Homonationalism: the new Foreign Policy
Western governments did not embrace LGBTQ+ rights because they believed in them. They did so because they needed something to believe in.
In the spring of 2021, the United States Embassy in Riyadh decided to fly a Pride flag from its flagpole. The thing is, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia criminalizes homosexuality, with punishment ranging from flogging to death. American officials described the display as a statement of values. The queer Saudis who later had to explain to their government why they were photographed near an American building flying that symbol received something else entirely.
The flag marked them. Pride and consequence arrived as a package deal, and only one side had to live with the consequence.
What happened in Riyadh, and Budapest, and Kampala, and every capital where a Western embassy has deployed rainbow iconography as diplomatic punctuation, is the conversion of a civil rights movement into a geopolitical instrument. The conversion is now so complete that the governments operating it have largely stopped noticing what it does to the people it claims to serve.
The Free Domestic Pass
Start here, with the domestic architecture, because that’s where the logic originates. The administrations most aggressive in deploying LGBTQ+ rights as foreign policy have generally been those facing the greatest domestic constraints on advancing queer rights at home. State legislatures have passed over 500 anti-LGBTQ bills since 2021, targeting transgender youth with legislation ranging from sports bans to criminal liability for parents who seek gender-affirming care. The Equality Act, which would provide federal non-discrimination protections in employment, housing, and public accommodations, has passed the House twice and stalled in the Senate twice.
Against that domestic landscape, an embassy Pride flag is essentially free. No political capital required. No Senate confirmation. No swing-district blowback. The incentive structure is perfect: appear progressive on LGBTQ+ rights by condemning foreign homophobia while domestic legislative agenda on queer equality stagnates or reverses.
The bipartisan dimension runs deeper still. Republican senators who vote against domestic LGBTQ+ protections routinely support State Department funding for LGBTQ+ democracy promotion abroad, because abroad is where queer rights function as a civilizational ranking metric rather than a domestic obligation requiring structural change. The flag costs nothing at home. That’s precisely why it goes up.
When Liberation Becomes a Brand
The scholar Jasbir Puar named this dynamic in 2007. Homonationalism describes what happens when a government selectively embraces LGBTQ+ rights as evidence of civilizational superiority rather than as an expression of it. The logic runs: we protect our gay citizens, they imprison theirs, and that asymmetry justifies the full apparatus of Western moral authority.
What Puar identified has since been institutionalized. The State Department has a Special Envoy for the Human Rights of LGBTQI+ Persons. USAID’s 2023 inclusive policy explicitly commits to ‘do no harm’ principles and locally-led programming. The language is there. But the incentive structure surrounding it: visibility metrics, reporting requirements, the need to show Congress measurable progress. It all pushes implementation toward exactly the kind of public signaling the policy claims to avoid. And the gap between official rhetoric and institutional pressure is where damage happens.
The Cold War Already Wrote This Playbook
Mary Dudziak documented, in Cold War Civil Rights, the mechanism by which the United States deployed racial integration as international propaganda during the Soviet competition for the Global South, while Jim Crow persisted at home. The State Department sent jazz musicians and Black athletes to African and Asian capitals. The domestic civil rights movement was tolerated, selectively accelerated, and used as foreign policy evidence, not because the administration believed in it, but because Soviet propaganda had made American racism a liability.
The structure is identical today. LGBTQ+ rights are a showcase. Russia and China play the role of the Soviet Union. And the Global South is, again, the audience being courted.
The adversaries, though, have by now read the playbook. Vladimir Putin’s 2013 gay propaganda law was designed as a geopolitical counter-move, packaging state homophobia as resistance to American cultural imperialism. That framing found a receptive audience across Africa, the Middle East, and parts of Asia, where the memory of Western conditionality is long and the appetite for its newest iteration is limited. China’s approach is subtler: suppressing queer visibility algorithmically rather than legislatively, while publicly framing Western LGBTQ+ advocacy as cultural warfare. In the competition for Global South alignment, that framing carries traction precisely because it lands on something real.
The Selectivity Problem
The discrepancy writes itself. The United States maintains a security partnership with Saudi Arabia, a state that executes gay men, while sanctioning Ugandan officials over the 2023 Anti-Homosexuality Act. The explanation is strategic interest. Saudi oil and regional alignment matter more than Saudi executions. Uganda offers no comparable leverage, so Uganda receives the pressure.
This is how foreign policy functions. What makes the calculation corrosive in the LGBTQ+ context is that communities in both sanctioned and unsanctioned regimes understand it perfectly. Queer Saudis watch their government execute men like them while the embassy issues statements about values. Queer Ugandans watch their government pass harsher laws in explicit response to Western pressure. Both communities learn their safety is contingent on someone else’s strategic calculus.
Brand Israel: The State-Engineered Version
Israel offers the most developed case study of homonationalism as deliberate government policy. The mechanism has a founding document. In 2005, the Israeli Foreign Ministry, Prime Minister’s Office, and Finance Ministry launched the Brand Israel campaign, a multimillion-dollar rebranding effort developed with American marketing executives after internal surveys found that Israel ranked, in one blunt assessment, as the worst national brand ever measured. The goal was to reposition the country’s international image from militaristic and conflict-ridden to modern, cosmopolitan, and creative, targeting the 18-to-34 demographic in Western markets.
LGBTQ+ imagery became the campaign’s primary instrument. Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni appointed diplomat Ido Aharoni to head Israel’s first brand management office, with a four-million-dollar budget supplementing existing public diplomacy spending. By 2011, the Tourism Ministry and Tel Aviv municipality had invested approximately ninety-four million dollars to position Tel Aviv as an international gay vacation destination. Tel Aviv Pride became a state-sponsored export. TLVFest was marketed as the Middle East’s only LGBTQ+ film festival. Promotional materials foregrounded open IDF service as evidence of Israeli modernity. Aharoni described the strategy’s purpose directly: the goal was not to hide the conflict but to broaden the conversation.
Israel’s domestic LGBTQ+ record is real and regionally exceptional. Open military service since 1993, recognition of foreign same-sex marriages, and a visible urban queer culture in Tel Aviv represent genuine achievements, built through decades of Israeli activists fighting conservative and religious political establishments. That authenticity is precisely what makes Brand Israel effective. It requires no fabrication. It requires only selective amplification, pointing a spotlight at one corner of a room while leaving the rest dark.
Scholar and activist Sarah Schulman named this in a 2011 New York Times op-ed that gave the practice a word: pinkwashing. The term describes a government deploying LGBTQ+ rights as a deliberate strategy to conceal ongoing human rights violations behind an image of liberal modernity. The charge is specific to the framing, not the fact. Israel’s gay rights record and its instrumentalization of that record can coexist. Both things can be true simultaneously.
The Gaza Flag
In November 2023, an Israeli soldier raised a rainbow flag over the rubble of Gaza. The image went viral within hours. The soldier had written ‘in the name of love’ across the flag, and his accompanying social media post declared that the IDF was the only army in the Middle East that allowed gay people the freedom to be who they are. Israel’s official state accounts amplified the imagery.
The moment crystallized a critique Palestinian queer activists had been developing for years. Queerness, in this framing, became justification rather than incidental detail, a moral credential attached to military operations in a territory where the majority of casualties were civilians. The rainbow flag raised over bombed structures did exactly what the Brand Israel campaign was designed to do: it shifted attention from the architecture of conflict to the identity of the soldier holding the flag. Whether that soldier’s conviction was genuine was beside the point. The point was the architecture.
For Haneen Maikey, founder of alQaws in Jerusalem, the Gaza flag distilled a dynamic her organization had been documenting for over a decade. A rainbow flag does not improve a queer Palestinian’s situation at a checkpoint. What it does is reframe the checkpoint as liberation.
When PR Becomes Policy
alQaws’s 2020 paper ‘Beyond Propaganda: Pinkwashing as Colonial Violence’ pushes the critique further than the propaganda frame allows. The damage, alQaws argues, is direct rather than rhetorical. By promoting narratives that portray Palestinian society as irredeemably homophobic and Israeli society as its tolerant counterpart, the campaign operates inside Palestinian communities, not merely on Western audiences. It pathologizes queer Palestinians’ attachment to their own families and society, making alignment with the occupier appear as a precondition of personal liberation.
Palestinian anthropologist Sa’ed Atshan has identified the campaign’s four-part structure: affirm queer Israeli agency, elide Israeli homophobia, name Palestinian homophobia while erasing queer Palestinian agency, then juxtapose those two portraits as a civilizational argument for the superiority of one society over the other. The result is a discourse that recruits LGBTQ+ solidarity internationally while dividing Palestinians internally. The rainbow flag becomes both a recruitment tool abroad and a psychological instrument at home. alQaws calls this colonial violence rather than propaganda because propaganda implies only an external audience. This one has an internal target.
The Counterargument and Its Limits
The defense of Israel’s LGBTQ+ record deserves precise treatment. The rights are genuine, built through decades of domestic activism and won against considerable conservative and religious opposition within Israeli society. Dismissing them as pure propaganda erases the Israeli advocates who built them. The defense also carries a legitimate double-standard charge: critics who apply the pinkwashing frame to Israel rarely scrutinize the Palestinian Authority with comparable intensity. The PA banned LGBTQ+ organizing in the West Bank in 2019, and Hamas criminalizes homosexuality in Gaza. If the analytical standard is consistency, it is being inconsistently applied.
The double-standard critique, though valid as a check on bad-faith activism, does not dissolve the Brand Israel framework’s own logic. A government can hold a genuine domestic LGBTQ+ record and simultaneously weaponize it as a public diplomacy instrument to deflect criticism of unrelated policies. The record and the weaponization can coexist. That coexistence is precisely what makes pinkwashing operationally effective, and precisely what makes Puar’s framework durable across contexts well beyond Israel. The mechanism requires no individual cynicism. It requires only an institutional incentive structure that makes the deployment of minority identity coherent with state interests. That structure, as this article has argued throughout, is a recurring feature of Western foreign policy, not an Israeli invention.
What the Evidence Shows
The backlash pattern has a record. Nigeria’s Same-Sex Prohibition Act was signed in January 2014, immediately after Western governments made LGBTQ+ rights a high-profile diplomatic issue. President Goodluck Jonathan framed the signing as resistance to Western imperialism. The bill had languished for years; Western visibility gave it political momentum.
The pattern runs wider. Research on naming-and-shaming campaigns shows mixed results at best. In some cases, international pressure correlates with harsher domestic legislation as governments perform resistance to foreign interference. Quiet diplomatic engagement has produced incremental gains — decriminalization victories in Botswana and Kenya — that received minimal Western attention because they generated no photo opportunities. The incentive structure rewards visibility. Visibility sometimes harms the people it’s meant to illuminate.
The Fracture Is Already Visible
Across Africa, and in pockets of Latin America and South Asia, a generation of queer activists is breaking with the Western NGO architecture that funds them. The African LGBTQ+ literature emerging from South Africa, Uganda, Zimbabwe, and Kenya articulates a sexual politics rooted in pre-colonial gender traditions and post-apartheid liberation frameworks that carry no obligation to the Western rainbow flag. Organizations like GALZ in Zimbabwe have spent three decades navigating the space between donor requirements and local political realities in which unconditional alignment with Western foreign policy amounts to organizational suicide.
As geopolitical competition intensifies, the countries that have aligned with Russia and China’s framing of LGBTQ+ advocacy as cultural warfare will not soften. They’ll harden. And queer communities inside those countries will remain caught between a government framing their existence as foreign contamination and an international advocacy architecture framing their liberation as American soft power.
Uganda’s parliament passed the Anti-Homosexuality Act in May 2023. The United States condemned it, issued sanctions, and delivered statements. Ugandan queer activists who had warned for years that Western visibility campaigns were inflaming local political hostility — and who had asked for quieter, more sustained forms of solidarity that didn’t make them targets — were not consulted before the flag went up or the statements were issued.
They were the occasion for the statements. The architecture produced exactly what its incentives demanded. That is the harder problem: the policy works precisely as designed.
When Public Signaling Helps
(and When It Doesn’t)
Helpful contexts: In relatively tolerant or allied democracies (Western Europe, parts of Latin America, South Africa, Australia), a Pride flag reinforces shared values, boosts morale among local LGBTQ+ groups, and has minimal backlash risk. It can also support tourism or cultural ties in places like Tel Aviv.
Risky contexts: In highly conservative societies (much of the Middle East, parts of Africa, Asia, or Eastern Europe), it can “mark” both the embassy and local individuals. Adversaries (Russia, China, or local governments) exploit it to portray LGBTQ+ rights as a neocolonial import, gaining traction in the Global South where memories of Western conditionality run deep. This doesn’t excuse local homophobia—it highlights how poor tactics can worsen the environment for change.
The US has pursued LGBTQ+ rights through other channels: the Special Envoy position, USAID funding, the Global Equality Fund, sanctions in extreme cases (e.g., Uganda officials), and multilateral work. These can be more substantive than a flag, though they too face criticism for conditionality and donor-driven priorities.
Better Alternatives (Pragmatic Approach)
The article’s revised version ends with sensible suggestions that align with evidence from diplomats, local activists, and researchers:
Prioritize private/quiet diplomacy — Behind-the-scenes engagement, support for local civil society, and technical assistance often yield better results without the spotlight. Court challenges and incremental health/anti-violence programs have driven real decriminalizations in parts of Africa and Asia with less provocation.
Consult local voices first — Many Global South queer activists emphasize that external visibility should follow their lead, not precede it. Some explicitly request quieter solidarity to avoid being cast as foreign proxies.
Decouple from geopolitics — Apply pressure consistently (not selectively based on oil alliances or strategic interests) or focus on universal principles like basic safety and non-violence rather than full “export” of Western frameworks.
Fund flexibly — Support local organizations without forcing them to adopt donor-preferred language or theories of change, reducing “NGO-ization” risks.
Recognize symbolism’s limits — Visibility is a tactic, not an end. In hostile environments, it can become counterproductive theater.