Scott Long

In April 2015, Long made a rare comment on the level of personal danger he felt:

A spectre is stalking the arenas where human rights activists work. ...The forces in question define themselves most often by what they claim to defend—and that shifts from time to time and territory to territory: "culture," "tradition," "values," or "religion." What they share is a common target: sexual rights and sexual freedoms. These are most often represented by women's reproductive rights, the assault on which continues. The most vividly drawn and violently reviled enemy typically is homosexuality. "Gay and lesbian rights," the dignity of people with different desires, the basic principle of non-discrimination based on sexual orientation: all these are painted as incompatible with fundamental values, even with humanity itself. The target is chosen with passion, but also precision and care. Movements for the rights of lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender people, along with movements that assert sexual rights more generally, are arguably the most vulnerable edge of the human rights movement. In country after country they are easy to defame and discredit. But the attack on them also opens space for attacking human rights principles themselves—as not universal but "foreign," as not protectors of diversity but threats to sovereignty, and as carriers of cultural perversion.

Cultures are made up of faces. They are not monoliths; they are composed of diverse individuals, each contributing to and minutely changing what the culture means and does. When a culture is reinvented for ideological purposes as a faceless, seamless whole—incapable of dissent from within, so that any dissenter automatically becomes an outsider; incapable of changing, so that growth seems like destruction—it has ceased to be an environment in which people can live and interpret their lives. … The role of human rights principles, unquestionably, is to mark out spaces of personal freedom, to affirm areas where individual privacy and dignity and autonomy should prevail against state or community regulation. But human rights principles also defend communities…. They ensure diversity both among communities and cultures, and within them. Rights work does not promise utopia, only an endless process of protecting basic human values against constantly renewing threats. But it also does not promise the dissolution of cultures or the annihilation of traditions. It helps to ensure that they remain responsive to the human beings they contain.

All of a sudden the OMON police were there too. Instead of trying to separate skinheads and gays, though, they surrounded all of us in a double line, constricting the circle and shoving the crowd tightly together so that we were jammed up against each other—for maximum damage. The crush was paralyzing – I could barely breathe. The extremists were delivering body blows to people around me right and left. ... Finally the circle opened enough for most of us inside to escape. Various other people were arrested outside the circle. Yevgeniya Debryanskaya, one of the founders of the lesbian movement in Russia, was giving a media interview nearby. Police seized her and a friend and bundled her into the police van.

Long helped organize several social media campaigns in Egypt to mobilize opposition to the crackdown. In December 2014, he was the first to break the news of a police raid on a Cairo bathhouse led by prominent journalist Mona Iraqi. 26 men were arrested and charged with "debauchery" in the most high-profile gay trial since the Queen Boat. The shocking pictures of the raid Long published galvanized indignation at the arrests, both inside Egypt and beyond. Partly as a result a court eventually acquitted all the men, a victory highly unusual under the draconian Sisi regime. Long was interviewed extensively by publications such as The New York Times, the Guardian, BuzzFeed, and Global Post, as well as in the Egyptian media. He also wrote about the human rights crisis in Egypt in such venues as the Irish Times and the Advocate.

I sometimes seem insouciant about threats in Egypt, but I'm not. It's just that the atmosphere of threat is general here. It affects every corner of your personality, yet it's hard to take it personally, so wide is the danger spread. ... Yesterday, talking with a reporter in the usual seedy Cairo café — a place I've always considered safe — I saw a well-dressed man at the next table listening intently. Finally he interrupted. He gathered I was interested in human rights, he said. What did I do? Did I work for Freedom House? Freedom House is, of course, a banned organization, its local office raided and shuttered by the military regime back in 2011. I said no. He added, almost enticingly, that he himself had been tortured, and offered to show me his scars. I gave him my contact information and told him to call me. That was simple responsibility – you do not refuse a torture victim anything you can give; but afterwards I cringed inside. It's how things are in Egypt. Other people, foreign passport-holders among them, have been arrested for "political" conversations in public places. You don't know if the person who approaches you is victim or violator, survivor of torture or State Security agent; or both.

Working independently from any institution, Long visited dozens of Romanian prisons over the following years, interviewing prisoners, linking them to legal assistance, and documenting torture and arbitrary arrest of lesbians as well as gay men. One of the first cases he investigated was that of Ciprian Cucu and Marian Mutașcu, two young men – respectively 17 and 19 – who had become lovers. Jailed for months, the two were tortured brutally. Soon after Marian Mutascu committed suicide. Long visited their home towns, interviewed family members, and confronted the arresting officer and prosecutors. Information he provided persuaded Amnesty International to recognize the two men as prisoners of conscience, the first time the organization had taken up the case of a couple jailed for their sexual orientation. The international pressure Long helped create won the two their freedom.

Long documented Cetiner's story and persuaded Amnesty International to adopt her as a prisoner of conscience, the first time the organization had taken up the case of a lesbian imprisoned for her sexual orientation. Later that year, he wrote Public Scandals: Sexual Orientation and Criminal Law in Romania, a detailed study jointly published by IGLHRC and Human Rights Watch – the first report on LGBT issues ever issued by the latter organization.

One of the most basic splits in contemporary human rights work – sometimes mapped onto a division between "global South" and "global North," though not quite reducible to it – is between rights as a set of legal norms, and rights as a complex of human dreams and political aspirations. The split has to do, as well, with the difference between institutions and movements, the former ones formal and developing their own standards and needs, the latter fluid and chaotic and responsible to individuals' and communities' desires and drives … Human Rights Watch – and other international organizations like it – needs a far deeper understanding of what social movements are, why they are important, how they turn human rights into living values rather than legal abstractions.

Long continued to work in support of Iraqis' rights and lives for many years. In 2012, when a new wave of death-squad killings erupted in Baghdad, Long—by then a fellow at Harvard Law School—demonstrated that the attack grew from a state-promoted moral panic over "emos" allegedly corrupting Iraqi youth. Long produced evidence that security forces were implicated in the killings, and showed how other victims, such as men seen as "effeminate" or gay, were being swept up in the murders as well. Long personally posted warnings in Arabic on more than 500 Iraqis' personals sites and ads with advice about safety. Long's research was cited in The New York Times. Long has also written on Iraq for publications including the Guardian and Jadaliyya.

In fall 2010, Long was a senior fellow at the Center for Gender and Sexuality Law at Columbia University Law School. From January 2011 - September 2012, he was a visiting fellow at the Human Rights Program at Harvard Law School.

In late 2012, Long moved to Cairo, Egypt. The New York Times reported that he was "researching a book about sexual politics." Although for nine years Egypt's law against "debauchery" had almost never been enforced, after the July 2013 military coup that brought General Abdel Fattah el-Sisi to power, a new crackdown on LGBT people began. More than 150 people were arrested in the next 18 months. Long documented the arrests from the start, interviewing as many as possible of the victims and publicizing many accounts on his blog, A Paper Bird. He stressed the role of gender (rather than sexual orientation) in the persecution, and the way that transgender women and "effeminate" men were especially targeted for arrest. Long worked on a legal guide for endangered LGBT Egyptians that was published, in Arabic, on his blog. He also published warnings, in both English and Arabic, about Internet entrapment and surveillance in Egypt and how to protect online privacy.

Scott Long (born June 5, 1963 in Radford, Virginia) is a US-born activist for international human rights, primarily focusing on the rights of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) people. He founded the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Rights Program at Human Rights Watch, the first-ever program on LGBT rights at a major "mainstream" human rights organization, and served as its executive director from May 2004 - August 2010. He later was a Visiting Fellow in the Human Rights Program of Harvard Law School from 2011 - 2012.

Under Long's leadership, Human Rights Watch also documented discrimination and violence against LGBT people in Iran; violence against lesbians and transgender men in Kyrgyzstan; violence and discrimination against LGBT people in Turkey; killings and abuses of transgender people in Honduras; and moral panics over gender in Kuwait and the Gulf states, and their human rights consequences. In 2010, Susana T. Fried of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) said, "Compared to a decade ago, many more governments and international organizations recognize the rights and lives of LGBT people as their legitimate concern ... Scott has made innumerable contributions to this change, and his leadership has been vital."

Long suffered severe pulmonary embolisms in July 2010. He wrote, "While running to catch a bus on a New York street, I saw a blinding effusion of white light, amid which several spangled and bell-bottomed figures vaguely resembling ABBA beckoned me to an eternal disco complete with spinning ball. Yanked back from their blandishments by a superior fashion sense, I spent a couple of weeks in intensive care." Long resigned from Human Rights Watch the following month in order to recuperate. In his resignation letter, published in English and Spanish, he recollected that

In 2010, Long received the Lifetime Achievement Award presented by the Harvard Lambda Law Association, an "Annual award given to someone whose life's work has significantly advanced the human and civil rights of LGBT people."

In early 2009, Iraqi militias in Baghdad and elsewhere began a massive campaign of brutal murders, targeting men suspected of homosexual conduct. Reports that emerged from Iraq were initially confused and contradictory, until Long and Human Rights Watch went to Iraq to find the facts behind the stories of lethal violence, and – in a unique project – to help as many men as possible escape. According to New York magazine,

In 2009, Long wrote an article, published in the Routledge journal Contemporary Politics, on Mahmoud Asgari and Ayaz Marhoni which sharply criticized the accuracy of claims Tatchell and OutRage! had made about Iran. Peter Tatchell wrote to Human Rights Watch in 2010, and Kenneth Roth and Long issued an apology in June 2010. Taylor & Francis issued an apology in 2012 declaring there were "substantial innaccuracies" in the essay.

The article had been widely praised; Dianne Otto, a professor of international law, called it "meticulous genealogy of some western LGBTI advocacy of sexuality rights in Iran." Long asserted that Tatchell intimidated HRW and Taylor & Francis with legal threats under english defamation law, while Tatchell claims he never made any legal threats against Human Rights Watch, and that Taylor & Francis only retracted the paper because it had claims that were unsubstantiated. Tatchell has been accused of intimidating or harassing other critics with threats of action under England's libel laws, at the time some of the most restrictive in the world. In 2009, Tatchell had induced a small UK feminist publisher to withdraw an anthology that contained an article critical of him, and to publish an extensive apology. In an open letter published in February 2016, 165 activists and academics cited the withdrawal of Long's article as well as other incidents and accused Tatchell of "intolerance of criticism and disrespect for others' free expression."

Long again documented violence and police arrests at Moscow Pride 2007, where he was briefly detained. He wrote a report on those abuses, co-published by Human Rights Watch and the International Lesbian and Gay Association - Europe.

Long also campaigned for years against homophobic policies in Uganda. He traced connections between discrimination in Uganda and Bush administration decisions in the U.S., arguing in 2007 that "When the U.S. funds abstinence-only programmes in Uganda, it tells people that LGBT people's sexualities are dangerous and must be denied." Long and Human Rights Watch also documented how U.S. anti-HIV/AIDS funding had been funneled to groups actively promoting homophobia in Uganda. Long's efforts drew the direct ire not only of the Ugandan government but of notorious anti-gay preacher Martin Ssempa. Long helped coordinate international responses to the draconian Anti-Homosexuality Bill after it was introduced in 2009, working to ensure that international groups took their guidance from domestic Ugandan advocates. The bill "is clearly an attempt to divide and weaken civil society by striking at one of its most marginalized groups," he said; "the government may be starting here, but who will be next?" In an interview shortly after the bill's appearance, Long explained its origins in the politics of moral panic:

In 2007, Long and Human Rights Watch received the Global Justice Award of the Worldwide Fellowship of the Metropolitan Community Churches, in recognition of "groundbreaking work defending LGBT people worldwide from violence, discrimination, and abuse."

Long went to Moscow in 2006 to support Russian activists, including Nikolay Alexeyev, attempting to organize a gay pride march in defiance of an official ban. The ban was part of a general strangling of civil society as President Vladimir Putin's regime became more authoritarian. Long witnessed and reported on skinhead and police violence against marchers, including a brutal attack on German member of the Bundestag Volker Beck. Long documented collusion between police and violent right-wing extremists, and "evidence that the police lured the lesbian and gay activists... to be beaten, then selectively jailed." He wrote of his own experience at the abortive march:

Long continued to work with and support LGBT activists in Africa. During his tenure, Human Rights Watch embarked on in-depth investigations of punitive rapes of black lesbians and transgender men in South Africa; arrests of LGBT people in Cameroon; and the impact of Senegal's sodomy law. Long cooperated closely with activists in Nigeria in opposing the "Same Sex Marriage (Prohibition) Act" introduced in 2006, which would have punished displays of same-sex affection as well as any public statements in support of LGBT people's freedoms. Human Rights Watch's advocacy helped ensure the bill failed in several legislative sessions, though a version became law many years later, in 2014. Long repeatedly stressed that state-sponsored homophobia and repressive laws against LGBT people in Africa should not be seen in isolation, but as part of broader government campaigns against civil society. "If the national assembly can strip one group of its freedoms, then the liberties of all Nigerians are at risk," he said.

In 2006, Long was the main author of a report on binational same-sex couples and the discrimination they face in U.S. immigration law, amid a fierce religious and social backlash against recognition of same-sex relationships in the United States. Long also wrote a survey of the strategies, priorities, and needs of grassroots sexual-rights activism around the globe, and (with Indian activist Alok Gupta) an influential history of the British colonial origins of more than the half the world's sodomy laws

Long played a key role in developing the Yogyakarta Principles, an influential set of guidelines on how human rights law applies to issues of sexual orientation and gender identity. Long helped conceive the principles' scope and shape, and served on a secretariat that drafted an initial version for the 16 experts who debated and finalized them. He also attended the final experts' meeting in Yogyakarta, Indonesia, in November 2006. The principles have been a crucial tool for local activists in lobbying governments, and an important "soft law" way to expand international protections for LGBT people.

After his time in Egypt, Long's work increasingly explored how governments (and forces bidding for political power) exploit fears around sexuality and gender to create massive moral panics. This kind of cultural backlash, Long argued, endangers not just LGBT people but human rights in general. In an influential 2005 essay on "Sexuality and the 'Cultural' War on Human Rights," he wrote:

Paradoxically, Long was also criticized from the opposite perspective. Other campaigners, especially the British activist Peter Tatchell, attacked him for questioning the universal validity of "gay" identity. Long's work produced controversy in 2005 and 2006 after photographs of the hanging of two teenagers in the city of Mashhad, Iran went viral on the web. Tatchell, gay writer Doug Ireland, and U.S. activist Michael Petrelis insisted that the youths were hanged not for the rape of a 13-year-old (as initially reported in the Iranian press) but for being gay. Long and Human Rights Watch, while conducting intensive research on the situation for LGBT people in Iran, maintained the evidence in the Mashhad case was inconclusive, and also questioned assigning the youths a Western "gay" identity in a culturally complex situation where neither they nor others around them were able to speak for themselves. Long urged that the executions should be condemned, but that it was not necessary to believe the youths were either "gay" or completely innocent to do so. "Rights aren't for saints, and if we only defend them for people onto whom we can project our own qualities, our own identities, we aren't activists but narcissists with attitude," he said. "If these kids aren't 'gay,' or 'innocent,' but are 'straight' or 'guilty,' does it make their fear less horrible, their suffering less real? Does it make them less dead?" Long was attacked for a social constructionist approach to LGBT activism. Some, including Tatchell, questioned whether his work reflected covertly pro-Islamic sympathies.

In 2004 in Cairo, together with Human Rights Watch executive director Kenneth Roth, Long launched a report on the Egyptian crackdown against gays. In Cairo, Long and Roth met with Egyptian officials including the country's Prosecutor General and deputy Minister of Interior. Human Rights Watch later stated:

Human Rights Watch established its Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Rights Program in 2004, with Long as director. Bruce Rabb, a member of HRW's governing board, remembered that when Long spoke to the board, "The depth of Scott's knowledge and the passion he had for his work, combined with the dramatic effectiveness of his research and advocacy in Egypt, made it clear to all present that, while setting up an LGBT program would break significant new ground for Human Rights Watch, Scott's program would be core to Human Rights Watch's mission and definitely should be undertaken."

Later in 2004, Long worked to launch a Human Rights Watch report on homophobic violence and HIV/AIDS in Jamaica. The report stimulated an intense debate in Jamaica and across the Caribbean over homosexuality and the region's colonial-era sodomy laws, a furious controversy which continued into the next decade. Editorials condemning Jamaica's anti-gay policies appeared in publications such as The New York Times and The Economist, and filled the Jamaican press as well. For the first time the government suggested a willingness to modify its repressive legislation on consensual sexual acts. Long continued to cast a spotlight on abuses in Jamaica during the following years, and to demand government action against them. "Gays and lesbians in Jamaica face violence at home, in public, even in a house of worship, and official silence encourages the spread of hate," he said in 2008. "What stands out about Jamaica is how absolutely, head-in-the-sand unwilling the authorities have been for years to acknowledge or address homophobic violence," he commented in 2009.

Long went to Egypt for the first time to attend and report on their trial. In succeeding months, hundreds, possibly thousands of other men were arrested in raids and through Internet entrapment. Working for Human Rights Watch, Long lived in Egypt for several months in 2003 documenting the extent of this crackdown. Through Human Rights Watch, he also documented a brutal government assault on anti-war activists, Islamists, and the political Left, as well as persecution of African refugees and other vulnerable groups. In all this, Long worked closely with Egyptian human rights organizations, including the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights, the El Nadeem Center for Psychological Management and Rehabilitation of Victims of Violence, and the Hisham Mubarak Law Center. The bridges he built helped persuade parts of Egypt's human rights community to take lesbian and gay issues within their work.

In 2002, Long left IGLHRC to join Human Rights Watch (HRW), the largest U.S.-based human rights organization. Since 2001, Long had been deeply engaged in combating a crackdown on homosexual conduct in Egypt. In May 2001, police in Cairo raided a floating Nile discothèque called the Queen Boat, arresting dozens of men and staging a show trial for "blasphemy" as well as "debauchery." Long later wrote:

Long also led IGLHRC's lobbying at the groundbreaking 2001 United Nations General Assembly Special Session on HIV/AIDS. IGLHRC was invited to address the session, then blocked by conservative Islamic states and the Holy See. The crisis eventually reached the floor of the General Assembly, which had never discussed LGBT rights before but was forced to vote on whether the LGBT group could speak. Long's advocacy led to a victory and to IGLHRC's reinstatement. "This was the first time a gay and lesbian issue has ever been debated on the floor of the General Assembly," Long commented on the unprecedented vote. "It's a precedent that will have serious impact on the way vulnerable groups and marginalized groups and outsiders from all parts of society can get involved in the U.N."

On the night of May 11, 2001, as I worked late in my office in New York, my inbox began filling with e-mails from [an] anonymous man, whose roommate had been seized in the discotheque raid. His messages spread news of the arrests around the world.

In the mid-2000s, Eastern Europe saw a backlash against LGBT rights. Long cited the evidence of an "unexpected Europe" rolling back the post-1989 democratic advances: "faces bleeding, people running, the air streaked with tear-gas trails. These photographs have burst forth every spring and summer for several years, as LGBT groups try to stage pride marches in Cracow, Chisinau, Moscow." Bans on LGBT pride marches, he wrote, "became a way of defining who belonged in the public sphere, who could participate in politics at all."

In Bucharest in 1998, Long met with Romanian president Emil Constantinescu, who "promised to pardon all those incarcerated under Article 200 and to give priority to the repeal of the discriminatory article." Long specifically lobbied for Mariana Cetiner, who was promptly freed on the president's order. In the next three years, according to political scientist Clifford Bob, Long "enthusiastically and skillfully" pushed the Romanian government toward full repeal of Article 200, which was finally achieved in 2001.

Between 1998 and 2002, he organized a project bringing many grassroots lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender activists from the global South to speak and advocate before the then United Nations Commission on Human Rights. Long also gave UN bodies extensive information and analyses on abuses against LGBT people. This lobbying brought about an unprecedented commitment by key U.N. human rights officials to work on issues of sexual orientation and gender identity. In 2001, six independent experts—high-level individuals appointed by the UN to investigate patterns of human rights abuse—publicly reached out to lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) communities, formally declaring that these issues lay within their official mandates. Long said of the move, "Today the United Nations has lived up to its promise: to defend the dignity of all people without exception."

From 1998, when he led a delegation to the World Council of Churches's world conference in Harare, Zimbabwe, and visited Zambia during a huge national furor over a young gay man's public coming-out in the media, Long was closely involved with sexual rights movements across Africa. He connected homophobia and moral panics in many African countries to economic and political factors, especially the poverty and dislocation caused by structural adjustment programs. Long told the Chicago Tribune, "There's a sense of economic and political powerlessness, and when you feel powerless about your economy and your country's politics there's a tendency to turn to culture as the one thing you can exert control over." In 2003, IGLHRC and Human Rights Watch released More than a Name: State-Sponsored Homophobia and its Consequences in Southern Africa, a 300-page investigation of the roots of homophobia that Long had researched and authored.

In June 1997, Long received an Achievement Award from nine Hungarian lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender organizations, "in recognition of years of work in building and strengthening the Hungarian LGBT community and the cause of LGBT human rights."

Returning to the United States in 1996, Long accepted a position with the International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission (IGLHRC) — an NGO combating rights abuses based on sexual orientation, gender identity, and HIV status — first as its advocacy director, then as program director. He continued to work with activists in Romania, returning to the country in 1997 for additional research. During that research, he learned of the imprisonment of Mariana Cetiner, a woman given a three-year sentence for attempting to have sex with another woman. Long later testified to the U.S. Congress that

Long was an outspoken voice on LGBT rights within Romania, participating in a controversial Bucharest conference on "Homosexuality: A human right?" organized in 1995 by the Dutch Embassy and UNESCO – the first public discussion of LGBT human rights in the country. He was a founding member of the Romanian gay and lesbian organization Accept. His documentation was crucial in persuading the Council of Europe to strengthen its stand on lesbian and gay issues, and to demand that Romania repeal its sodomy law. His work spearheaded a European campaign and contributed strongly to Romania's eventual repeal of Article 200 in 2001.

In 1993 Long conducted the first-ever mission to Albania to investigate the state of LGBT rights and to meet with gay activists there, and his documentation of arrests and abuses helped lead to the repeal of that country's sodomy law.

In 1992 Long accepted a senior Fulbright professorship teaching American studies at the University of Cluj-Napoca, Romania. There, together with a few underground Romanian activists, he became deeply involved in campaigning against Article 200 of the Romanian penal code, a law dating from the Ceauşescu dictatorship that criminalized consensual homosexual acts with five years' imprisonment.

Scott Long was born June 5, 1963 in Radford, Virginia. He graduated from Radford University at the age of 18, and received a Ph.D. in literature from Harvard University in 1989 at the age of 25. In 1990 he moved to Hungary, and taught literature at the Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest. He became involved with the emerging lesbian and gay movement in Hungary as it developed during the democratic transition. He organized the first course on sexuality and gender at the Eötvös Loránd University.