Orientation and her identity have come to divide and define the world in an entirely new ways in the 21st century and he is joined in the conversation by andrew solomon, National BookAward Winning writer and lecturer on politics, culture and psychology. You can find the full biographies on the librarys website. An ideal place to post this conversation because we have one of the greatest collections of lgbtq history in the United States and archives of pivotal organizations such as the society of new york and individual activists and key cultural figures from Virginia Woolf to james baldwin. Please remember this event is being recorded, not you but for me the event itself. Mark will take some of your questions at the end and you can send them any time during the conversation by typing your question into the qanda box at the bottom of the app. We will make sure they get to mark and andrew and they will answer as many as they can. At the end of tonights conversation we will be showing a short two question survey with you that we would love your feedback if you have a second. Welwe will post the link towars the end of the event wherever you are watching in the chat and in the Comment Section on youtube in the weeks ahead we will be featuring programs with edward ball and many more. If youd like to learn more about these events and Everything Else the library is up to, please visit nyplconnect and access to myriad of resources we are making available at this time. Now please welcome Mark Gevisser and andrew solomon. Thanks. There we are. Mark, what a pleasure to see you. I hope all is well in cape town. Im thrilled to be the one who gets the opportunity to talk about his remarkable book, which i read a manuscript. We were undergraduates together and have known each other for i guess three and a half decades or so ive enjoyed the previous books for all of you that have joined us this evening, this is an achievement to a completely new scale. The research, the internationalism, the depth of the thinking and the inside is nothing short of extraordinary and im not aware of there being any other books that press this territory with the same authority and clarity and charm. That is eminently readable and extremely engaging. Its full of stories and it stretches out a new way of thinking about lgbtq as it exists and makes arguments many of us have benefited from the liberalism that has been introduced into the lives of people that are lgbtq. There are many others who have gone in the exact opposite direction. Why dont you tell us what you mean by the word pink line and how you define it. Guest thank you for that introduction and thank you for hosting. I have to say what a pleasure it is being here with you. When i was pitching the book many years ago, without question the most important reference is this going to be far from the tree or something other. Because of the scale of the scope and also the very particular way you work and other people that youabout. As i said in the introduction, i was increasingly aware as we all were the new global conversation about a new human rights frontier which has become known as lgbtq. Its fascinating how things are being discussed in ways that are unimaginable to me and he when we were undergraduates decades ago and even more unimaginable to other people in the world in india and west africa and russia. The notion i remember at the very moment 2015 i was struck by the way almost within weeks the United Kingdom passing the samesex marriage act, nigerias past an act [inaudible] both was fascinating to me is the way that i it is being drawn geopolitically in a new cultural war to people on the other side of it and so in a place like the United Kingdom or western euro europe, with Womens Movement and this is moving to the next level of universal human rights at the same time people in most countries were staking out a new line alone complex old frontiers sort of defining what is civilized and what is barbaric. Meanwhile on the other side that political leaders, patriarchs, priests, staking their own pink line against colonialism and capitalism that they believed it was threatening their cultural sovereignty and values and really what they were doing i argue in the book is trying to set up barriers against globalization, against a new way of ideas for food. That would carry by the movement of more than anything. To be able to try to protect something kind of national. And against the threats of the global sort of onslaught. In the little are people who came to assume much more politically than their actual soaps. That was the notion of the pink line but i sort of came up with and in expanded through the book. Host as you said up to write the book how did you decide where to go, how did you find the people you wanted to write about in the countries they visited, and how big you build your relationships with people to get such tremendous trust so that you were able to chronicle the details of their lives and details of their lives and most distances over quite an extended period of time . I should say at the outset that the book is divided into two sections this deep personal profiles of people or communities that leave the end i would get an open society fellowship. [inaudible] makes me a warrior among the pink line myself because george soros and the others in countries like russia and then it was about drivin tracking to understand whertry again toundes being drawn in ways that would help searchers in places where there was potential. It was obvious i was going to go to russia like uganda and is pakistan but also places where there were pink lines perhaps gone in other ways so because of the ageold category and how it was being drawn between these cultural definitions and new sort of political or biomedical understandings that might have originated in india became another country. Country. Imexico is a country that i was really interested in because of the way that samesex marriage would be and the importance of family. In palestine, because i was fascinated at the way that it was being etched onto the green line that the way they were making such a big play as the critics said the human rights record against the end we are in the bad middle eastern territory, i would understand so i went to israel palestine and the case to the United States. I came to the United States really to understand how the cultural war have shifted over the decade from Marriage Equality and homosexuality which is now very much the new normal in the United States and it might have even been in the white house can help to shift transgender rights which has become the new sort of hot button and how the pink line in the United States was coming to sort of School Locker rooms and bathrooms as americans are contending over whether children could use the facilities with their gender identity. Once i found an issue in each place, i tried to find people that could illuminate the issue and i was working first with activists and then thats what introduced me to people who were, struggles of one or another. In one or two visits them to carry on a relationship with them online is quite a liberty because it wanted to see how they grew and other stories developing other experiences developed and how they impact on the pink line politics and how it impacted our men. Host you touched on the next questions [laughter] why dont we look at some of them. I was interested in the story from guadalajara because i think so much of what has happened in the United States has been contingent on the proliferation of speedy loving families. When obama spoke about making the shift and change it and talk about everyones right to whatever form of sexuality they wanted. He talked about the children in his daughters class whose parents were being treated with unfair prejudice, so this question of having families i think has been more central to the american debate than it has been revealed. You didnt talk about that so much in your writings about the u. S. , but you spoke about it quite amusingly and very cogently in the section on guadalajara. How does it resemble what you have seen elsewhere . Guest i couldnt agree with you more. A historian who i really respect so much published a book and one of the arguments from the Progressive Left is because queer had had children, joined the army, we had shown up all of these radical values that defined the previous generation and my feeling is yes, i hear what hes saying and i agree with a lot of it, but i do agree people like yourself that have raised families have been a cuttingedge revolution. Frankly theres more with the big wide world than i do with our children. You have to deal with schools and clinics and other parents, and i think that that does create a certain cuttingedge for the understanding and acceptance of. So i was fascinated about mexico because of the entrance to the United States. But partly because it had become such a huge issue there and i chose a cup chose a couple of constitutional mechanisms they had decided to challenge their home state which guadalajara is the capital to marry them because without the right to be married, they could both be on the certificate. So, they went through this extraordinary Legal Process to get the right to manage and they chose to do that in guadalajara because samesex marriage is legal. They wanted to do it for activists reasons to strip the law and culture and they succeeded. They had a very poignant, very beautiful wedding with protesters outside, but they didnt succeed in getting both of their names onto the certificate. And that was very difficult to watch. It wouldnt go that far for them and they had different opinions. The difficulties over trying to make a family and turned them over and the time you read the book they are no longer togeth together. But they are both wonderful parents. It was fascinating for me to compare and i get some data that is a small percentage of people that identify as a gay or lesbian are transgender do have children and it says something about the very different ways that you can be gay in the world. For people like you and me, we might think of it as a step of deprivation to have our children where it might be in other parts of the world to be queer and have children [inaudible] host interestingly even in the United States, according to the William Institute the number of openly gay with children [inaudible] we spoke a few minutes ago about pink washing in israel and you also talk about the intersection of gay pride and money and have the description of all the companies that ended up trying to exploit the market with rainbow colored jello and so forth and we are part of that whole process. What do you think the politics are of societies that are choosing more to stigmatize the populations are the ways in which the activities of the government into winning peoples votes. We have seen that horrifying campaign that was almost entirely predicated on an antiqueer platform supported by the Catholic Church withers ways in which some countries manage d to get a head that way in some countries manage to really change the lives of the populations for personal gain either corporate or political level. Host guest theres this global shift of Global Convention as a consequence. I mentioned the district of the revolution which is important in the way people move and human rights policies particularly during the obama years they did a huge amount to promote the lgbtq equality worldwide and it had an effect. For example, when David Cameron said that he was going to make the aid conditional on lgbtq writes it had a negative effect but also had that kind of foreignpolicy approach and that kind of space queer people have thanks to the institute or the american embassy. Lets also talk about another globalization and this is complicated because those companies that are promoting lgbtq writes are not necessarily doing it because they are committed to a better world, they are trying to sell a product. Com and when starbucks has a global reputation for being lgbtq friendly, its because of the market back from that that has an effect. So the starbucks in malaysia because it would see was seen t gay and fascinating they were flocking because they liked the way that it was connected and it was a way of saying we are part of the world and they do not hold this tradition and the richer upgrade to value. We are part of the global village. I see that amazingly in the way of the corporate representatives in places like google march in gay pride. It wasnt awkward to be an ally, but that has its limits with the bottom line. The example i cited in the book is theres already a wonderful add [inaudible] but then turn off conservative. There are many different sectors which are created all over the world. Host this points to the way that putin in particular has the resistance to the recognition of these relationships and part of the way that he has continued in his policies have been unpopular. My group is about soviet orders and i had at the time a russian boyfriend or partner that was the drummer in the leading underground rock band in the soviet union. We would walk down the street and then go back and forth most nights everything changed and there was a glorious moment of freedom. Thertheir workloads and all kinf things and he was very involved. It felt like this is a glorious new liberalism and i think precisely because it felt more exquisitely in the United States or other types of societies that i lived for quite some time. Your story about russia or your stories about russia are heartbreaking and sad and devastating, particularly the story of the woman that lost all contact with her own child. Talk about the way that you see putin and russia in these international arenas. It feels at time once more through the domain under the influence and they are in opposition as they were during the cold war. Its wonderful that you told that story because that is really the beginning of how putin has used the gay issue. The time is catastrophic for russia. People really struggled and suffered. Yeltsin style liberalism is associated. It wasnt until putin came alo along. How do i define myself as the guy that is going to bring russia back from the brink. How am i going to show that i am going to attend and applauding for this control, reason in a way that just kind of went wild between the collapse of the soviet union and use that as a way of trying to bolster my burgeoning autocracy. It was just such a perfect five because of the way they were being promoted and also because of the way that russia and many other countries the attack is an attack on the pacific space. So, russia and even today tracking where the locations where, a whole lot of them were in the kremlin. On one level it was fantastic but dont take to the streets and demand your rights because they dont exercise Political Rights in that way. So it happened at the same time. The department of the Global Community of claiming their right to be on the streets and this was another reason [inaudible] the legislation also sort of fits into the war against the population because its dying and became a symbol of a kind of enemy within is the sort of political construction in russia and the United States. Host you wrote nicely about mccarthyism and the way that it was used to portray gay people it was vulnerable and therefore dangerous to you write a lot about people who define themselves as we are lgbtq plus any of these larger categories and people that defined themselves as gay or lesbian and transgender and i feel like that is a great question in the United States or even in western europe as we look at the movement for equal they whether it is an extension of gay rights and whether it automatically applies. The question in the employment of months discrimination act. Did you feel that you could say they are separate or a where did you place the for the experience in india lacks guest that is a good question. It is awkward and a pain, but it serves an important purpose because it reminds us that they are different. Together in that basket in many respects because they are put in a basket by the other side and you know whats fascinating about you mentioned the transgender woman in russia. Therethere is nothing in the legislation that says that mentions action but a church used the propaganda legislation to prevent a one of the things this book doing is trying to understand how people look at themselves in the context of how they ask you. And in that respect, Sexual Orientation and gender identity and there has been an important view particularly cold for obvious reasons. [inaudible] is to see how Sexual Orientation and gender identity to Work Together and how they are interdependent in many ways and to track the way a global originated movement. Its driven backward as i said and they are understood and very present. Anybody that visited they are not necessarily accepted and they have their place and its a pretty abject place that has to do with being somewhere in the middle. Theres abject place in the middle. So you dont need to just be a bigger. That creates a lot of possibilities and opportunities but it also creates a balance space for people in the middle to have to reconstitute themselves or put themselves into this paradigm of this identity that has kind of been downloaded discourses of civilization. In india i told the story of an Amazing Community in a small fishing village who had made the decision because of the human rights culture they are not going to take one of the two options that would be available to them traditionally to accept or repress their femininity and grow mustaches and get married and have children. They have determined to be themselves into some were outside of that. They think othe way they do it h the emotional work that requires you to worship the deity which gives them this space in their vil