The Pink Line

January 13, 2020
In this expansive and deeply sourced inquiry into the 21st-century LGBTQ rights movement, South African journalist Gevisser (Lost and Found in Johannesburg) profiles gay and transgender people around the world living in “the Pink Line”—“a borderland where queer people work to reconcile the liberation and community they might have experienced online or on TV or in circumscribed places, with the constraints of the street and the workplace, the courtroom and the living room.” Gevisser’s subjects include a transgender woman from Malawi, a gay Ugandan refugee living in Vancouver, and a lesbian couple running a café in post–Arab Spring Cairo. He alternates these portraits with discussions on how “nativist nationalist politicians” in Russia and Eastern Europe demonize European Union laws protecting LGBTQ rights, the spread of antihomosexual laws from Victorian England to the British colonies, the courting of “pink-dollar tourists” in Mexico City and Buenos Aires, the recent shift of public attention from gay issues to transgender ones, and the Vatican’s longstanding advocacy against the concept of gender as a social construct. Though the book at times feels more like a collection of magazine profiles rather than a cohesive whole, Gevisser’s non-Western point-of-view and exhaustive research provide essential perspective on the threads connecting gay, lesbian, and transgender communities worldwide. This impressive work is a must-read for anyone invested in social justice and LGBTQ rights.

Starred review from March 1, 2020

Gevisser (Dispatcher) compiles stories of LGBT people on the front lines of fighting for legal, social, and cultural rights and acceptance. Taking on a massive project to understand how and why the world is changing in regards to LGBT people and culture, and how the people and culture themselves are changing, Gevisser acknowledges the ambitious scope of the content prior to diving into the stories of people across the world, noting that no one story is everyone's story; thus, no book with an aim such as Gevisser's can possibly be considered exhaustive. Still, The Pink Line makes impressive strides in chronicling distant and recent LGBT history and progress across the world, punctuating overviews of specific countries every other chapter with intimate stories with LGBT people living in those countries The relative comprehensiveness can at times be tedious, but the humanity and tension with which Gevisser portrays his subjects keeps the prose engaging alongside his incredible and seemingly encyclopedic knowledge of LGBT world history. VERDICT For readers who appreciated the New York Public Library's The Stonewall Reader, this work moves the observation of the evolution of LGBT life and culture to the global scale and is a must-read for all interested in gender studies. [See Prepub Alert, 11/11/19.]--Abby Hargreaves, District of Columbia P.L.

Copyright 2020 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

March 15, 2020
A global exploration of LGBTQ issues in the 21st century in relation to public policy, human rights, and economic pursuits. In his expansive new undertaking, South African journalist Gevisser offers sharp insights into queer cultures throughout the world. Early on, he defines the titular pink line: "between those places increasingly integrating queer people into their societies as full citizens, and those finding new ways to shut them out now that they had come into the open." In the current century, writes the author, "new battlegrounds [are] opening up new frontiers of the culture wars." Traversing across a diverse selection of countries, Gevisser shares stories from either side of the line, reflecting a broad sweep of gay and transgender human rights and cultural challenges. These include a newly partnered gay male couple (Israeli and Palestinian) exploring their relationship in gay-friendly Tel Aviv, tested by the social intolerance directed toward Palestinians; a lesbian couple in Cairo struggling to keep their gay-leaning cafe afloat after the Arab Spring; a transgender woman in Moscow and another in Malawi, each caught up in her country's bureaucratic restrictions. In alternating chapters, the author expands on emerging themes. He explores gender ideology and fluidity and how trans-related concerns have gained prominence. He examines the sociopolitical and economic motivations of these countries regarding their level of LGBTQ support, and he reports on anti-LGBTQ laws that expand and contract in response to right-wing or religious influence. Gevisser's journalistic acumen and breadth of research are impressive. While he offers an unprecedented scope, however, the densely packed text lacks a unifying narrative flow, reading more like a series of articles (several of the chapters were derived from previously published pieces). Consequently, sometimes the author's capable storytelling skills take a back seat to what often feels like an excessive overflow of reporting. Not fully compelling but a solidly researched, important addition to queer studies.

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Starred review from April 15, 2020
South African journalist Gevisser (Lost and Found in Johannesburg, 2014) has written about sexual orientation and gender identity for more than two decades. In this book, he explains the Pink Line dividing the modern world. On one side, countries are expanding human rights; on the other, those same rights are retracted and criminalized. In 2015, the U.S. legalizes same-sex marriage; in 2016 and 2017, China publishes a list of abnormal sexual relationships banned from TV. In some countries, LGBTQ+ rights are positioned as a corrupting influence from the West designed to undermine traditional autonomy and values. This dense, well-researched project alternates between chapters contextualizing political and legal events from a high-level view and closeup chapters that follow, empathically and personally, the lives of LGTBQ+ people living on the wrong side of the Pink Line. Aunty, for instance, is a transgender woman from Malawi whose marriage is profiled in the local paper, resulting in her social rejection and harassment. This structure reinforces the social justice belief that the personal is political and vice versa. Gevisser's monumental effort in this global deep-think of a text outlines how much work remains ahead. This necessary, timely, intelligent book belongs in every library, the world over.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2020, American Library Association.)