"The Pink Line" is an overall interesting book but it seems like it might have been better written with other people. It's definitely colored by Gevisser's lived experiences and does fall flat in some parts.

I always say that I am out and I am open about my story because knowing me as a human being my change someone's feelings towards LGBTQ+ people. Gevisser manages o do this on a global scale: Offering us deeply personal and moving stories about being a member of the LGBTQ+ community in places where it could cost the book's subjects their life.

I received an ARC of this book from NetGalley. This book beautifully connects the deeply personal stories of queer people living around the world with the facts and figures of the global fight for LGBTQ + rights. I have had a lot of personal connections with this book and have learned so much from reading it. Mark Gevisser writes it in an accessible and impactful way. I highly recommend this book to anyone who wants to raise their awareness of the global queer community and anyone who wants to remember that we have come a long way, but there is still a lot of work to be done.

This was confronting in a good way: the frontier here is as much between LGBT human rights/acceptance and lack thereof as it is about exploring and showing the interesting, complicated, difficult, and different ways LGBT individuals in pressure points around the world. on these frontiers, conceptualise themselves and live their lives. This is not about a line between 'mainstream west' and other; even LGBT individuals on the Pink Line have a very different understanding of themselves.

While I actually only read the first 20% or so of this book, I did enjoy it and it's also quite a long book so I do feel like I read enough to give a review of it. I really enjoyed what I read but non-fiction is often difficult for me to stick to in the best of times and with everything going on this year and some recent health issues I have come to accept that this is just not something I have the mental capacity to finish any time soon. Still, I think it seems to be a very well researched book that gives both broad statistics and personal stories about queer people from many places around the world and I hope to get back to it someday, it's just a bit heavy for me to process at the moment.

This is definitely a book that would have been best written in collaboration with others. Whilst Gevisser can write, and has clearly completed meticulous research for this text, he is limited by his lived experience and own identity.

The individual stories that were included were necessary, but their presentation needed work. I was also shocked at the bias in the chapters on the trans experience. There was far too much focus on trans teens and the dangers of transition at this age. Whilst other identities (and gender presentations) have been celebrated, trans people are demonised and bodily autonomy is removed. There is no mention of transition in adulthood, which reiterates damaging ideas which already run rampant in mainstream literature.

It’s abhorrent that a book on queer existence would provide and support such a view. Gevisser needs to re-evaluate this internal bias and address the transphobia rampant in this text. You cannot sell a book based on the inclusion of trans people and then vilify them.

Consequently, I cannot support this text and have provided the 1-star rating.

The Pink Line is a meticulously researched, hugely informative and engaging book, but it is not without issues. I found it strongest when providing objective summaries of historical / political situations, even delving into theory, or when directly retelling others' stories. However, the book is limited somewhat by the author's own identity and privilege - although Gevisser touches upon this and does attempt to grapple with it in the concluding chapter, it makes for a weaker book altogether (this is especially noticeable in the last third generally, and when meeting trans teens in Ann Arbor particularly). When there is more of a contrast between Gevisser's own situation and those of the people whose story he's telling, the descriptions can occassionally read as quite condescending. That said, I feel The Pink Line is an important book (albeit not a flawless one) - I would encourage reading it alongside other texts, to gain a more balanced view.
3.5 stars, rounded up to 4.

A thoroughly researched and comprehensive look at the struggles for LGBTQ understanding and rights in a handful of countries throughout the world. Told through personal vignettes against a backdrop of the political and social history, the book packs a beautiful and bittersweet punch in places. There is so much to unpack here, about culture and sex and identity....themes that are big so but but felt so deeply through the personal lens. A highly recommended book for any who seek an intersectional and international look at the fight for human and queer rights in the world.

This book pulled together LGBTQ experiences from around the world in a way that I've never seen done before. I thoeoughly enjoyed and I was happy to receive an eArc from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review. In addition to the powerful stories from a wide variety of places, this book also was incredibly respectful of how people personally identified and what terms they used, as well as the different cultural conventions and the fact that the terms and slang of the modern LGBTQ communities isn't the same as it was in the past or may be in the future. Not only are the stories amazing and the respect given by the author unparalleled, the writing is also exceptional! This is a nonfiction book that should become required reading in my opinion! So so important and we need more of authors and books like this one!

A very thick book that discusses the LGBTQ experience and fight for rights around the globe. It provides history and policies in various parts of the world - Russia, India, Latin America, Africa, the Middle East, Israel, and North America. The information is followed by stories of people living in these areas. It was very interesting to see how the West’s push for rights and inclusion encroached on other countries and sometimes caused a backlash rather than progress.

Gevisser has been writing this book for many years, and this is really a comprehensive look at queer lives and the religious, cultural, and governmental jurisdictions under which they live across the world. I found the discussion of these jurisdictions impressive and the effects on peoples lives under these to be very effective and so well documented. The individuals' stories were necessary, but they needed serious editing. The fact that a character list is provided before each of these chapters attests to this.
This work left me with a very negative picture of the world and the state of queer lives. I found the fight of the individuals to live authentic lives was so rich and powerful. However, my ability as a citizen of world to have an impact on these lives was doubtful, even on an individual basis.

Thanks to Net Galley and the publisher for this electronic version.

Asked what he hoped to achieve with the publication of The Pink Line at the book’s online launch in August 2020, Mark Gevisser said: ‘I want to expand people’s minds, and my own mind.’

That was exactly my impression having finished the book. It contains a substantial journey among a number of queer and transgender people from South Africa to Egypt, India to the United States, Mexico and Russia. Gevisser tells their stories in alternating chapters in which topics such as transgenderism and changing attitudes to queerness around the world are explored. My mind was expanded, it bulged with the stories of those who have had to navigate difficult pink lines in their life journeys.

‘The stories I tell don’t always end on a high note,’ Gevisser added, and indeed many of the stories of those who have fallen foul of anti-gay laws are tinged with bittersweetness, even when the endings are successful, so to speak.

The Pink Line, as Gevisser explained during the launch, ‘runs through countries and divides people’. In the book, he writes:

‘It is a place where queer people shuttle across time zones each time they look up from their smartphones at the people gathered around the family table; as they climb the steps from the underground nightclub back into the nation-state. In one zone, time quickens, in the other it dawdles; spending your life criss-crossing from zone to zone can make you quite dizzy.’

This, then, is both a physical journey and an exploratory, cerebral one, through the often shifting pink lines.

Gevisser travelled from 2012 to 2018,

‘trying to understand how the world was changing, and why. I did not go everywhere. Rather, I chose places where I felt I could meet people who could best tell the story of how the “LGBT rights movement” was establishing a new global frontier in human rights discourse—in the way that the women’s rights movement, or the civil rights movement, or the anti-colonial movement, or the abolitionist movement, had done in previous eras.’

The story begins close to home, in Tambo Village, a township outside Cape Town, where Gevisser lives with his husband. This is now home to Malawian exile Tiwonge Chimbalanga, who calls herself Aunty. Assigned male at birth, she early on took on traditionally female duties in her uncle’s household where she grew up, cooking and cleaning, and he accepted her as female. In 2009 Aunty made world headlines when she held an engagement ceremony called a chinkhoswe, with her partner, Steven Monjeza. They were arrested and charged under Section 153 of the Malawi Penal Code that forbids homosexual sex. Aunty was adamant that she was not gay; she saw herself as a woman and explained her male features away with the assertion that she had been bewitched as a child. She and Monjeza were sentenced to fourteen years of hard labour.

The international condemnation that followed resulted in a pardon from the Malawian president, Bingu wa Mutharika. Aunty and Monjeza broke up. She applied for asylum in South Africa, and it is in her home in Tambo Village that Gevisser gets to know her and tell her story. Now living with a new husband, Benson, a fellow Malawian, Aunty suffers derision from others in the township—it is still a tough world for her, despite her asylum status. She has suffered assault, and has struggled to fit in. Benson too, is not the ideal partner, with his drunken rages, but Aunty, it seems, is made of steel, and has made a life for herself on the edge of Gugulethu.

Michael Bashaija’s story is another of exile, first to Kenya, after having been driven out of Uganda. His family discovered his relationship with a classmate, and froze him out of the family home. He was to make his way to Kampala, and then to Canada. In a wry twist, Gevisser notes, before the promotion of anti-homosexuality legislation, Uganda had been ‘home to the most open scene in East Africa’. Telling the story of the Pink Line is not so simple, and understanding how homosexuality is understood around parts of the world isn’t a cut and dried exercise.

Before Bashaija found his way to Canada, he too walked a rocky path. He suffering abuse at the hands of others, from a man who had sex with him before turfing him out of his home after a few weeks. He was kicked out of the mosque where he next found shelter. Then he was taken in at a Christian orphanage and boarding school, but he was again ejected, as being gay ran counter to the beliefs of those running the school. Further homelessness, and further abuse followed. Finally finding asylum in Canada, it’s clear that the path of exile and beginning again isn’t easy: ‘I thought people would be welcoming, but they push you away indirectly.’

Another story is that of Maha and Amira from Cairo. When Gevisser meets the couple, Amira owns an establishment called Girls’ Café. The two have been married, although illegally. It is a year after the Arab Spring and Cairo’s downtown is buzzing. Amira has left home, after having been discovered with a girlfriend by her mother, and lives in a flat. Maha stays overnight with Amira only a couple of nights a month; she lies to her parents about needing to travel for work. But Egypt is still not a safe space for queer or transgender people. Amira’s bar is trashed. The police use online platforms to entrap gay men. In 2014 Amira is forced to flee the country and the couple spend years apart trying to be together. They find asylum in Holland; but their relationship has crumbled, and Maha finds that life in a ‘free’ country has its own unseen emotional locks and chains.

Meanwhile, in Russia, Pasha Captanovska loses custody of her son to her ex-wife, because she is transgender. She has violated the Federal Law on Protection of Children from Negative and Harmful Information ‘which prohibits the propaganda of non-traditional sexual relationships among minors’. Pasha is yet another victim to the dividing lines of the Pink Line—her being transgender is not the problem here, but words are words, it’s the actions that drive them that can destroy a life. She is not permitted to see her son until he turns eighteen.

In Mexico, married lesbian couple, Martha and Zaira, spend years trying to get Martha registered as a second parent to their child, Sabina (born to Zaira). It is a struggle that goes on for years, and highlights negative attitudes toward queer people in their country; even though same-sex marriage was legalised in Mexico City in 2010, same-sex marriage is only legal in some states.

Gevisser also explores the politics of transgenderism in communities in the US, meeting Liam Kai who is a transgender man, undergoing top surgery in 2014. Liam has lived as a boy since he was thirteen, binding his breasts, but could do nothing more until he reached eighteen. Why? Because his lesbian parents disagreed. Beth accepted Liam’s transgender identity; Susan was opposed. They no longer lived together. This riveting chapter illuminates the plight of a transgender people, and the differing arguments for and against allowing transgender children to choose their preferred gender, with some people believing that because being transgender is now so easily accessible some impressionable teens could adopt another gender before they are properly ready to do so.

Gevisser also spends time among the ‘kothis’ in India, ‘men with women’s hearts’, meeting a group who run a temple in a rural fishing village. There is also his sharply draw portrait of the relationship between a Palestinian man, Fadi, and his Jewish boyfriend, Nadav.

Interspersed between these stories is considerable research into the subject of how the world is divided by the Pink Line—between those countries that have and are decriminalising homosexual activity, and others that are strengthening their laws. Some of the facts are astonishing to read about. In countries where it is assumed more liberal attitudes prevail, there are still anomalies. In 2017 seven American states still had ‘no promo homo’ laws on their statute books. In the United Kingdom, Margaret Thatcher’s Section 28 amendment, which forbade local authorities from promoting homosexuality in schools, was only repealed in 2003.

Then there are the arguments that the Western world has forced ‘identities of gayhood’ onto other cultures in their desire to see queer-related human rights violations stamped out. Palestinian academic Joseph Massad, a professor at Columbia University, published an essay in 2002 in which

‘he argued that Western human rights activists and tourists alike had disrupted age-old modes of homosexual activity in the Arab world by foisting the “gay” label onto them. This, he maintained, had forced an unspoken but widely accepted practice into the light of day, and demanded that a set of rights be attached to them.’

And then there is the generational divide, as illustrated by Indigo. Taken by her bisexual mother to Michigan’s Womyn’s Music Festival since was a child, she has struggled with their policy of excluding transgender women: ‘We are more fluid. Less bothered by categories. That’s what makes us queer.’

The Pink Line is a tour de force of scholarship into the lives and issues that affect queer people today, opening a window on lives that are still so often marginalised, and a riveting account of Gevisser’s own exploration into these worlds.

"The Pink Line might be a frontier between countries, or between different parts of the world governed by clashing ideologies, or between the suburbs and the city, or between the past and an imagined future, but in the minds of queer people themselves, it is often a security gate: between fear and vulnerability on the one hand, and sanctuary and affirmation on the other."

The Pink line highlights queer identities in the 21st century through a geopolitical lens. Discussing colonialism, #MeToo, religion, Tumblr, and so much more, the book acknowledges that queer identities can be malleable and up to different interpretations by different people.

The book was very long (and a little dry). However, it did an excellent job of illustrating a broad spectrum of queer identities thought the mid-2010s and across the world.

(Thanks to NetGalley for providing me with a free eARC in exchange for an honest review.)

I got an ARC of this book.

This book started out amazing. It was dense, but it made sense. There needed to be this background to make the points work. The history of the countries and history of politicians all were necessary to make the world make sense. This was a difficult read and until the last few chapters I was really loving it. I was learning so much and seeing things from a new way of thinking.

It was wild to see just how much the world really is connected. Countries influence other countries, money talks loudly across the world, there is just so much that this book explored. It was fascinating. It was clear that the author spent considerable amounts of time and effort making this book and researching everything. It is also clear that the author is cis. It is painfully clear near the end of the book.

The last few chapters focus on trans issues. The thing is the author gives so much time to the opposition and without showing how damaging this is. This is not the case in the earlier chapters. In the earlier chapters there is talk of asylum, drug use, abuse, and horrific events that come from denying queer people rights. Yet in the chapters that focus on trans people specifically in the US, there is none of this. Instead there is so much talk of how teens transitioning is dangerous that I felt sick to my stomach. There was no analysis. There was no mention of suicide rates among trans teens being higher when they are not allowed to socially transition. There was no mention of trans people coming out later in life. It was “transsexuals know early on, but they can’t transition because they are forced to to be queer enough”. Then the author repeatedly mentions how hard and confusing they/them pronouns are. I’m sorry, is this a book about the queer world or the gay world? Because this author wasn’t able to handle trans stuff well at all.

This book was amazing for the gay stuff and for gender nonconforming gays or for queer people who don’t want/need medical transitions. It was terrible for trans people like me who transitioned as teens, who would be dead without their transitions. Instead it vilified this idea that teens could know who they are (which despite what the author claims, is against many studies shown across the world).

So my recommendation is read the first 60% of the book, then stop. I am appalled at the last few chapters. I was lulled into this false sense of security at how well the author handled gender differences across the world and how gender was less binary is so many of the people interviewed, but then I was let down. There was a documentary on Netflix that hit me the same way. A white guy went around and did dark tourism stuff (Dark Tourist, maybe?), but I couldn’t even make it through the first episode since it was such a white guy making himself the moral compass and the star. This happens in this book in many of the interviews where he talks about what he did for the people and then related him giving money to paying people to be queer. I am so lost at where this is getting so many five star reviews. It has so many problems. My three stars are for the effort this book took and from the enjoyment I got from the more fact based chapters. I doubt I will read something from this author again.

This is a fascinating book that really highlights issues faced by many LGBTQ people around the world. As someone living in Australia, it is perhaps easy for me to believe that the world has generally become more accepting of LGBTQ people. Mark Gevisser highlights that, while we have seen positive change in some countries, that change has had a profound affect on others, which has led to laws, protections and general acceptance being wound back.

The book examines various aspects of LGBTQ discrimination, skilfully illustrating digestible analyses of the situations in various countries with lived experience stories of people affected by those situations.

It really helps us understand the situation in many different countries, but also helps us understand potential impacts on LGBTQ from different cultural backgrounds living in a ‘western’ society, and how their cultural background may intersect with their LGBTQ identity.

This book is truly incredible in both senses of the word.
I feel like in 2020, all people should be able to live a free life, love who they want to love. As we see in this book from interviews and observations, that is unfortunately not happening in large parts of the world. The LGBTQ+ community is still facing so many ridiculous obstacles. I hope a lot of people read this. So they can have a better understanding of what being "other" is like. Especially politicians, and religious people. I hope this book changes peoples minds. And makes it better for the worldwide community.
Mark really wrote a beautiful, heartbreaking book. Recommend it, but keep tissues near.

I'd have given this title 4.5 stars if that was an option. I've been proudly out as queer since 2001, and have been an avid consumer of news and information about the queer community, but I learned SO MUCH from this book about the global perspective on queerness. I liked the mix of non-fiction information with personal stories that illustrated the impact of culture and policies on real people.

The sections without personal stories sometimes felt overwhelming as I tried to understand complex issues with little to no knowledge of the culture and customs of those countries, but the author did a great job of presenting the most relevant facts. I thoroughly recommend this book to anyone with even a passing interest in queer or trans rights worldwide.

The Pink Line provides the reader with a combination of analytical chapters that situate the LGBTQ struggle for human rights in the ongoing story of globalization and deeply moving personal vignettes of the queer folks he encountered on the Pink Line's front lines in nine countries. These stories include a trans Malawian refugee granted asylum in South Africa and a gay Ugandan refugee stuck in Nairobi; a lesbian couple who started a gay café in Cairo after the Arab Spring, a trans woman fighting for custody of her child in Moscow, and a community of kothis—“women’s hearts in men’s bodies”—who run a temple in an Indian fishing village. What makes this narrative truly powerful is the way in which the author highlights the interconnectivity of these struggles for human rights, that is, how progress and change in one region of the world, could spark both momentum for LGBTQ rights and backlash against LGBTQ rights in another. This global push/pull has led queer lives to be instrumentalized for political causes that have little to do with their call for equality and dignity. In Western Europe and the United States conservative politicians have reframed LGBTQ rights as a battle call against the influx of immigrants. For example, in 2018 right-wing Flemish Nationalist Vlaams Belang claimed that his party was the most LGTBQ friendly because all the others were "willing to import thousands of Muslims who have very violent ideas against being gay or transgender." In Eastern Europe and Russian, advances in LGBTQ rights in Western Europe were used as battle cry against allowing decadent Western liberalism to take hold there.

But this is not a story without hope. Even as some politicians have manipulated LGBTQ rights to their own ends, LGBTQ activists around the world have pushed for the recognition. of LGBTQ rights as human rights. Thanks to these efforts, in May 2019, the World Health Organizations finally adopted the ICD-11, thereby no longer labeling transgender identity as pathological. That same month, Taiwan became the first country in Asia to allow same sex couples to marry and although efforts to decriminalize homosexuality failed in Kenya, the author notes, the atmosphere was changing there as increasingly in urban areas the LGBTQ community found new allies. Thus, while progress has been far from a straight line, the "it gets better" campaign that first took shape in the United States after several LGBTQ teens committed suicide after years of experiencing bullying, has become a global campaign. What began as celebrities in the United States posting videos online about their experiences and how "it gets better" has become a global movement with LGBTQ individuals from Egypt, Russia and elsewhere posting "it gets better" videos. For example, the author tells of a young Egyptian man who was found by his family with his male lover. They shaved his head and dragged him through the streets tied to a horse cart and then locked him in a room for a month. But rather than succumb to despair, this young man posted his own "it gets better" video on YouTube via his cell phone. In 2018, this young man overcame the odds and qualified as a lawyer.

The arc of justice is shifting, although at times the backlash obscures from view the progress being made. But as the people across the globe who shared their stories with the author understand, change requires taking an active stand. A must-read for anyone interested in human rights and in the struggle across the globe of LGBTQ individuals to have their humanity recognized.

I was blessed with friends, family and a professional circle of people who give a rats ass who I love. That combined with living in western Europe, my "fight" for gay rights consists of equity on levels of running activity's for queer youth, ask attention for laws on alternative parenthood and all-round better acceptance for LGBTQIA who do not have the same experience as me. Of course, we have all heard about gays around the world not having such great lives as we do. But those are short news items that give us only a glimpse.

This book by Gevisser gave me insight into people's lives around the world. Their struggles, the way they cope, what their day looks like and how that must feel. How society around them copes with their queerness and how that affects them on a daily level. Gevissers writing portraits people in a beautiful and respectful way.
I would advise anybody who is sincerely interested in this topic to pick up this book.

This book was a great asset to expanding my knowledge of the LGBT+ community on a more world wide level.

I highly recommend others to read it. There are some very powerful stories and experiences shared which definitely heightened my awareness of LGBT+ issues and also how far the world has come while also recognising there is still more that needs to be done.