Rainbow Refugee, a Vancouver-based non-profit charity founded in 2000, is an organization that offers programs to “support and assist LGBTQ+/HIV+ refugee claimants in BC’s Lower Mainland through facilitated peer support, referrals, system navigation, and accompaniment.” Every 2nd Thursday of each month at 7:30pm Rainbow Refugee hosts drop-in meetings open to the public at Qmunity located in Downtown Vancouver at 1170 Bute Street. At these meetings, important information regarding LGBTQ+/HIV+ refugee claimants is discussed in order to help refugees successfully gain refugee status in Canada. It should be known that Rainbow Refugee also is partnered with the Federal Government’s Immigration, Refugees Citizenship Canada (IRCC) to develop private sponsorships to ensure successful refugee claimants. Such sponsorships also provide financial aid to refugees to help settle in Canada. For refugees who flee their home country because they are persecuted on the basis of their sexuality, gender identity, or HIV+ status, finding a community in Vancouver that provides support for people who cannot divorce their simultaneous identities as being not only refugees but also, for being queer, is of vital importance.
Rainbow Refugee (Photo from Rainbow Refugee’s Facebook Page)
That being said, for many queer refugees who flee their home for their own safety, what if “home” had already been penetrated by colonial forces? To give context to why queer refugees exist, as of May 2017 out of the 124 countries in the world, 72 of them criminalize same-sex sexual relations (ILGA). In a report conducted in 2014, 57% of all countries that criminalize same-sex sexual relations were once British colonies. Furthermore, 70% of all former British colonies continued to criminalize forms of homosexuality.
If we recognize residual colonial laws criminalizing same-sex sexual relations are often the culprit behind why many queer refugees must flee their countries, then states such as Canada, the United States, and Britain must take the responsibility to accept them. After all, are queer refugees not simply traversing from ‘West to West’? From being excluded from a home country tainted with homophobic colonial laws to then being excluded from host countries that are rooted in colonial powers. Drawing the connection of colonial laws or colonial forces that have negatively impacted refugees are significant because all refugees implicated in such colonial systems are therefore deserving of their entrance through the borders of new countries.
Yet, various scholars who study the intersection between queerness, race, and migration identify unique barriers that queer refugees face. Karma R. Chávez discusses the notion of “cultural citizenship” as a way for queer immigrants and refugees to normalize themselves to be seen as less threatening within a largely white and heteronormative society. In Rainbow Refugee, queer refugee-seekers are expected to demonstrate in law courts not only that they are legitimately queer, but also, that they are positively contributing to Canadian society. This performative act of belonging to Canada is a standard unique to queer refugees that they are expected to demonstrate. In “Intimate Investments: Homonormativity, Global Lockdown, and the Seductions of Empire” (2008) Agathangelou et al. discuss the neoliberal underpinnings of the notion of a “global lockdown” that physically confines and targets refugee camps and immigrant detention centres. In our current globalized world, it is integral to resist ideas of queer and non-queer refugees as non-belonging subjects in Western states if Western states are to blame in the first place for being perpetrators of political and climate instability. Here, note that I am referring to non-queer refugees as equally deserving because they too become queered in discourses of national belonging. To borrow from Cathy Cohen, an anti-racist feminist queer scholar, this idea that to be queer encompasses more than sexuality, but of dis-belonging and subjugation through being interpreted as non-normative, is important in my reconceptualization for a plea for all refugees to be seen as legitimate, not just queer ones.
And not to mention, what about queer refugees who flee countries that do not have a British or European colonial history? There comes a point where all refugees have lives that matter because, in a globalized world, the problems of one country are inextricably linked to the external pressures, economic exploitation, and environmental degradation perpetrated by the world’s most economically ‘advanced’ nations: Western states as a product of neoliberalism and global capitalism.
Ultimately, diasporic queer refugees expose the contradictory notion of having to redeem themselves in a state like Canada or the United States when in fact similar anti-same-sex sexual relations laws in Canada and the United States have only until more recently been decriminalized. It is important for people to start recognizing how interconnected our world is, and how a history of colonialism cannot be erased when thinking about refugees, especially queer refugees.
Works Cited:
Agathangelou, A., Bassicchis, M. D., &. Tamara, S. L. (2008). Intimate investments: homonormativity, global lockdown and the seductions of empire. Radical History Review, 100: 120-143.
Chavez, K. (2010). Border (in)securities: normative and differential belonging in LGBTQ and immigrant rights discourse. Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies, 7(2): 136-155.
Cohen, C. (1997). Punks, bulldaggers and welfare queens: the radical potential of queer politics? GLQ, 3(4): 437-465.
Qmunity Website. Retrieved from: https://qmunity.ca
Rainbow Refugee Website: Retrieved from: https://www.rainbowrefugee.com