The deleted word
Lesbian rights are human rights: in Beijing, the sentence was dropped from the UN text.
On 15 September 1995, the United Nations Fourth World Conference on Women came to an end in Beijing. That day, one hundred and eighty-nine states adopted the Platform for Action, a comprehensive programme for women's rights. One term was missing from it: sexual orientation.
For two weeks, lesbians from all over the world had fought for it. At the forum of non-governmental organisations in Huairou, some fifty kilometres away, there was an official lesbian tent for the first time, with workshops and stalls. The activists marched down the main street with banners, their chants ringing out in English, Spanish, French and Zulu. And when the conference devoted a day to human rights, they dropped a banner more than seven metres long over the balcony railing in the main hall in Beijing: "Lesbian rights are human rights".
Two days before the end, the South African Beverley Ditsie, co-founder of the Gay and Lesbian Organisation of the Witwatersrand, stepped up to the lectern. She asked the delegates to make this a conference for all women, regardless of their sexual orientation. It was the first time an openly lesbian woman had spoken before a UN world conference.
The demand itself was modest. One sentence in the text condemning discrimination on the grounds of sexual orientation, nothing more. More than thirty countries backed it, including South Africa, Cuba, Chile and Slovenia. Ten years earlier, at the World Conference on Women in Nairobi, only the Netherlands had spoken up for lesbians. In the final hours of negotiation it became clear that there was no consensus for the sentence. It was dropped from the document.
Several states then entered statements in the record regretting the deletion and stating that it did not justify unequal treatment in any country. Nothing had been won. And yet, for the first time, the United Nations had officially argued about whether lesbians belonged in a human rights document.