Members and allies of the LGBT community are making strides toward acceptance in Bhutan and Moldova, though their success is relative, according to two journalists and social justice advocates from those countries.
Natalia Ghilascu and Namgay Zam, two Hubert H. Humphrey Fellows visiting the Walter Cronkite School this academic year from Moldova and Bhutan respectively, discussed the efforts of social justice advocates in their home countries at an event called The Global Rainbow: LGBT Expressions in Asia and Eastern Europe.
Ghilascu elaborated on what she called a “profound homophobic mentality” prevalent in Moldova. She cited statistics from the Soros Foundation showing that 14 percent of respondents accept members of the LGBT community as neighbors, and only 4 percent accept LGBT family members.
“You can imagine how many couples and how many young people struggle with this issue,” Ghilascu said.
She showed commercials from organizations and politicians for and against LGBT inclusion, highlighting the deep divide in the country.
She also showed footage of protests in a Moldovan park that occurred the same day a Pride festival date was announced in the country. Members of one group that protested misrepresented themselves in online forums in order to track down and attack members of the LGBT community, she said.
She said aggressors, including priests and other religious figures, try to infiltrate LGBT marches and events to attack participants.
Zam said the primarily Buddhist country of Bhutan is generally more accepting of the LGBT community, but she described discrepancies among various laws regarding homosexuality.
She said two statutes in the country’s penal code criminalize homosexuality, while Bhutan’s 2008 Constitution includes an anti-discrimination clause for sexual orientation. She said the laws are the result of “colonial baggage” and influences from India and Britain.
Zam said she became an advocacy journalist on accident because members of the LGBT community kept reaching out to her after some of her earlier work. She said she received backlash in person and online for taking up the cause of LGBT equality in her work.
“I think this happens to a lot of people who take up LGBT issues in any country,” she said.
She said she hopes to help change the lives of members of the LGBT community because they’ve changed her life through sharing their stories.
“Among my own circles, they did not know the right terms to use,” she said. “They did not know how to be sensitive in interviews. So I thought, ‘OK, I’m going to help them and help people in my own circle to understand what this is.’”
She said more public figures have come out recently, and there has been more public dialogue about LGBT issues.
She said there still isn’t much visibility for the transgender community, and each story about a transgender person is part of a history still being created in the country.
Andrew Leckey, president of the Donald W. Reynolds National Center for Business Journalism at the Cronkite School, spoke in a group discussion after the presentations and compared the public opinion of the LGBT community in Moldova and Bhutan to that in the U.S.
“I would love to say that America has always been open-minded,” he said. “I think many of the struggles that you have are struggles that have occurred in America in our lifetimes. Most of the people I’ve worked with that it turned out they were gay — I didn’t know until after they were dead.”
He said the more visibility the LGBT community has, the more acceptance there eventually will be among the general public.
“You begin to realize that, rather than a personal preference, it becomes tolerance,” he said. “I think that only occurs when you see enough people and enough good people and enough people you’ve met that people start realizing they don’t have to . . . (worry) about it all of the time.”
Contact the reporter at sajarvis@asu.edu.
