And also how imperial intervention intentionally increases the entrenchment of that social conservatism

Thank you. This article is absolutely mandatory reading for Westerners who support the sovereignty of the Global South.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately since I saw this story about the australian ambassador to Iran promoting some niche australian gay pride event earlier this year

https://www.sbs.com.au/news/article/australia-very-concerned-over-irans-summoning-of-ambassador-over-pro-lgbtiq-post/ghhicfsxo

that and the constant pinkwashing of israel, and the constant concern trolling about queers in china

thank you for sharing this, I hate seeing my identity used as a cudgel. It feels so on the nose when it was still illegal to be gay in parts of australia well into the 1990s, and cops still routinely fuck with my community.

Fundamentally, it comes down to Eurocentrism undermining any supposed universality that that it claims to uphold. As Houria Bouteldja writes, any claim to a universal gay identity is immediately undermined by Eurocentric and culturalist assumptions. Samir Amin put it this way in the Preface of Eurocentrism, Second Edition:

Modernity is the product of nascent capitalism and develops in close association with the worldwide expansion of the latter. The specific logic of the fundamental laws that govern the expansion of capitalism leads to a growing inequality and asymmetry on a global level. The societies at the peripheries are trapped in the impossibility of catching up with and becoming like the societies of the centers, today the triad of the United States, Europe, and Japan. In turn, this distortion affects modernity, as it exists in the capitalist world, so that it assumes a truncated form in the periphery. The culture of capitalism is formed and develops by internalizing the requirements of this asymmetric reality. Universalist claims are systematically combined with culturalist arguments, in this case Eurocentric ones, which invalidate the possible significance of the former.

[…] The crisis of modernity is itself the sign of the obsolescence of the system. Bourgeois ideology, which originally had a universalist ambition, has renounced that ambition and substituted the postmodernist discourse of irreducible “cultural specificities” (in its crude form, the inevitable clash of cultures). As opposed to this discourse, I suggest that we begin with a view of modernity as a still incomplete process, which will only be able to go beyond the mortal crisis it is now undergoing through the reinvention of universal values. This implies the economic, social, and political reconstruction of all societies in the world.

Exemplified by the “inferior culture” nazi basement dweller

Why? Why any of this? What the fuck does the CIA get out of….supporting queer rights in Yemen?

Fifth columns. People who will act against the state and be endlessly loyal to the USA, because if it were to be revealed that they are LGBT, they would be prosecuted, and by being LGBT, they have a natural distrust of the socially conservative government that seeks to limit their rights. Easy targets for blackmail into becoming spies. This was being done by a spy ring after all.

Just spit balling here but, maybe they imagine it will damage social cohesion (like Russia supposedly sponsors right wing influencers in the West), or maybe it’s a way to link up with gay Yemeni’s who could be easier to blackmail for intelligence purposes

I guess they might be at the vanguard of a color revolution, seeking more rights in a new government

It benefits the empire in several ways.

First, recruiting persecuted and marginalized minorities has always been a priority in espionage. If you know someone is gay in a society where gay people are brutalized or killed then you own them. If they refuse to follow orders you expose them and their ife is destroyed. It’s part of the justification for why the us was so terrified of gay people in the military and bureacracy during the Lavender Scares (the gdr solved the problem by destigmatizing and supporting gay culture).

Second - openly promoting something highly transgressive will create a reliable reaction. If the Americans are trying to normalize homosexuality homophobic elements will organize against them

• firstly, this plays in to western cultural imperialism. The regime can use the persecution of gay people to play on western sympathies and get western support for military interventions.

• secondly, it polarizes the local political climate. If homosexuality is associated with american infiltration and subversion this makes it more dangerous to be accepting or supportive. It’s a divide and conquer strategy - create a political rift between groups that support or tolerate gay people and nationalists by tying homosexuality up in nationalism. It forces people to choose a camp, pits those camps against each other, and gives the us options for further compromising people and destabilizing politics.

Liberalism.