As we approach PRIDE season, I started thinking about what Pride means for LGBTQ expats living abroad.
My little secret
First, I’ll let you in on a little secret - Pride season and I haven’t always been the best of friends. I didn’t really understand what Pride was meant to represent in my life, and it always felt like a forced, performative acceptance of my being gay.
I realize now that was primarily because, as an expat for 15 years, I was almost entirely focused on assimilation, ie fitting into local cultures and not standing out.
“Passing” was my goal. I celebrated being mistaken for a local.
If I’m honest, so was “passing” as straight, or at least, not standing out as gay. At first, this was from a few years living in Central America. As an elementary school teacher, I didn’t want the very Catholic local parents to view me as a danger to their children, and I stayed very much in the closet. After that, no matter where I moved, it became a habit to keep my private life very private.
Finding queer community wasn’t exactly easy for me, either. As someone with a tendency to live in smaller cities a bit off the beaten path, I didn’t really know how to join local queer events, and I had no idea how to find other queer expats, either.
Underserved and poorly understood
Now that I coach and consult for the LGBTQ expat community, I realize just how many people share my experiences. The needs and concerns of LGBTQ expats are also just incredibly underserved.
A major goal of expats is to integrate with local communities, but integrating with local queer communities is complex. Depending where you move, the community may be underground or the local LGBTQ community may not actually feel comfortable with Western expats who can sometimes bring a “colonizer” mentality to local LGBTQ movements.
On the other hand, there may be a robust and welcoming LGBTQ community, which can really help you assimilate. And yet…sometimes you also really need your community of fellow expats to lean on during periods of intercultural confusion or homesickness that locals - gay or straight - just don’t understand. While hetero expats can be lovely, it’s the queer expats who understand the nuance and complexity of it all.
The nuance of LGBTQ expat life
As queer expats, we try to fit in, but also want to be out.
When do we, when CAN we, come out to fellow expats?
Can we ever come out to locals?
Are we safer if we are honest rather than keeping it quiet and someone finding out?
Can we bring our spouses with us and will our families be recognized?
Can I be out at work? Will I be treated differently in my job?
Is it different for foreigners to be out than locals (often times, yes)? Will landlords or real estate agents hesitate to work with me?
Are there very specific places where I should live?
Are there gayborhoods? Is it necessary to live in one?
And are there only certain cities I can move to, or can I fulfill my dream of a quiet home in the countryside?
Of course, our community knows how to operate with nuance in our home countries: we read your body language, and your actual language, like whether you tell us about how you have a gay friend or you are fine with whatever “lifestyle” we choose. We learn to trust our gut reactions regarding safety, or whether that person who just passed us was family (also LGBTQ).
We were practically made for expat life, since many of us have been operating from the outside of mainstream culture our whole lives.
LGBTQ folks have always lived abroad
And let’s be really clear: we LGBTQ folks have always moved abroad. Some go in search of a safer life; others toward a more adventurous one.
Just look at the Americans in Paris in the 1920s and 30s, like Gertrude Stein, Josephine Baker, Langston Hughes and Richard Wright. What a time and a place to have been alive, surrounded by such incredible queer, expat excellence!
We know about this queer American expat enclave because they were all writers who expressed themselves with a cohort of queer expats. They left their homeland and moved to a more accepting place. Not only did they find it, but they also made it, created it together.
Thousands of others who were not famous writers also went abroad. Some went in search of a safer life; others a more adventurous one.
So we go, and we enjoy the same rush of adventure and navigate the same uncertainties that hetero-expats face. We take with us our own culture’s feelings about queerness, and learn to adapt to another country’s same or very different attitudes as well. Always an on-the-job training, of sorts.
The pride I feel for LGBTQ expats today
Today, as an LGBTQ expat coach and consultant, I feel a real sense of connection with the meaning of Pride. It is no longer forced on me. I am so proud of us, of the way we fight for our right to live freely, as who we are, with those we love.
Homosexuality is criminalized in roughly 70 countries, punishable by death in at least six. And while it is being decriminalized in many countries, there are also many countries that seem very LGBTQ-friendly but haven’t enacted protections for the community.
We can’t just move where we want
I see the way that my clients have to filter their dreams through the lens of their queerness. Want to live on a tropical beach or the rural countryside? We need to look not only at the laws and urban attitudes, but whether or not you’ll have peace where you want to actually live.
And yet we still go.
We still live out our dreams and live our biggest, fullest lives. We won’t live small. It’s not who we are.
For many LGBTQ+ Americans right now, it sure feels like now is the time to finally get out of here. With a judicial slippery slope threatening to take away all that we have worked for, and the rise of remote work and steady income from anywhere, the time is now to take that leap.
If you’re interested in that, I’m more than happy to help you with that dream.
I wrote the book on How To Move Abroad, a Relocation Guide to connect with on-the-ground specialists and I’ll coach you all the way through your journey.
