For decades, LGBTI+ people simply did not exist in the language of international human rights law. No treaty named them, and no UN body addressed their demands. They had been written out of the universal promise of human rights. Based on archival research in Amsterdam and London, three years of participant observation at the UN, and in-depth interviews with activists, diplomats, and UN officials, Queer International Activism tracks the strategies, coalitions, and creative advocacy efforts through which LGBTI+ activists gradually inserted themselves into the world's most powerful human rights institutions.

  The book traces five distinct ways in which queer civil society organizations worked to reshape human rights subjecthood: reframing the meaning of universality; drafting their own international legal instruments; forging coalitions inside UN bodies; confronting the colonial assumptions embedded in global sexuality politics; and leveraging personal relationships and individual identity to open doors that formal institutional rules kept closed. But this is not a straightforward victory narrative. The power queer activists have won is real but precarious, built on relationships and opportunity rather than on deep institutional change, and the influence activists have gained depends on conditions that can disappear. As opposition to LGBTI+ rights escalates across the globe, this book underscores the urgency of understanding how queer activists changed the trajectory of human rights law, and how fragile these victories remain.