Is Vietnam turning against LGBTQ+ rights?

After years of steady progress on LGBTQ+ issues, Vietnam’s sudden cancellation of Pride events has raised fears that the ruling Communist Party is retreating into a more repressive stance.

In late September, Ho Chi Minh City abruptly cancelled its flagship Pride march and at least five other LGBTQ-themed events.  The decisions shocked activists, who have grown to view Vietnam as one of Asia’s most tolerant countries toward sexual minorities.

The reasons for the Ho Chi Minh City cancellation are still not clear, and Pride events proceeded as planned in the capital Hanoi, suggesting that the crackdown may have been a local decision rather than a coordinated national policy.

But others see the ban as part of a broader response by the Communist Party to a recent wave of youth-led protests that have unsettled multiple Asian governments.

There are worrying signs that Vietnam’s government is clamping down on LGBTQ+ rights, Patricia Gossman, associate director for the Asia division at Human Rights Watch, told DW.

“This may have to do with internal power struggles that deter anyone trying to secure their position from sticking their neck out on anything that could be seen as remotely controversial,” she added.

End of Vietnam’s success story?

Vietnam has long been viewed as a regional success ìn terms of granting LGBTQ+ rights. In 2015, it symbolically lifted a ban on same-sex marriage, although such unions are still not legally recognised in the country.

The same year, the country’s Civil Code was amended to allow people to change their legal gender. Pride marches in both Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City became annual fixtures.

Arguably, the biggest milestone came in 2022, when Vietnam’s Ministry of Health declared that homosexuality “is entirely not an illness,” adding that it “cannot be ‘cured’ nor need[s] to be ‘cured’ and cannot be converted in any way.”

Hanoi has generally focused on removing restrictions rather than on granting rights. Even so, Vietnam remains among the most LGBTQ-friendly nations in Asia, second only to Thailand, which legalised same-sex marriage this year.

A 2023 Pew Research Centre survey found that 65% of Vietnamese respondents supported legalising same-sex marriage, the second-highest level of support in Asia. By comparison, only 5% of Indonesians and 45% of Singaporeans favoured legalisation.

Another survey by the UN-backed Provincial Governance and Public Administration Performance Index found that 67% of Vietnamese supported same-sex marriage last year, up 11 percentage points from 2023.

Vietnam’s vanishing civil society

Until recently, the LGBTQ+ movement appeared to enjoy what some observers described as an “exempt status” from the Communist Party’s crackdown on civil society.

“LGBTQ activists didn’t challenge the ruling party’s political control,” Phil Robertson, the director of Asia Human Rights and Labour Advocates, told DW.

“It was convenient for Hanoi to be able to point to the LGBTQ rights issue when they needed to push back against the human rights criticism from trading partners in the EU,” he added.

That changed, analysts say, after former public security chief To Lam became general secretary of the Communist Party in the wake of his predecessor’s death last year.

Since then, To Lam has launched a “concerted campaign to wipe out civil society reformers. There are no exceptions,” said Robertson.

Dozens of environmental and labour activists have been detained in recent months, while critics of the government have been jailed on what rights groups say are politically motivated tax charges. Whatever space existed for civil society before To Lam’s rise, many argue, it has now vanished.

“The LGBTQ+ community saw this coming, but there was little they could do because To Lam’s crackdown is like a political tsunami wiping out everything in its path,” Robertson added.

Looming fear of Gen Z protests across Asia

Still, it is unclear whether the party views the LGBTQ+ movement itself as a threat.

Writing in Nikkei Asia last weekend, Dien Luong, a visiting fellow at Singapore’s ISEAS–Yusof Ishak Institute, argued that last month’s cancellations may have more to do with fears of youth unrest than hostility toward LGBTQ+ people.

Recent months have seen a wave of “Gen Z” protests across Asia, including violent demonstrations in Nepal that toppled the government in early September. Anger over inequality and corruption has also sparked deadly protests in Indonesia, the Philippines, and Timor-Leste.

“In a country where the prospect of disaffected youth toppling leaders has long unnerved Vietnamese authorities, the recent regional upheaval only reinforced those anxieties,” Dien Luong argued.

“Seen through that lens, the Pride cancellations were less about hostility to LGBTQ rights than about reflexive fear of large, youthful crowds. Even if other factors played a role, that fear was likely a central one,” he added.

Others suggest that Hanoi may now feel freer to act against LGBTQ+ groups because of shifting global dynamics.

The Trump factor

Gossman noted that the rollback of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs, as well as renewed attacks on LGBTQ+ rights in the United States since Donald Trump’s return to the White House, may have convinced Vietnam that it will face little criticism from Washington.

Vietnamese LGBTQ+ activists also say they no longer receive the same level of backing from the US Embassy in Hanoi they did in previous years. Some voices specifically point to the tenure of Ted Osius, the first openly gay US diplomat in East Asia, who served as the US ambassador to Hanoi from 2014 to 2017 and was seen as a driving force for LGBTQ+ advocacy in the country.

A Vietnamese activist, who asked not to be named, told DW that a small but vocal anti-LGBTQ+ segment of society has felt emboldened by rhetoric from US officials and Trump-aligned celebrities.

How Trump’s culture war puts LGBTQ+ community under pressure

Going underground

The future of Vietnam’s LGBTQ+ movement may hinge on the government’s motive for the pushback.

If the cancellations were a temporary overreaction to regional unrest, activists hope the damage will be short-lived. But if the Communist Party has started viewing LGBTQ+ groups as part of a wider threat to its authority, the consequences could be far more enduring.

“No doubt that in the future, there will be more meetings shut down or disrupted, more hostile surveillance and scrutiny, and likely hostile tax investigations into LGBTQ+ groups’ financing,” argued Robertson.

For now, many activists are choosing to keep a low profile. The anonymous Vietnamese activist told DW that many of his friends are prepared to remain silent, especially since most aren’t particularly politically active and don’t want to risk imprisonment.

Edited by: Srinivas Mazumdaru

First published on dw.com 

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