Few revolutions in rights have emerged as suddenly, and with such intensity, as the sweeping changes we have observed around LGBT2 rights in the last two decades. In multiple states, these monumental changes have transformed many LGBT people from the proverbial “other” – often perceived as criminal and degenerate – into respected and sometimes even celebrated members of society. Coming out of the depths of the AIDS crisis of the 1980s, few would have predicted the major victories in rights many states afford LGBT people in 2017. From the passage of gender recognition in Colombia and Malta to same-sex marriage in Ireland and South Africa, the diversity of states that address such norms have surprised even the most pessimistic onlooker. As such, LGBT rights constitute an intriguing example of unexpected and transformative social change on a global scale.

During the opening days of the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, Russia, activists from a group called the Gay Folks’ Movement cunningly beamed their logo onto the facade of the Russian embassy in Berlin. This visible act of solidarity was in response to a lengthy campaign by Russian and transnational activists that voiced concerns about Russia's draconian state ban on gay “propaganda.” So was Google's home page, which depicted various winter sports in the bright rainbow colors commonly associated with the LGBT movement. Beneath the design, Google quoted statements on human rights and anti-discrimination from the Olympic charter. Acts like these, which make the LGBT norm publicly visible, have gained unparalleled momentum in recent years. And more and more frequently, prominent figures across the globe, including a British diving star (Tom Daley), an Icelandic prime minister (Jóhanna Sigurðardóttir), a Latvian foreign minister (Edgars Rinkēvičs), and a Polish Catholic priest (Krzystof Charamsa), are coming out. The notable actor Wentworth Miller came out in 2013 by referencing his Russian heritage while declining to take part in the annual St. Petersburg film festival. “I cannot in good conscience participate in a celebratory occasion,” he wrote, “hosted by a country where people like myself are being systematically denied their basic right to live and love openly” (Miller 2013). Shortly afterward, the retired German soccer professional Thomas Hitzlsperger came out, saying that he did so because “gay football players so far don't exist officially” (Agence France Presse 2014). The attention Hitzlsperger's coming out attracted in Europe suggests that he has indeed helped to lift the veil of silence he decried. By September 2014, following campaigns by various LGBT rights organizations, the International Olympic Committee added non-discrimination based on sexual orientation to the Olympic charter. The addition sent a strong signal to potential host countries that have laws discriminating against LGBT people. As the visibility of the transnational LGBT community grows, it reshapes our understanding, and indeed our imaginations, about the place of LGBT people in international society.

This book has explored the effect of this increasing visibility on state and societal recognition of LGBT people across states in the European region.

When the late Polish president and former then-mayor of Warsaw, Lech Kaczyński, banned marches for LGBT equality in 2004 and 2005, LGBT organizations began organizing to hold the event illegally and generating press by contacting international authorities and media outlets. What was unique about the Parada Równości (Equality March) of June 11, 2005, compared to similar gay pride events in major cities where LGBT visibility had become common, was that a transnational group of activists organized the event from both Poland and neighboring Germany. Many of these activists were expatriate Poles who used resources made available to them in Berlin. Prominent European politicians were among the roughly 5,000 illegal marchers who took to the streets of Warsaw that day to demand the right of assembly for sexual minorities in Poland, and more than one-third of the marchers came from foreign contexts (interview no. 125). According to Tomasz Bączkowski, the activist who organized the march:

The illegal march provided the political opportunity to link the social situation of Polish sexual minorities to Poland's recent accession to the EU through the frames of democratic values and human rights. Many activists remember it as one of the most important public assemblies for the rights of LGBT Poles and as a turning point for Polish LGBT activism.

Like many students of social movements, I first became interested in the LGBT rights movement through personal experience. This project dates back to 2004–2006, when I was completing a master's degree in Berlin at a time when many Berliners were organizing to participate in marches for LGBT equality in various Polish cities. It was in Berlin that I came across a flier concerning a march in Warsaw, which sparked a long curiosity about the transnational nature of LGBT politics and the questions it raises. The political behavior that seemed obvious to many of the participants challenged fundamentals of what I had learned of politics in the classroom: what was rational about marching for rights in a foreign context, where such rights would not benefit you directly? Why did such activism meet forceful resistance in some cases and not in others? The uneven diffusion of legal rights and societal recognition across states – the goals of the movement – also puzzled me.

During the decade I spent thinking about the issues related to this book, I would be amazed most of all by the striking changes that occurred around the globe. Under the right conditions, it seemed, LGBT people could be their own emancipators (in some sense of that word), in that their visibility could be the path toward rights. Moreover, these politics of visibility were transnational in nature, as so many varied states – including ones that many observers thought of as highly unlikely – adopted new LGBT rights norms into the framework of the state. The contentious politics of visibility thus became the subject of this endeavor, and this book is about the political power of coming out for individuals, groups, and states. It is a story of how local activists can channel transnational support to affect domestic politics, a story about how a norm can become salient, and about how people can come out under broader conditions of visibility.

For all the words in this book, I could easily devote as many to thanking the various people who have made it possible. It is only fitting that I begin by thanking the many unnamed activists who offered me their time and insight as interviewees.

When the Berlin Wall fell, CEE societies had unprecedented exposure to norms concerning LGBT people, which were developing more rapidly in other parts of the continent. Pathways for the exchange of ideas opened tremendously as the continent again re-examined its understanding of “Europe,” and as increased transnational channels supplemented the internal dynamics that led to such striking changes in CEE. While political scientists generally analyze the diffusion of policies across states, the abruptness and rapidity of European integration in the 1990s also exhibits value internalization among and across societies. Indeed, international norm diffusion theory suggests that accepted ideas spread from areas of high concentration (usually powerful states) to areas of low concentration; at its essence, this theory describes how social entities change their behavior (Florini 1996). Change in attitudes toward sexual minorities is thus a measure of norm internalization that goes beyond state compliance.

Surely, for most LGBT movements, legal recognition is deeply intertwined with the objective of sociocultural recognition. A “revolution in thought,” as the Italian transnational activist Angelo Pezzana called it, is about fundamental shifts in behaviors, practices, and understandings that change lived experiences for sexual minorities. Activists like Pezzana understood that for minorities – who are so often deemed radical in their own domestic contexts – such changes have both domestic and transnational sources.

In this chapter, I focus on international norm diffusion pertaining to changing attitudes and perceptions of sexual minorities in an integrating Europe. Attitudes toward homosexuality are still largely negative in most countries around the world, including much of Europe, and only recently has there been a more rapid shift toward internalizing the norm of accepting homosexuality. In their “return to Europe,” newly admitted member states were exposed to similar EU norms and regulation, yet their societies display stark variations in value shifts (see Figure 5.1). For example, between the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact in 1991 and accession to the EU in 2004, nearly 60 percent of Slovaks positively shifted their opinion on homosexuality, while Hungarians saw no positive change at all.

This chapter returns to several core questions: why have societal attitudes toward lesbian and gay people been different across states?

In the 1980s, activists of the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP) in New York coined the slogan “Silence = Death,” an expression that came to define much of the LGBT movement in that decade. In the spirit of Harvey Milk, who rejected what he called a “conspiracy of silence,” the activists were responding to the Reagan administration's silence on the HIV/AIDS epidemic that had brought the gay community to its knees. ACT UP adopted a logo that featured, above the words “Silence = Death,” a pink triangle symbolizing the patch that gay concentration camp prisoners were forced to wear during the Second World War (WWII). That historical context also evoked the theme of silence and death: in the 1940s, the silence of a nation and the silence of a social group resulted in death in the camps of Dachau, just as it did in the hospital beds of Chelsea in the 1980s. Equating silence with death is therefore neither new nor unique to a particular context. Indeed, nearly a century earlier in 1896, a German gay advocate (using the pseudonym Ludwig Frey) wrote that “Stillschweigen ist der Tod” (staying silent is death) (Beachy 2014, 107). At various points during the twentieth century, members of a marginalized group who sometimes had the ability to disguise their sexual orientation and gender identity were compelled to come out, to act up, and to make themselves visible.

Extending the logic of the “Silence = Death” campaign, I argue that visibility explains the transnational diffusion of LGBT rights in Europe. The premise that visibility leads to change is not new among European rights activists, many of whom share Harvey Milk's theory that gay and lesbian people should publicly declare their orientation if they wish to see society accept them (Herek 2004, 14). That said, they also caution that coming out – especially on an individual basis – is a privilege that can be more or less difficult depending on context (a point I return to at the end of this chapter).

On the gray late spring day of June 19, 2010, Judith Butler, the renowned philosopher and public intellectual, took to the stage at the Brandenburg Gate to address Berlin's Christopher Street Day parade. The annual event celebrates the visibility of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and trans (LGBT) identities, and that year it had again attracted almost a million guests from across the continent. A bird's-eye view of the colorful throng of people on the tree-lined street that connects the Brandenburg Gate and the Victory Column – the Prussian military monument that Berlin's gay community symbolically claimed as their own – clearly suggested that the organizers had achieved their goal of generating visibility. While some participants simply came to celebrate (though by making their identities visible, their presence was still political [V. Taylor, Rupp, and Gamson 2004]), others purposefully enhanced the colorful nature of the event by carrying signs and banners that articulated political grievances. Many of these statements championed or targeted the governments of foreign states, reflecting political action that reached far beyond the city and the state. Butler stood before a crowd peppered with diverse national symbols – in recent years they have included a Swedish flag, a banner with the words Solidarność Gejów (“gay solidarity” in Polish), an image of Russian President Vladimir Putin's face painted in drag, and floats foreign embassies and expatriate communities had commissioned.

The scene illustrates the transnational dynamics of a movement that has spilled over the borders of nation states, a dimension of visibility that is central to this book. Visibility for LGBT people often has its roots in transnational sources. Indeed, the Berlin parade's name, Christopher Street Day, refers to the street in New York City where police raided the Stonewall Bar in 1969, subsequently spawning the gay liberation movement that moved LGBT people out of the closet and into the streets. With the parade's audience spread across both halves of a once-divided city where the Berlin Wall stood, the location itself represented both persistence and change in the role transnational movements play in an integrating Europe. Berlin was the avant-garde city that housed the world's first research center on homosexuality in 1897 but then stood aside in fearful silence as the capital of a state that brutally persecuted gay identity during the Third Reich.

In 1948, Axel and Eigil Axgil and their colleagues founded Denmark's first gay rights organization, Kredsen af 1948 (The Circle of 1948). Inspired by the UN Declaration of Human Rights of that year, homophile organizations like Kredsen af 1948 began to lobby states for gay rights. For affluent democracies, the birth of the gay liberation movement and the dawn of the 1970s heralded a marked, albeit gradual, expansion in the legal protections that states provided gay and lesbian minorities. By October 1, 1989, the first same-sex couples – including the Axgils, who celebrated four decades as a couple and as human rights activists – had entered into registered partnerships in Denmark. Although progress has been slow and has often provoked countermovements intended to block progressive legislation and to promote anti-LGBT policies, the proliferation of LGBT-friendly legislation has amplified the voice of a once politically invisible group and has become a recurrent theme in modern European politics.

Legal recognition of LGBT minorities varies greatly across European states, however. In this chapter, I explore LGBT norm diffusion by examining legislative changes across states. Europe is distinctive in that it houses states at both ends of the global spectrum of LGBT egalitarianism, with wide discrepancies both in legislation, which this chapter examines, and in the social acceptance of LBGT minorities (Chapter 5). While some states (e.g. Denmark) quickly became the world's leading advocates for LGBT rights and provided the most extensive legal measures to their citizenry, others have only recently decriminalized homosexuality (e.g. Romania in 2001). Furthermore, some states in the region have introduced or proposed legislation that retrenches the rights of LGBT minorities, such as bans on same-sex unions or bills banning gay propaganda. Figure 4.1 shows how EU member states have varied in adopting LGBT legislation over three decades. The 12-point LGBT legislation score counts various pieces of pro-LGBT legislation, described in detail in Table A.1 in the Appendix.

Transnational activists have long publicized this imbalance in legal recognition of LGBT minority rights as a central concern for those working to achieve social equality across Europe.

Research methods and data collection

Research methods

In my research design, I employed an eclectic multimethod (quantitative and qualitative) approach. I used a nested analysis technique, which began with the large-n statistical test of correlation between variables and then, depending on the results, proceeded to either “model-testing” or “model-building” small-n analysis (Lieberman 2005, 436). The project included large-n analyses that used statistical methods to test correlations between predictors in all EU member states, and small-n analyses that used qualitative methods to trace channels of diffusion between carefully selected case studies. I thus used a triangular design in which the preliminary large-n analyses identified a set of ideal cases (on the regression line) for the small-n analysis, which I used to test the theory and to understand the mechanisms by which ideas diffuse.

I first constructed the data sets for preliminary quantitative analyses (final versions appear in Table A.1 and Table A.3). Next, I turned to qualitative methods in order to confirm or question the validity of the correlations I observed in the large-n analysis. This allowed me to answer open questions of causal order, measurement, and the heterogeneity of cases. I followed the principle that in triangulation “the best use of [small-n analysis] is to leverage its distinct complementarities with [large-n analysis], not to try to implement it with the exact same procedures as one would carry out regression analysis” (Lieberman 2005, 440). In this sense, the small-n analyses also allowed me to observe the mechanisms that connected the independent and dependent variables, aiding my understanding of historical sequence and causal process (McAdam, Tarrow, and Tilly 2001).

In a paired comparison, I chose Poland and Slovenia because my initial analysis revealed that, among new EU member states, these historically Catholic states were on opposite ends of the spectrum in terms of legal standing and societal attitudes toward LGBT people. Both cases had variation on the explanatory and dependent variables. I also studied Germany and the EU as “norm entrepreneur” cases, because I identified them as sources of horizontal and vertical diffusion, respectively. These cases served as mobilizing structures for activism in CEE. They illustrated how ideas diffused, with activists using resources available to them in one context to mobilize in another.