On the morning of 28 June, the final day of Istanbul Pride Week, riot police sealed off Taksim Square with iron barriers, restricted metro services in the city centre and enforced bans on all weekend gatherings in two districts where LGBTQI+ people regrouped after their planned march route was closed off. Marchers pressed ahead anyway, re-emerging from side streets each time police dispersed them. By the end of the day, police had detained at least 50 people, including journalist Müberra Ünsal, taken into custody despite repeatedly identifying herself as a reporter and showing a valid press card.

Banned but undeterred

This was Istanbul Pride’s 24th edition, and the 12th in a row that authorities have banned outright. But this year’s restrictions were more extensive than before. In the days before Pride Week, Turkey’s telecommunications authority blocked access to dozens of social media accounts belonging to LGBTQI+ and women’s rights organisations.

On the eve of the main march, authorities ordered a well-known Istanbul gay bar to close. Islamist groups had campaigned against its owner, accusing them of organising the Turkish leg of a cruise aimed at LGBTQI+ travellers. The ship, carrying 2,000 LGBTQI+ passengers, had been scheduled to dock on 7 July, but authorities denied it permission. In Izmir, a city on Turkey’s Aegean coast, the governor’s office banned the Pride march on ‘public morality’ grounds. Police detained and fined 36 people who marched regardless.

Being gay isn’t illegal in Turkey, so the state can’t prosecute people for being who they are. Instead, it systematically denies them the right to gather and be visible in public. Since 2015, when authorities first banned a march that had grown over a decade, without restrictions, to attract crowds of up to 100,000 people, a pattern has settled: authorities issue a ban citing public order or security concerns, a defiant march proceeds regardless and a wave of detentions follows.

Turkey ranks 47th out of 49 European countries on ILGA-Europe’s 2026 Rainbow Map of LGBTQI+ rights, ahead of only Azerbaijan and Russia. In April, 11 leaders of a Turkish LGBTQI+ rights group were put on trial on charges of obscenity and violating the protection of the family. They face three years in prison. Right-wing nationalist president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan routinely scapegoats LGBTQI+ people and blames them for the country’s declining birth rate.

In Turkey and elsewhere, much of this current wave of repression is a direct response to the gains LGBTQI+ movements made over previous decades. Anti-discrimination laws, recognition of equal marriage rights and growing public visibility have given opponents a clear target to mobilise against, and governments under economic or political pressure have found a convenient scapegoat.

Erdoğan’s disparaging claims follow a common pattern. Authoritarian and populist leaders, facing discontent over corruption, inflation and unemployment, redirect public anger towards a minority that can be attacked without any political cost, while conservative religious institutions, losing ground on issues from divorce to reproductive rights, find in opposition to LGBTQI+ rights, and particularly trans rights, a rallying cause that restores their relevance and their claim to define society’s moral order. The result is a mutually reinforcing alliance between political power and religious conservatism, dressed up as the defence of children, the family and national identity.

Nowhere to march

In Turkey, the struggle is to hold onto territory the state wants to erase. But across a growing part of the world there’s little ground to defend any more. In Uganda, public Pride events are simply unthinkable, with prospects for holding one made even more dangerous by the 2023 Anti-Homosexuality Act. The law, broadly upheld by the Constitutional Court in 2024, can punish homosexuality with life imprisonment and impose the death penalty for the vaguely defined offence of ‘aggravated homosexuality’ that includes repeated same-sex acts. The sentence can be 20 years for what it calls the ‘promotion’ of homosexuality, a crime so imprecisely worded that it can apply to anyone advocating for LGBTQI+ rights, including staff of human rights organisations and people providing financial support.

Since the law came into force, LGBTQI+ groups have been increasingly accused of ‘recruiting’ children into homosexuality. The National Bureau for Non-Governmental Organizations has shut down groups that provided health, legal and shelter services to LGBTQI+ people, while police have entrapped LGBTQI+ people via dating apps and social media, and arbitrarily arrested and detained them. Activists have also faced physical violence. In January 2024, two attackers stabbed Steven Kabuye, executive director of the advocacy group Coloured Voices. The informal space Ugandan LGBTQI+ people built for themselves, including community shelters, support networks and a handful of registered organisations, is being systematically dismantled, driving people underground or into exile.

Iraq has moved in the same direction. An April 2024 amendment to the country’s anti-prostitution law imposed jail sentences of 10 to 15 years for same-sex relations, one to three years for gender-affirming medical procedures or for ‘imitating women’ and a minimum of seven years for anyone who ‘promotes’ homosexuality or prostitution. The amendment followed years of unpunished violence against LGBTQI+ people, with a documented pattern of armed groups abducting, raping, torturing and killing LGBTQI+ people and facing no accountability.

Linguistic erasure preceded the repressive law. In August 2023, Iraq’s Communications and Media Commission banned the use of the word ‘homosexuality’ across traditional and social media, mandating the term ‘sexual deviance’ instead. Criminalisation was already underway. In 2023, authorities charged 14 people for publishing ‘indecent’ or ‘immoral’ content on social media and sentenced six of them to between six months and two years in prison. Authorities in Erbil arrested two transgender make-up artists, jailed them for five days and subjected them to forced medical examinations.

In Indonesia, which doesn’t have a law explicitly banning same-sex relations, a patchwork of morality legislation, including provisions of a new Criminal Code that took effect in January 2026, has produced a similar result. Police have broad discretion to prosecute LGBTQI+ people under decency and public order rules. In October 2025, police in Surabaya raided a private gathering they described as a ‘gay party’, arresting 34 people who face prosecution for pornography offences. There were no allegations of trafficking, exploitation or violence. The gathering itself was treated as evidence of a crime.

Rights advocates describe this as a form of control through intimidation. Prosecutions are rare enough that most people never face charges, but frequent enough, alongside official rhetoric that brands LGBTQI+ visibility a ‘non-military threat’ to national security, to discourage public gatherings, reporting of violence and use of legal protections.

West Africa’s criminalisation wave

Regression has moved fastest in West Africa, where four states have criminalised consensual same-sex relations in the past two years, framing this as a defence of national sovereignty against western influence.

Mali’s military government, in power since a 2020 coup, criminalised homosexuality in December 2024. Burkina Faso’s junta followed in September 2025, imposing jail sentences of two to five years for same-sex conduct and its ‘promotion’. In Niger, the military regime prohibited same-sex relations in the Charter of the Refoundation it adopted in March 2025 to replace the constitution. Last month, a new penal code imposed punishments of five to 10 years’ imprisonment for consensual same-sex relations, 10 to 20 years for taking part in a same-sex marriage and up to 20 years for directing, managing or financing an LGBTQI+ organisation. Within weeks, media reported up to 40 arrests, the suspension of HIV prevention services and people going into hiding or fleeing the country.

The challenge isn’t limited to dictatorships. Senegal is an electoral democracy, but it stepped up enforcement of previously rarely enforced criminalising provisions after Ousmane Sonko, until recently prime minister, made it the focus of his 2024 election campaign. In March, the National Assembly doubled the maximum sentence for ‘unnatural acts’ to 10 years. It also criminalised the financing and ‘promotion’ of same-sex relationships with provisions broad enough to expose lawyers, medical staff, shelter providers and friends offering emotional support. The following month, a court handed down its first conviction, sentencing a 24-year-old man to six years in prison. Police reportedly arrested over 300 ‘suspected homosexuals’ in the first months of this year, including a well-known TV presenter. Hostility is driving Senegal’s LGBTQI+ people into hiding and exile. Whatever organising remains is largely underground.

Things are getting worse in Ghana too. In May, its parliament passed the Human Sexual Rights and Family Values Bill, which would jail anyone who identifies as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender or queer for up to three years and impose three-to-five-year sentences for ‘promoting’ LGBTQI+ activities. It would also create a duty to report suspected violations to the police. The bill passed in a chaotic, poorly attended session, prompting even some of its supporters to call for its reconsideration, and President John Mahama has yet to sign it. Ghana’s LGBTQI+ organisations are in limbo, because if the bill becomes law, they will have 90 days to dissolve. Even if it doesn’t, the debate has fuelled a rise in blackmail, evictions, family rejection, mental health crises and workplace discrimination, with people increasingly afraid to seek healthcare, legal aid and psychosocial support for fear of being exposed.

This regressive wave has had outside help. Civil society has documented growing involvement by US-based conservative groups such as the American Center for Law and Justice, Family Watch International and the Fellowship Foundation in funding anti-rights advocacy and providing campaigning and legal templates across Africa. Days after passing its regressive bill, Ghana’s parliament hosted the fourth African Inter-Parliamentary Conference on Family Values and Sovereignty, a platform with documented ties to those groups, whose previous editions promoted Uganda’s Anti-Homosexuality Act as a model for other African countries.

Consensus in retreat

US anti-rights groups now have the president’s ear. Since returning to office in January 2025, Donald Trump has signed a series of executive orders rolling back federal protections for LGBTQI+ people, particularly targeting transgender people. The administration has barred transgender people from military service, ended gender-affirming care coverage through federal programmes for people under 19 and restricted passport gender markers to sex assigned at birth.

Pride organisers reported an immediate parallel corporate retreat as companies avoided the legal and political risk of visible LGBTQI+ support. In 2025, major Pride events including NYC Pride and San Francisco Pride experienced financial difficulties. Many bounced back by seeking alternative grassroots and local support, but some didn’t: Tampa Pride for instance called off its 2026 parade in response to the hostile economic and political climate.

For years, activists grouped under banners such as the Reclaim Pride Coalition in New York accused mainstream Pride of having become a rainbow-branded corporate vehicle and organised breakaway marches deliberately free of private sector sponsorship, arguing that companies are pinkwashing, profiting from LGBTQI+ visibility while doing little to help realise LGBTQI+ rights. Their central demand was for Pride to return to its protest roots.

Now that corporate money is withdrawing due to political fear, the loss isn’t just financial. Sponsorship dollars, whatever their motives, also functioned as a visible marker that a critical mass of mainstream institutions considered public support for LGBTQI+ people to be normal, safe and good for business. As that backing evaporates, it’s not just event budgets that shrink, but also the social consensus that took decades to build.

Celebration and defiance

In this regressive context, some of the year’s largest Pride events have been acts of political defiance. On 27 June, tens of thousands joined the 31st Budapest Pride march, the first since voters removed the right-wing nationalist government that had repeatedly banned it. The 2025 march, held in open defiance of the ban, drew a crowd of between 100,000 and 350,000 people, the largest anti-government mobilisation in years.

This year, Pride organisers received the go-ahead in May, weeks after the election, but treated it as a starting point rather than a finish line. In April, they had presented new Prime Minister Péter Magyar with a list of 14 demands. Top of the list is repealing a 2021 law that bans the display or discussion of homosexuality and gender diversity with anyone under 18, ostensibly to protect children. It was this law that underpinned the ban on Pride events, and the European Union’s top court has ruled that it breaches equality and human rights principles. Other demands include reinstating legal gender recognition for transgender and intersex people, ending discrimination against same-sex couples in adoption and family law and eventually recognising marriage equality.

Magyar has said he’s open to discussing these issues but hasn’t committed to specific reforms. LGBTQI+ activists continue to insist that friendlier rhetoric isn’t the same as legal change.

São Paulo’s 7 June LGBT+ Pride Parade was also politically charged. It was held under the theme ‘The street summons, the ballot box confirms’, a call to turn visibility into votes ahead of Brazil’s October general election. It marked the 30th edition of an event that has grown from a couple thousand people to four million at its peak. This year, organisers estimated that over a million people marched throughout the day along the nearly three-kilometre-long Avenida Paulista.

In São Paulo, sponsorship reportedly fell by around 60 per cent, a drop that organisers attributed to pressure from conservative movements. Community support largely filled the gap. In a country where same-sex marriage has been legal since 2013, but which continues to record high rates of violence against LGBTQI+ people, the march was both a celebration and a defiant assertion of rights that remain contested in practice.

Bangkok offered the season’s clearest evidence of what legal recognition can do for a community’s ability to gather and be visible in public. Since Thailand’s marriage equality law – Southeast Asia’s first – took effect in January 2025, Bangkok Pride has grown quickly, from around 20,000 at its 2022 relaunch to 100,000 in 2023, 250,000 in 2024 and 350,000 in 2025. On 31 May, over 500,000 people marched behind a 500-metre rainbow flag, and activists unfurled a ‘Road to WorldPride 2030’ banner in support of the city’s bid to host the global event.

Pride season continues

Regression is being met with resistance. In Africa, Botswana shows there’s more than one possible direction of travel. In March 2026, following years of civil society advocacy, its government finally deleted provisions criminalising same-sex relations from the Penal Code, complying with 2019 and 2021 court rulings that had declared them unconstitutional. In Europe, Hungary offers a counterpoint to Turkey’s story of entrenched bans. In both countries authoritarian governments blocked Pride for years, but this year their trajectories diverged.

Pride month may be over, but Pride season continues. WorldPride comes to Amsterdam in late July and early August, marking 25 years since the Netherlands became the first country to recognise same-sex marriage. Its Canal Parade on 1 August is expected to bring half a million people to the city’s waterways.

For many LGBTQI+ people, the value of these gatherings has never been purely local. Where hostility makes holding a Pride event at home unthinkable, people look outward instead, hoping that a crowd marching freely somewhere else is marching for them too. That’s the duty of Pride season for those still free to gather: to mobilise both for themselves and for the many being forced to hide who they are.

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