“GAY RIGHTS ARE HUMAN RIGHTS”: THE FRAMING OF NEW INTERPRETATIONS OF INTERNATIONAL HUMAN RIGHTS NORMS

“Gay Rights are Human Rights” may have begun as a slogan chanted in the street, but academics and human rights organizations began to use the international human rights frame systematically in the 1990s to argue for universal human rights to fully apply to LGBT persons. This framing gradually began to replace framings based on claims for liberation and emancipation or national conceptions of civil rights. We first trace the early academic writing setting forth the human rights argument for LGBT persons, and then see how the popular media and websites began to share this frame with a much wider audience in the 2010s. We then discuss how the framing of rights for LGBT persons as human rights gradually became institutionalized in various jurisdictions, including Europe (Council of Europe and the European Union), the US, and very recently the UN. The human rights perspective has allowed for significant legal and political gains to be made on behalf of LGBT equality in certain jurisdictions around the world, and holds out the prospect of this international human rights norm spreading further to include more countries and persons under its protection.