Foreign to the world: Challenges faced by LGBT refugees from Ukraine, Russia, and elsewhere

Queer identities and migration are interrelated, although this observation is a recent discovery. Scholars are exploring the “migration culture” in non-heteronormative communities, which is often fueled by discrimination and exclusion faced by queer people in many regions. Karma Chávez published a book in 2013 titled Queer Migration Politics, addressing the intersection between queer and migrant issues and civil and political coalitions that emerge at this confluence. The editors of Queer Diasporas point out a correlation between the “sexual fluidity” of the last decades and increased migration flows. In their new countries of residence, queer migrants establish fluid communities, and these formations have enabled researchers to reinvent the concept of diasporas, which were previously mainly ethnic. The very notion of queer as a particular “anti-identity identity” emerged in many parts thanks to migration from non-Western cultures to the West: African, Asian, and Latin American queers brought their sexual identities and practices that went beyond the Western scope of LGBTQI+, thus expanding it.

Just recently, up until the 1980s, many countries used non-normative sexuality or gender identity as a pretext for deportation or refusal of entry on a regulatory or customary basis. Thus, the McCarran–Walter Act passed in the U.S. in 1952 prohibited entry for persons with “sexual deviations”, while the Hart–Celler Act of 1965 explicitly banned the immigration of queers. Even after homosexuality was excluded from the list of mental disorders in 1973, these bans remained in effect, in one way or another, for at least another seventeen years. One did not even have to be queer to be refused entry or asylum: thus, up until the mid-20th century, the U.S. essentially blocked entry for Chinese women because of stereotypical associations with illegal sex work, promiscuity, and venereal diseases. In 2020, a collection of papers titled Queer and Trans Migrations was published, describing and analyzing various national practices of outlawing, incarcerating, and deporting queer migrants and refugees.