Lesbians brought lesbian rights to the world stage at a 1995 United Nations conference event, writes LSE Library curator Gillian Murphy, using sources from the Women’s Library and Hall-Carpenter Archives at LSE.
The Fourth United Nations World Conference on Women was held in Beijing, China, from 3 to 15 September 1995. It was a huge event with over 50,000 people attending the conference and a parallel programme of events organised by Non-Government Organisations (NGO) in Huairou from 30 August to 15 September.
The theme of the conference was equality, development and peace. Delegates discussed and adopted a Platform for Action document, a blueprint for countries to follow to foster women’s status around the world. Some highlights of the Platform for Action included: provision of well-funded shelters and support for victims of violence; gender equality on government bodies and committees; and consideration of how to measure women’s unpaid work.
For the first time, there was an official lesbian tent at the NGO Forum at Huairou which provided a space for workshops and for sharing information.
Lesbians brought lesbian rights to the world stage. They marched down the main road at the NGO Forum with banners, chanting in English, Spanish, French and Zulu.
The 8 September was designated as Human Rights Day and some lesbians unfurled a 25-foot “Lesbian rights are human rights” banner over the balcony in the main hall of the conference in Beijing.
Lesbians ensured that sexual rights were included in official discussions. On 13 September, the South African activist and co-founder of Gay and Lesbian Organisation of the Witwatersrand, Bev Ditsie, made a historic speech at the conference which brought unprecedented visibility to lesbian issues. She asked delegates to “make this a conference for all women regardless of their sexual orientation”. She was asking for inclusive gender equality.
Lesbians lobbied for the inclusion of a clause prohibiting discrimination based on sexual orientation into the Platform for Action document. Although this was not successful, it was the first time that there had been an official debate about the discrimination faced by lesbians. Ten years earlier, at the Third UN International Conference on Women in Nairobi, only the Netherlands would speak in support of lesbians. Now at Beijing, over 30 countries including Cuba, Chile, Slovenia and South Africa, were in support of such a clause at these UN conferences.
Sources for this blog come from The Women’s Library and the Hall-Carpenter Archives at LSE. For more information about this event, have a look at Lesbians take on the UN from “Trouble and Strife“, issue 39, Summer 1996.
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