9781422275269

Introduction There are approximately 7.5 billion people in the world. The percentage of people who are LGBTQ is extremely difficult to pin down, but estimates based on research range from 3 to 10 percent, which means that there are somewhere between 225 million and 750 million LGBTQ people in the world. That represents hundreds of millions of different life experiences, hundreds of different cultures and ethnicities, and 195 different countries. The breadth of experience within the community we call LGBTQ is difficult to even imagine. AWealth of Diversity The purpose of this book is to help you understand the incredible diversity of LGBTQ people around the world. With that in mind, there’s an important principle you should remember while you’re studying LBGTQ communities in foreign countries: LGBTQ doesn’t look the same in every cultural context. When we use words to describe sexual and gender minorities—lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, pansexual, asexual, genderqueer, and many others—we are using those words to try to understand very complex issues. None of those terms is a perfect description of what is going on inside a person, but they’re the tools we use to communicate these identities as well as we possibly can. Our own culture has changed the way we talk about and perceive identity over time, so it shouldn’t be surprising that different cultures have different ways of talking about sexual and gender identity and even have different conceptions of what queerness looks like. The LGBTQ communities in different areas can look different as well. There are certain things that we take for granted as parts of the community, such as pride parades, rainbow flags, and gay bars. But we can’t assume that that’s how it will look everywhere. Those things grew out of a very specific time and context, and situations that didn’t happen exactly the same way in other places. For example,

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LGBTQWithout Borders • International Life