Nepal Wants a Lot of Gay People to Come Visit

by Michael Jones · 2009-10-23 07:50:00 UTC
Topics:

Nepal

What's the best way to recover after a Maoist insurgency leaves your economy in shambles? For Nepal, one way is to completely open the country up as a tourist destination for LGBT people throughout the world. The goal is to bring a million foreign tourists to the region over the next two years, and the hope is to have many of those tourists be sexual minorities -- members of the gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender population.

Nepal has become one of the more progressive countries in the world toward LGBT rights. Nearly a year ago, the country's Supreme Court ruled that all people in Nepal, regardless of sexual orientation, ought to have the right to get married. They ordered the government to come up with a commission to study same-sex marriage laws around the world, with the intent that based on this research, Nepal would draft its own marriage equality law. That process is churning at a snail's pace, making rush hour traffic on the Los Angeles Freeway seem like a piece of cake. But finally, after several months delay, the government enacted a commission to look at worldwide marriage equality laws earlier this summer.

Sunil Pant, one of the leading LGBT rights organizers and by many regards a father figure of the LGBT rights movement in Nepal, said that if the country could attract at least 10 percent of the global gay community to Nepal, it would drastically help the state's economy. "All the government has to do is welcome LGBT travelers," said Pant.

Pant is also on his way to the United States, where he will be speaking at the 10th annual International Conference on Gay & Lesbian Tourism, held in Boston in early November.

Will Nepal become the next Provincetown? It certainly takes a longer ferry ride to get there. But in a region where many countries still criminalize homosexuality, Nepal is a bright spot. It's becoming a pioneering country for LGBT rights in Southeast Asia.

(Photo courtesy of judepics' photostream on Flickr.)

Michael Jones is a Change.org Editor. He has worked in the field of human rights communications for a decade, most recently for Harvard Law School.
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