WorldPride gave mainstream Australia a glimpse into the world of the queer community with a celebration that set Sydney alight with events and parties — but it wasn't all glitter and go-go dancers.

One suburb over from Oxford Street, Sydney's International Convention Centre was playing host to hundreds of international delegates, who gathered over three days in March for the festival's staple Human Rights Conference.

With this being the first WorldPride held in Oceania, delegates focused much of their attention on LGBTQIA+ issues in Asia and the Pacific, including an unprecedented announcement from Foreign Minister Penny Wong that Australia will invest $3.5 million into LGBTQIA+ rights in the region.

Community leaders have bold ideas for how Australia should spend the new inclusion and equality fund — a first for the country — and how it should engage in foreign aid.

Jennifer Lu is one of them.

Lu is the director for Asia Programs at Outright International, a global LGBTQIA+ non-government organisation, and says she welcomes the Australian Government's "phenomenal" investment, which she hopes will alleviate the sector's lack of funding.

“Of the whole global LGBT movements’ funding, only 5 per cent is in Asia, but we have 60 per cent of the population,” Lu says.

The human rights landscape across the region varies; each country has different cultural attitudes and legal rights towards LGBTQIA+ people.

Lu says the legalisation of same-sex marriage in Taiwan in 2019 has bolstered human rights movements in some countries, including Thailand, Vietnam, South Korea and Cambodia.

“It was a very amazing milestone and I believe because of that, that movement actually attracts more activists in Asian countries to try to launch their own marriage [equality] campaigns,” she says.

But the influence of conservative religious sects drives anti-LGBTQI+ laws and social attitudes, she says. "The churches really spread out their power from the United States to Asia, so they have really good strategy to support the community, to spread out their religions and also work with the conservative politicians."

Tackling religious conservatism

Similar to the West, many countries in Asia continue to grapple with anti-queer movements fuelled by conservative religious groups that advocate against queer, trans and gender-diverse rights.

One country that has seen a resurgence in anti-LGBTQIA+ laws is Indonesia, where the federal government recently introduced a law that criminalises sexual activity outside of marriage. This leaves same-sex couples at risk of persecution, as they do not have a right to marry.

Freelance art worker and Balinese resident Sidhi Vhisatya says the queer and trans community in Indonesia faces challenges across health, housing and employment.

“We still have big challenges providing a comfortable shelter for the elder queers, especially from the trans women community, as some of them were disowned by their family and some of them work in the non-formal sector as street performers, sex workers,” Vhisatya says.

“We have no mechanisms to provide financial support for them, especially when it comes to emergency situations like COVID, natural disasters.”

Vhisatya says he wants the Australian Government’s fund to support the work of existing organisations, and for the response to be decentralised outside of the capital, Jakarta.

“In Indonesia, we have this network of collective organisations and individuals who have been working on these issues: they know better what needs to be done.”

On the other side of the continent, in the Central Asian country of Kyrgyzstan, homosexuality is legal but queer people face similar social stigmas. 

The executive director of LGBTQIA+ advocacy group Kyrgyz Indigo, Adilet Alimkulov, says coming to terms with identity in a religious country is a complex process.

"It's all about the accepting yourself as a Muslim, as a Kyrgyz person, as a queer in the one body," Alimkulov says.

He says the LGBTQIA+ community is often used as a target to advance conservative political agendas — whereby politicians position queer rights as a Western threat to traditional values.

"Our society in general is very homophobic and transphobic and most of them follow the Islam religion and value the traditional values," he says. "That's why, when they heard about the LGBT and stuff like that, they're very angry."

Alimkulov says an investment from the Australian Government could fund the shortfall in basic health services, including mental healthcare, sexual healthcare and HIV prevention.

“When it comes to mental health, we don’t have really good programs and to be honest we don’t have psychologists who can be really useful.” 

Supporting queer refugees

With some countries enforcing punishments as extreme as the death penalty for same-sex relations, many LGBTQIA+ people are left with no choice but to flee their home countries in search of a better life.

The founder of non-government organisation Afghan LGBT, Artemis Akbary, knows intimately the hardships faced by queer refugees and asylum seekers.

After the 1996 rise of the Taliban, his family fled from Afghanistan to Iran to avoid persecution. But with Iran’s harsh punishments for homosexuality, Akbary embarked on another dangerous journey alone, to seek asylum in Europe.

“I escaped because of my sexual orientation as a gay person. This time, I escaped from my parents because they didn’t accept me as a gay person,” he says.

Akbary says it was a long ordeal, met with hostility from the Turkish Immigration Office, which had minimal knowledge of the LGBTQIA+ community and Akbary's predicament. He endured two weeks with no shelter, he says, as the UN Refugee Agency would only provide shelter to women and children.

“I slept on [foot] paths for two weeks. An Afghan family saved me and helped me with a job,” he says.

Now living in the Czech Republic, Akbary says Australia must do more to fund visas and basic necessities for queer refugees, while also supporting those staying in transit countries.

“Our organisation receives many emails from suffering LGBTQI people in Afghanistan, and they don’t have food to eat. They eat grass,” he says. “They call it illegal immigration, but I believe it is the wrong term for refugees and asylum seekers.”

The bid to decolonise 

The push for queer rights in the Asia-Pacific has long been tied to efforts to decolonise — or 'free' places from the political, social and cultural effects of colonisation.

Much of the region’s homophobic laws can be traced back to European colonialism and the influence of Christian missionaries from the West.

In the Pacific Islands, many individuals who would fit LGBTQIA+ labels in Australian society define themselves outside of Western constructs of gender.

In Samoan culture, people who are 'assigned male at birth' but embrace a female identity are known as fa’afafine, while Samoans 'assigned female at birth' yet who live as men are known as fa'afatama.

Similar identities are referred to as fakaleitī/fakatangata in Tongan culture, whakawāhine/tanata ira tane in Māori culture, and māhū in Hawaii.

Fa’afafine woman Tuisina Ymania Brown, a project lead for the Sydney WorldPride Human Rights Conference, says third genders have long been accepted in her home country of Samoa.

"The West is grappling now with the idea of gender identities, gender expression. That's something that's existed in Pacific culture, in Asian culture, around the Asia and Pacific for thousands of years," Brown says.

She welcomes the Australian Government's investment in the region as a "historic and significant first step", but cautions against imposing Western identities and labels.

“When they come to Pacific and Asia, please don't bring the trans identity thing. Don't make this about a trans identity. Respect the identities that are on the ground." 

In Bangladesh, homosexuality faces a maximum penalty of life imprisonment under a British colonial law, Penal Code 377. 

Dipa Mahbuba Yasmin, a co-founder of the Bangladeshi Asexual Association, says embracing decolonisation would help overcome social taboos faced by the LGBTQIA+ community.

“People are saying that, as a Muslim country, we cannot change that law,” Yasmin says.

"You are doing these [homophobic] things because of the British law. You are still following those colonial practices but you shouldn't."

She says the asexual community, people who do not experience sexual attraction to others, faced unique challenges of visibility and awareness.

“I just feel that the monolithic view of queerness … this is also a very problematic thing,” Yasmin says. “They [asexuals] always have the threat of spousal rape; they can be raped by their own partner.”

Yasmin says she would like to see the Australian Government’s fund be put towards educational resources and LGBTQIA+ inclusive mental health services.

“When I started my journey, I always feel that in the beginning if I got the support of mental health professionals, it would not have been so tough for me,” she says.

While advocates have welcomed the $3.5 million, an Equality Australia report published earlier this year recommends the Australian Government invests $15 million in the Asia-Pacific. By comparison, the Netherlands committed $74 million to overseas LGBTQIA+ rights in 2019-20, while Canada and Sweden allocated $25 million and $34 million, respectively, in that same time.

Brown says the fund needs to continue to grow to have real impact.

"The strategy must be always to develop in close and open partnership with our communities in Asia and the Pacific, so we can inform what they're going to be giving and what they're going to be developing," she says.

With Sydney WorldPride in the rear-view mirror, the test will be if the fund can deliver outcomes before the next WorldPride Human Rights Conference in Washington, DC, in 2025.