Okay everyone, I'm writing a research paper on the hatred for the LGBT community in the world. I open the paper with the story of Lawrence King. For those of you who don't know, he was a 13 year old boy who was shot in the head at school for being gay. I wanted to know if anyone had any research sources for this topic. I've covered the film, For the Bible Tells Me So, and the Stonewall riots. I'm starting on Harvey Milk, but not sure what to say after that. Any input is appreciated. Thanks!
It'd be good to get personal horror stories from people here, which you'd probably be able to get a few if you made a thread about them in the anonymous discussion.
Make sure you include the Muslim world, that is probably the biggest problem the LGBT Population of the world (as in as a whole) has to face, and probably will face for quite a while. There is tons of stuff to write about on it too, probably a whole research paper or 2 on its own.
Also, since you're doing it "in the world" and not just in the country, it doesn't hurt the list all the countries (or at least give the number of countries) that have some sort of legal punishment towards people who are homosexual. While also mention the fact that in most of the world did not start legalizing homosexuality until the 1970s.
i wouldn't stop at the Muslim world. All major world religions denigrate homosexuality in some way, including (much to many peoples' surprise) Buddhism.
Like I've said previously, I don't know of any other religions/cultures as large as the extremist nations in the Middle East (basically all the ones that openly allow the execution of LGBT people based on their sexuality) that are as much of a threat to us. They're the only ones that legitimately commit. I'm sure there have been plenty of other religions that have had some of their followers commit murder because the person was gay or something, Not denying that. But Islam is the only religion that truly has extreme power in many countries and they're not afraid of upsetting other people of the world and commit to their executions. In the Present time most importantly. Just as a reminder, I'm talking about Extremist Muslims. I know there are a hell of a lot of Muslims that are nowhere near as bad as most of the people in power in these countries, but I'm not talking about them. I'm talking about the ones that have the power to mandate and do mandate these executions. Specifically Iran.
The intolerance in these areas may be more open, but on a world scale, it's still a minority, and i don't think it's as bad a problem within the islamic world in general as your post suggests, especially within the society at large, especially the younger demographics. Iran's government is not representative of the attitudes of the population in general. It's a very young (in terms of average age) country, with a comparitively very liberal and progressive population of people in their 20's and 30's. Iran is one of those countries i find myself rather optimistic about. One may be disgusted by the attitudes of the government towards LGBT people, but that's not always indicative of the sentiment of the people at large, and not always indicative of the level of intolerance on the street level. Besides, even in a conservative muslim nation like pakistan, genderqueer people are granted legally protected status, for example. And what about Uganda? That's some of the most terrible legislation i've ever seen. Russia has a major problem with anti-LGBT violence too, and i THINK the statistics there say that the instances of homophobic violence per capita are higher than in any arabic or persian nation. This from a country with relatively liberal laws regarding homosexuality.
