and being housing insecure or experiencing homelessness, where they can’t get jobs, where they drop out of school. All of these ways in which we can find security and empowerment, materially and otherwise, are taken away and folks have to survive. And so, many people turn to the underground economy. Many people engage in sex work, which of course is criminalized, which then only further criminalizes and pathologizes queer people. But they have no other access to material resources and to survival tools and basic needs but to do that work. And there’s a long tradition of that.  

And one of the reasons why I think it’s so important to listen to the queer activists and center their experiences as the fuel for our theories and practices and tactics and strategies is because they’re closest to the oppression. And so, not to idealize that in any way, that’s a horrible way to have to exist, but there is an urgency and an insight that it creates in them that we can learn from. And the other thing: giving voice to it, and bringing them together to share their own stories with one another and with us, it shifts and elevates our consciousness.  

On Friday, I remember remarking to a friend of mine after the summit was over that I’m never going to complain again about my context, because it’s a relatively more free and safe context even though there are unfreedoms and unsafeties here too. But the way that we all collectively—within the community, within the movement, and way outside of it, more importantly way outside of it—need to reckon with the fact that the people who are most equipped to change our world are living within the context within which the world is bearing down on them most harshly. And that’s on us to help alleviate that burden. And they’re helping us point the way. But it's not just their work, or even I would argue principally their work, even though they’re the principals in the work right now.  

Ralph Ranalli: We’re getting close to the end of our time, so I’d like to get to two things. Second, I’d like to make sure we get to our policy recommendations, because that’s what we do here at PolicyCast. But first, I wanted to ask you: “Where do you see the program going? Where would you like to take it?” Diego, do you want to start with that?

Diego Garcia Blum: Definitely. So, the summit was incredible in that it brought these people who now are leaving with a new set of ideas, with a new set of colleagues to collaborate with. But we actually don’t just want it to be something that they come here and then they’re on their own. But actually we help them develop advocacy plans, kind of as consultants. And if we need to bring in some kind of interesting faculty advisor, we can do that. So, in a sense, it helps us develop our teaching, it also helps us develop our research. Our research we can, I can go a little bit more into, but it’s also a way that we can apply a lot of what we do and learn in a very global context. So we’ve invited these folks to develop policy and advocacy plans that we will then look over, give feedback on, and then see it go into the field. So it’s super interesting. We’re launching an online program where we'll be able to reach a lot more people than what we can afford to bring in person here to Harvard. And then that program will have a lot of the foundations work, a lot of the sharing work, they will be teachers also in this work. And I think we’re very soon going to announce what that will look like. The summit experience is helping us shape that.  

And one of the, actually one of the points that we want to build in from our learning from this is mindful self-compassion and self-care is actually another foundation that we’re going to build into this because people feel alone doing this work a lot of times. So our training part is going to be a strong online program. And then this kind of capstone summit. And we want to build a very strong research program. And that has two components. The first is we want to talk to people that are doing this work in the international sphere, in the broader scope, and see what does that community need and what can we put together a project for and maybe like brand that specifically for that. And then another, we had 1,100 people apply to the summit from over 110 countries…

Tim McCarthy: Both times we’ve done it, we’ve had over a thousand applicants.  

Diego Garcia Blum: Each time. And so we’re creating this huge global network that we want to tap to do advocate informed research. So instead of us here sitting in our metaphorical ivy tower saying: “Oh, this would be an interesting thing to do.” Rather say: “What is useful for advocates on the field that we can put together a research project on and do this kind of an interactive ground up approach?”

And then lastly, it’s one of my goals to revive the LGBTQ leadership summit with the student groups because we have this convening power here. So that would be a great thing. Just another place for activists from all over the world and researchers and academics and business leaders to come. And then also thematics that we think of over time, whether it’s decriminalizing the rest of the Americas or deconstructing the so-called gender ideology movement, we have that convening power, and if we can get the resources, which we're working very hard on, we can create specific projects based on that.

Tim McCarthy: I would just say that I’m all about relationships. We have a great relationship that’s deep and rich in its own way. And social movements are about relationships. It’s about building relationships with people, so you can build power, so you can change things. I mean that’s what social movements are. And one of the things that I think is really special about this program and the Carr Center’s full embrace of it and now the Kennedy School’s full embrace of it under our new Dean Jeremy Weinstein, who spoke at our summit very powerfully about his own story and how it's connected to our stories and our movements and communities. It was very, very moving.  

And I think that there’s a world in which we can be a kind of connector and a convener and a cultivator and a catalyst for relationships. Internally, we have this cross-school board of faculty affiliates, of LGBTQ-identified folks within Harvard who are doing research in all sorts of areas, people who are allies to our community, who are ready to step up and do this, many of them were teachers in the summit. We’re building a research advisory group that we’ll announce in the spring, which will be outside of the school and within the school of people, major people in the field who are doing cutting edge research that relate to LGBTQI plus human rights. We’re building relationships with institutions like the UN institutions, like the State Department, the Special Envoy’s office, Jessica Stern and Reggie Greer’s work. We’re developing other kinds of relationships with institutions that are either adjacent to or in the world of human rights and social justice.  

And then we’re also trying to figure out how can we create spaces, online spaces, in the case of the online program we’ll be launching in the spring, but how can we also create in-person spaces where we can use the convening power of the university to bring people here. These are all activists who are working in-country. They met each other, many of them for the first time here last week. Many of them knew of each other because they're remarkable folks and there are those interconnections, but to bring people here and to give them space and room to develop and deepen their relationships so it’s another amazing thing. And one of the things that’s been so exciting for us about launching this new program is just how many people are excited for the possibility of those connections and those relationships. I mean, the number of people who have reached out to us to be part of this, to figure out how they can tap into this and work with us on this, is remarkable.

And one of the parts of our relationship, my relationship with Diego and Diego’s relationship with me was as student and teacher. Now, we were co-teachers and we are now co-leading this program and I really have a profound desire and a long standing desire to build out the curriculum at this school and to raise money for financial aid and to create institutions within this institution and pipelines within this institution and pathways within this institution to train the next generation of global advocates who can come to the Kennedy School to study, and to get a degree, and to take courses in this work and to be trained themselves to become human rights practitioners and social justice advocates in the world.

The sky’s the limit for what this institution can finally do to do right by the LGBTQI community. We have students who are coming here who are craving this and we don’t offer enough yet. But we’re building the faculty and we’re hopefully building out the courses and we’re hopefully going to be able to give people funding. I mean, what a wonderful thing it would be to have, in addition to the 20 participants who come to the summit, 20 Kennedy school students every year who are committed to this work over the long haul, as if they were like people who are in the foreign service or the military do. Global LGBTQI human rights activists and advocates in training who come here, go to school for free, get trained, get the credentials and go out into the world and have that impact. As someone for whom teaching is one of the parts of the center of my work, that’s also a dream that I have. It’s part of the larger dream of the impact that the program can have over time, and when we’re thinking about institutionalizing something, we have to think about long term impact. Not just the long history that produced this moment and opportunity, but the long history that we still have to make moving forward.  

Ralph Ranalli: Okay, so it’s time for our specific policy recommendation portion of the program. Can some of these best practices, techniques, and approaches be translated into specific policy proposals? And if so, what would they be? And what sort of policies could, say, states and governments who want to advance the cause of LGBTQI-plus rights and protections adopt to support them. Diego, do you want to go first?  

Diego Garcia Blum: Definitely. So, one of the things we’re seeing is that a lot of states, especially in the Global North, want to be allies with the communities, especially when these governments in the Global South and in other places that still haven’t come to protect their LGBTQ people and that pass bad laws. And one example is Uganda, when it passed, in May 2023, the Anti Homosexuality Act. The World Bank, the United States kicked Uganda out of the African Development Group, the IMF, and the World Bank, and tried to cut some credit lines to say: “No, you need to protect your LGBTQ people.” Now the problem is, although that’s great, they’re not enforcing it everywhere that it’s happening. So, Namibia just passed a similar law. It hasn’t been signed yet, but it’s been passed. It’s spreading all over Africa and other places, these places criminalizing advocacy and allyship, which will silence these people for good or at the expense of their lives.  

Tim McCarthy: Which is the broadening of the discrimination and the repression.  

Diego Garcia Blum: So, if you respond, and we’re glad that countries are responding to Uganda and Ghana doing this, also look everywhere it's happening, because people will see in the places that they can pass a discriminatory law and it just goes unnoticed as a license to be able to do it. So just be consistent in your response around the world and monitoring that.  

And then the second thing, too, is make space for LGBTQ people in your cabinet, in your leadership positions, in your parties. Empower them to run for office themselves, to show visibility. Sharing our stories does a lot of that myth busting work. But that requires other allies and leaders to elevate people, to bring them in, to call them in and to share their platforms. So those are the main two things I would say from a state and leader kind of perspective.  

Tim McCarthy: I think there’s all sorts of possibility in terms of strengthening the enforcement of human rights laws and statutes and treatises and so forth, and that’s one flank. There’s much work to be done in that. I think there’s also something that's both a kind of consciousness raising and also a kind of dismantling tactic, is that so many of the countries that are now post-colonial are still using colonial laws—literally the master’s tools—within the context of their own sovereignty and independence, which they fought for and which they relish. And so this idea, there’s a contradiction there. You cant brag about your independence and still use the colonist tools to discriminate against your people. And so that has to be exposed. And I would say let's just start with the British penal code. Let’s get rid of every vestige of that penal code and every sovereign nations law that discriminates against homosexuality now in a post colonial context. Let’s do that.  

There’s also a world where the funding of American-based and Global North-based- but particularly American-based- anti-LGBTQ groups, the funding stream to those organizations which are working on the ground internationally but they're based here—you cut their nonprofit status. These are churches. These are nonprofit organizations. They’re basically fronts and Trojan horses for homophobia, for transphobia, for biphobia—this treacherous work. And they have nonprofit status. They get tax breaks and tax alleviations for exporting homophobia and transphobia and establishing it on the ground in these countries. So the United States can take away tax exempt status for those religious institutions. We know who they are. We’ve done the research. A lot of people have done the research. We know who those organizations are. We know what those churches are doing, and we know how much money they’re funneling into that. So that’s one way we could attack it here.  

I also think that there’s a world where... our State Department is doing a lot of really good work now under the Biden-Harris administration and Jessica Stern, our friend, Jessica Stern, who’s a special envoy to advance human rights for LGBTQI+ people. They’re doing a lot of interagency work, really bold work at the State Department level, but we also have situations where we have U.S. embassies who are denying visas to people who are seeking asylum because they can’t live in the countries like Russia and Uganda and other places that are most treacherous in the world. And so our embassies and our State Department has to be working in concert with the movements for human rights, because you can’t just talk about human rights. You have to walk human rights.  

And which leads me to my last policy recommendation, which may seem sort of, basically U.S. focused, but if the United States, as it often likes to position itself, is going to claim that it is a moral force in the world when it comes to freedom, equality, human rights, human dignity, and these kinds of things, then our Congress has to pass the Equality Act, and our President has to sign it into law. The Equality Act, which has been sitting in Congress, ready to be passed, hasn’t reached that stage, for a whole variety of reasons, which is another podcast. But if we pass the Equality Act, which would be the most expansive, omnibus pro-LGBTQ piece of policy at the federal level we’ve ever seen in the United States. And it’s sitting there, it’s written, it’s been debated already. Pass it, put it into law because the minute we do that, we'll be more threatening to the places that see the expansion of those rights as an assault on their civilization or whatever. But we also will be a more of a moral force in the world. We will be showing an example to other nations that can do this too that we’re doing it and we’re leading, we’re not behind the curve, we’re not behind the ball, we’re not lagging behind. And so there are things we can do here nationally to make us a more legitimate and coherent moral force in the world. There are other things that we can do that can assist the work that's going on the ground. And there are ways that we can actually defund the homophobes. So let’s defund the homophobes.  

Ralph Ranalli: Great. Well, I want to thank both of you for being here. And I just want to wish you every bit of good luck as you continue to build this program.  

Tim McCarthy: Thank you so much, Ralph, for having us.

Diego Garcia Blum: Thank you so much.

Outro (Ralph Ranalli): Thanks for listening. If you liked this episode, please check out some of the other great policy podcasts produced at the Kennedy School, like the Justice Matters podcast from the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy, which in recent episodes has also featured conversations about global LGBTQI+ rights, but also about other human rights-related topics. Check them out on Apple Podcasts or your favorite podcasting app. And while you’re there, don’t forget to subscribe to PolicyCast, so you don’t miss any of our important upcoming episode. And please leave us a review. Join us for our next episode when we’ll talk to ����vlog���� Professor Jennifer Lerner about the policy possibilities raised by her research into the connection between emotion and addiction. So until then, remember to speak bravely, and listen generously.