Abstract

Although the global community is working toward making LGBTI rights an integral element of universal notions of human rights, its ability to enforce these norms and close dramatic disparities in the experiences of LGBTI people around the world is so far limited. This chapter illuminates recent junctures in the global LGBTI movement and introduces readers to the ways that global LGBTI equality has emerged as a theme in US public diplomacy. Engaging a substantial body of scholarship on human rights, this chapter demonstrates how LGBTI rights intersect, enrich, and complicate this larger human rights history and explains how and why LGBTI people and the LGBTI rights movement became an element of public diplomacy strategies.