Autumn is always the season of protest. Winter is understandably too cold for street marches, and the new warmth of Spring comes as such a happy relief that people take well-deserved mental vacations from their social activism. Summer is naturally too hot, but with people clamouring into sweaty public spaces it does reawaken the mind to long-felt injustices.

From here it is a waiting game – counting the days until the heat falls away just enough to make street protests bearable. So with the season now firmly upon us, there is a question that needs asking – what has happened to Korea’s gay pride movement? Of course, I am not talking about Seoul here – their annual Queer Festival came like clockwork, but in some ways that is just the point. Seoul have been doing this for 20 years – and it is now less of a protest than a celebration.  

If the feeling inside Seoul is one of increasing inevitability – a matter of keeping up momentum and rolling over the enemy’s battlelines with less-and-less resistance – outside the capital things seem to be going the other way, with LBGTQ communities in open retreat.

Korea still ranks painfully low on all international metrics of LGBTQ ‘acceptance’, same sex marriage is not legal and neither are same sex civil unions, there are very few protections against work place discrimination, the military code criminalises homosexual behaviour, there is a near-complete absence of media representation, and no major political party supports an increase in gay rights.

It is under this shadow, that Busan held its first Pride Festival in 2017 (18 years after Seoul had theirs), and in 2018 the port city organised their first International Day Against Homophobia. And yet it feels like the counter protests – well organised conglomerations of evangelical Christians who regularly outnumber and drown out the marchers in these events – have started to have an effect, because this year the pinnacle of Busan’s Pride movement appears to be a closed-door brunch at a parochial bar.

I suppose this could be narrow-minded – that movements like these might be playing a longer term game that requires patience, planning and the occasional hiatus. But it doesn’t feel this way, and the gulf between LGBTQ communities in Seoul and other urban areas seems to be growing.

Joe Phillips, a Professor at Busan National University, explains this in terms of: 1. A lack of fealty and sense of community, with very little cross-dialogue, 2. The same type of centre-periphery split that tends to happen when so much money, talent and resources becomes centralised in large cities, 3. Most interestingly, within these smaller, fringe communities is a more gradualist outlook toward equality that seeks to first change social attitudes before seeking protections in law.

Then why the soft tones and the stepping away from the light? This appears to play directly into the hands of current Korean attitudes, which is largely one of indifference rather than open hostility (evangelical Christians are only 18% of the Korean population, and very few of them join in the counter protests), and yet this seems bad enough.

When someone hates you, they are also acknowledging that you matter in some way – through their disgust and animosity they are saying ‘I wish I could control you, influence you in a different direction, and make you see what I see’. The other end of this spectrum is invisibility – the people around you neither know nor care, that you are even there.

And yet there could be a subtlety here on the ground, something that is being missed from the outside. The goal of the LGBTQ movement shouldn’t be to simply highlight injustice, but rather to correct it – and this requires persuasion. It may be intolerably slow for those people, suffering and diminished by their lack of basic rights, but the only other option is force, coercion and imposition. Democracies can’t work like this, and totalitarianisms are never too friendly to minority groups.

It seems unlikely that the stubborn, rigid and deeply held beliefs of people are ever going to change by way of noisy protest, in-your-face spectacle, or blunt-force instrument. The more people feel under attack, the more likely they are to bunker-down and resist change.

As Joe Phillips points out, there might be a better way to go about this. Instead of stepping into identity politics and drawing firm, public battle-lines, advocates of LGBTQ rights could focus on building social ties and working relationships with the non-LGBTQ community; and to do so through non-political organisations. This is what Antonio Gramsci labelled a ‘War of Position’ – rather than embracing open conflict, influence and power might be better achieved quietly behind the scenes.

If indeed, regional Pride movements – abandoned by their partners in Seoul – are making this shift, then that is a positive. But the vacuum screams loudly, and the empty streets still feel like symbols of failure and defeat.

*** The related interview with Joe Phillips on LGBTQ rights in South Korea can be found here.