The Pink Line

In this masterful recounting of sexuality and identity around the globe, Mark Gevisser achieves an almost shocking empathy. His accounts are riveting, brilliantly researched, liberal, and forthright. He talks to people with and without privilege, of every race and of every nationality, limning the aspects of queer experience that are universal and those that are local. In intimate, often tender prose, he brings to life the complex movement for queer civil rights and the many people on whom it bears. Whether recounting suffering or triumph, he is a clear-sighted, fearless, and generous guide. – Andrew SolomonA wide-ranging, open-hearted, beautifully told account of the radically various stateof LGBTQ rights in the world. This is a book that should be very widely read, and not only read, but acted upon. – Garth Greenwell, author of What Belongs to YouMark Gevisser’s sensitive yet firmly broad range, coheres the concept of a ‘pink line’ the difference between the wish of queer individuals for autonomy, versus the increased manipulations of gay and trans identities to shore up power systems. His book is both enlightening and disturbing in a world where the wish to be understood can become a commodity of domination. – Sarah SchulmanThe Pink Line traces a planet-spanning fissure that runs through the most intimate dimensions of life, documenting the sometimes literally war-torn rift zones where so-called ‘traditional values’ are being mobilized by states to combat trans, queer and feminist social movements. A smart and sobering book for our times. – Susan Stryker, author of Transgender History: The Roots of Today’s RevolutionIn intimate, often tender prose, Gevisser brings to life the complex movement for queer civil rights and the many people on whom it bears – Colm Toibin * Guardian *Powerful… meticulously researched… Long after finishing the book, it’s the individual stories of the likes of Pasha in Moscow, or Michael, the Ugandan refugee in Nairobi, that will stick with you. – Andrew McMillan * Observer, Book of the Week *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 … 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. * Library Journal *The Pink Line is a riveting, beautifully written, immensely moving book. It puts together a series of powerful personal stories that add up to a world riven by gender and sexual discrimination. The frontier between humiliation and civilisation is changing, albeit slowly, and we have to hope that it will move far further in the years to come. Mark’s book will help that to happen. – Lord Chris SmithThe Pink Line is a deep diagnostic account of the ways in which queer lives and queer loves cross the fraught frontiers of race, rights, discrimination and denigration to transition from agony to agency, and isolation to community. Mark Gevisser has given us a rare piece of writing in which the quotidian confrontations and consolations of everyday life build into an encyclopedic vision of the global frontiers of the queer condition. This is politics and poetry all at once. Gevisser occupies the front-lines of sorrow and struggle with his informants who, in becoming his friends and comrades, together define an activism of defiant desire unafraid of the ambivalences and contradictions of the human condition. The Pink Line is a remarkable narrative of resilience, romance and realism. – Homi Bhabha[An] ambitious, beautifully narrated book, whose lesbian and bi and gay and queer and trans and nonbinary and hijra and waria and bakla and kothi subjects live along what Gevisser names the Pink Line. – Stephanie Burt * TLS *These are compelling, empowering and uplifting dispatches from the frontlines of the global struggle for LGBT+ freedom. Read them and be inspired. – Peter Tatchell, LGBT+ campaigner and Director of the Peter Tatchell FoundationImmersive – Tareq Baconi * London Review of Books *

Mark Gevisser’s previous books include the award-winning A Legacy of Liberation: Thabo Mbeki and the Future of South Africa’s Dream, and Lost and Found in Johannesburg: A Memoir. He writes frequently for Guardian, The New York Times, Granta, and many other publications. He helped organise South Africa’s first Pride March in 1990, and has worked on queer themes ever since, as a journalist, film-maker and curator. He lives in Cape Town.