World
Meet America’s first out lesbian ambassador
Chantale Wong on groundbreaking role as U.S. director of Asian Development Bank

The first openly lesbian U.S. ambassador on Wednesday discussed her historic ambassadorship with the Washington Blade during an exclusive interview in D.C.
“It is a milestone for the United States,” said Chantale Wong, the U.S. director of the Asian Development Bank. “I’m hoping that it’s not too soon that I will be joined by others.”
Wong, whom the U.S. Senate confirmed in February by a bipartisan 66-31 vote margin, represents the U.S. at the Asian Development Bank, which seeks to promote economic and social development throughout the Asia-Pacific Region. Wong is also the first openly LGBTQ person of color to serve as a U.S. ambassador.
Interim Human Rights Campaign President Joni Madison said Wong’s confirmation “is one step closer to achieving a future where all members of the LGBTQ+ community can see themselves reflected at the highest levels of government.” Wong told the Blade that she feels “a huge weight of responsibility.”
“It’s a huge responsibility I carry with me because it is the hopes and dreams of those that want to be in my position, but also the issues that I will carry forward in terms of providing inclusive growth for our community in many of these countries where the community is really criminalized and targeted, and so that is going to be my burden and my responsibility to bring forth a better livelihood for these communities.”
Brunei and Singapore are among the bank’s member countries that continue to criminalize consensual same-sex sexual relations. The bank itself is based in the Philippines, a country in which dozens of LGBTQ rights groups operate.
Wong between 1999-2002 was the acting U.S. executive director of the bank’s board of directors. Wong noted the Philippines’ Foreign Affairs Department granted her wife a diplomatic visa after the bank recognized their Vermont marriage.
“For me 20 years ago, it was really precedent setting,” said Wong. “I was there with my partner.”
Wong spoke with the Blade less than two weeks after a group of Democratic lawmakers in a letter they sent to Secretary of State Antony Blinken urged the State Department to do more to ensure countries recognize the same-sex partners of American diplomats. The interview also took place against the backdrop of efforts to add sexual orientation and gender identity to the Asian Development Bank’s safeguards.
“In all the institutions, we come up with ensuring that any of our projects and our policies do no harm and maybe even improve the lives of the beneficiaries we try to serve,” said Wong. “Ultimately, it’s about economic development for these countries … we’ve always had labor standards, environmental standards, other social standards, social safeguards. You don’t go in and harm the people you’re trying to help.”
Wong further noted LGBTQ people “are the vulnerable of the vulnerable because of many of the laws in these countries are specifically targeting LGBTQ people.”
“We want to really advance that issue, that you’re also looking at that community to ensure that we do no harm, but also we talk about inclusive growth, that the economies of these countries cannot fully grow if you leave out any segments of the community. So that’s the push on the SOGIE (sexual orientation and gender identity and gender expression) safeguards.”
Wong said she expects the bank’s board in 2023 will decide whether to accept the proposed LGBTQ-specific safeguard. Wong told the Blade she expects the U.S. government will endorse it, noting the Biden administration’s executive order that bans discrimination against federal employees based on sexual orientation and gender identity and its commitment to promote LGBTQ rights abroad as part of U.S. foreign policy.
“The president is very clear,” said Wong. “The question how to go about making sure that this safeguard is protective of the community. That’s the discussion that’s going on.”
Ambassador fled China as a child
Wong was born in Shanghai in 1954. Mao Tse-tung in 1958 launched the Great Leap Forward that sought to transform China into an industrial economy. Wong said the famine that resulted from the campaign killed upwards of 55 million people.
Wong told the Blade her parents in 1960 “made the ultimate sacrifice to allow me to escape” China in the bottom of a boat that brought her and her grandmother to Hong Kong, which at the time was a British colony. Wong lived in Hong Kong with her aunt and uncle. They enrolled her in a Catholic boarding school in Macau, which at the time was a Portuguese territory.
She was baptized and given the name Chantale after St. Jane Frances de Chantal, who Wong noted is the patron saint of “forgotten people.” Wong said the first English word she learned to say and write was her name, which she practiced while taking the ferry between Hong Kong and Macau.
Wong, her aunt and uncle moved to the Japanese island of Okinawa in the mid-1960s.
President Nixon in 1972 traveled to China, and Japan the same year established diplomatic relations with the country. Wong, her aunt and uncle received Taiwanese passports that allowed them to travel to Guam, a U.S. territory in the western Pacific Ocean.
Wong attended an all-girls Catholic high school in Guam. The island’s governor later endorsed her for a scholarship that allowed her to enroll at the University of Hawaii. Wong later studied at the University of California, Berkeley and Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government.
Wong in 1982 returned to Shanghai, where she reunited with her parents who she had not seen in 21 years. Wong also met her brother whom she had never met.
Wong’s brother left China five years later and now lives in the U.S. with his family. Their parents arrived in the U.S. in 1990, a year after the Chinese government massacred pro-democracy protesters in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square. Wong pointed out her parents were in their 60s when they left China.
“Those are the models I adhere to,” she said.
Wong further added her “journey is not unlike many of the people that we’re trying to help and nurture and economically develop.”
“I’m very mindful of my journey and what we’re trying to help,” she said.
Trump ‘fueled the fire of anti-Asian hate’
Wong throughout her career has worked to expand opportunities for people of Asian and Pacific Islander descent.
She founded the Conference on Asian Pacific American Leadership, a group that seeks to “empower” members of those communities to enter public service, in 1990. New York Congresswoman Grace Meng is among the organization’s alumni.
Wong also documented the late U.S. Rep. John Lewis (D-Ga.) during the final years of his life.

Wong during the interview wore a gray hoodie with the hashtag #StopAsianHate.
She noted the Chinese Exclusion Act, an 1882 law that prohibited Chinese people from entering the U.S., and Japanese internment camps during World War II. Wong also referenced Vincent Chin, a Chinese American man who two white autoworkers in Detroit murdered in 1982.
Wong added “the rhetoric of the last administration fueled the fire of anti-Asian hate” during the pandemic.
“It’s a huge issue for the community,” she said. “There’s also hate against gays and lesbians.”

Africa
American Evangelical churches masquerade as connoisseurs of African family values
Anti-LGBTQ Family Watch International, partners held conference in Nairobi last month

On Friday, May 16, 2025, Family Watch International and its partners gathered in Nairobi, Kenya, for a week-long conference themed “the Pan-African Conference on Family Values.” Family Watch International is a U.S. Christian conservative organization led by the infamous Sharon Slater. This anti-choice and anti-LGBTQ+ organization lobbies in the United Nations and countries around the world to push their anti-rights and anti-gender agenda.
This wasn’t the first conference convened on East African soil; one such was held in Uganda, from May 9-11, 2025, where Family Watch International was also a part. East Africa seems to be the hub for conservative U.S. evangelists, and one wonders why. The conference is a series of conferences focusing on what they call traditional African family values. Again, one wonders what gives an American organization the authority to speak to Africans about African Family values. After the May gathering in Nairobi, the delegates released a press statement introducing and claiming to be adopting what they labelled “The Nairobi Declaration on Family Values.”
Funded misinformation
This article was thus born to review and address, particularly, the “African family” ideas purported in the declaration. The first inquiry is, who is funding the conference? This conference is heavily funded and guided by the ultraconservative far-right evangelical movements from America and Europe. The African hosts, the Kenya Christian Professionals Forum and the Kenyan Ministry of Labor and Social Protection and actors are merely tokens in this scheme aimed at taking over Africa by erasing its actual values and redefining them from a Western and Eurocentric religious lens. The colonial missionaries historically employed this very familiar move. Another blatant untruth in their declaration is the claim that they represent governments, civil society, academia, religious bodies, and “allied international partners.” There has been no evidence to prove this claim, except for the participants who are known conservatives, infamous for their hate and anti-rights rhetoric from countries such as Uganda, Kenya, and South Africa. This piece of misinformation and disinformation is one of the strategies they employ to make it seem like most, if not all, African governments and masses approve of their unscientific absurdity.
African Family values owned by foreign entities
According to the declaration, their engagements aim to “Promoting and Protecting Family Values in Challenging Times,” advocate for and protect the “natural family.” It is rather peculiar that American and European organizations would lead a conversation about African family values. These are modern imperialists; they intend to cement their Western-centric idea of a family. Their family structure comprises a mother, a father, and children, while the African family is beyond that. Although nuclear family units do exist within African society, it is the more nuanced family structures consisting of “children, parents, grandparents, uncles, aunts, brothers, and sisters who may have their own children and other immediate relatives” that dominate the African family traditions. Often in rural areas, children are communally raised by their grandmothers, aunts, and siblings, as the parents go to the cities for economic opportunities and serve more as financial support for their young. It is therefore naïve for these modern imperialists to falsely claim a singular and rigid definition of family, especially as it concerns African people. Failure to acknowledge the diversities and complexities that exist within African family structures is both delusional and a clear indication of how there is nothing Pan-African about the conference itself.
Nothing Pan-African about it
Furthermore, how does a Pan-African family conference discuss African family values without African traditional leaders, elders, and spiritual leaders? Their exclusion of these figures demonstrates that they uphold the colonial and missionary legacy. It remains the view of the majority of Africans that those in traditional roles are the true custodians of the African culture, language, traditions, customs, and values, and these individuals clearly misalign with these modern imperialists’ agenda and mandate, thus illegitimizing claims of Pan-Africanism and protecting African family and values. The cognitive dissonance is evident in African actors who adopt those imported religious beliefs and regard them as superior to true African spirituality and culture, making these individuals modern imperialists.
Misleading the people
The intentional misuse of the term “Pan-African” not only misleads but can also entice those who believe what the term has historically meant, while in actual fact, the ideals they are spreading are far from Pan-Africanism. Meanwhile, African human rights organizations and those who can legitimately claim Pan-Africanism are concerned about colonial laws and the reform and eradication of colonial legacies. The modern imperialists, on the other hand, are reinforcing the colonial legacy by using confusing and dividing language aimed at causing moral panic among African communities.
Erasure
Activists in Kenya who have been following and monitoring the work of Family Watch International in Africa have argued that their agenda poses a grave threat to erasing Africa’s rich diversity of families. What the conference deems un-African are the same characteristics that the colonial missionaries historically labelled undesirable when they indoctrinated African societies in Christianity and its values, when Africans were made to believe that their own spiritualities are demonic.
The term “values” becomes redundant when it is solely tied to Christianity and disregards true African realities. They are causing confusion among African societies through the use of desirable and triggering language such as “Pan-Africa” and “African values.” When people are divided and busy fighting each other, important issues will fall through the cracks, go unnoticed, and there will be a lack of accountability. These modern imperialists use tactics to distract the African nation with these ideas that historically have never been a problem within African societies; meanwhile, the looting of the African land continues, and so does the exploitation of its minerals and resources. This article is part of the Southern Africa Litigation Center’s campaign around addressing hate speech, misinformation and disinformation. #StopTheHate #TruthMatters
Daniel Digashu is a consultant at the Southern Africa Litigation Center.
South Sudan
The forgotten struggle: LGBTQ refugees and asylum seekers in South Sudan
June 20 is World Refugee Day

As the world prepares to mark World Refugee Day on June 20, discussions will echo across continents about war, displacement, and humanitarian assistance. But there is one story that is often left out — a story of a people who are doubly displaced, constantly under threat, and too often excluded from protection programs. We are the LGBTQ+ refugees and asylum seekers living in South Sudan, particularly in Gorom Refugee Settlement, and our daily struggle for survival continues in silence, far from global headlines and political promises.
We are refugees who fled our homes in Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Ethiopia, and Sudan — countries where being lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, or queer means being hunted by the state, persecuted by society, and disowned by our own families. Many of us first found temporary safety in Kenya, only to be forced to flee once more as hostility and violence found us even there. We ended up in South Sudan, believing it might be safer. But we were wrong.
What we have experienced is a relentless cycle of flight and fear. We are tired of running, tired of hiding, and tired of being treated like we do not exist.
Fleeing persecution, only to face more
The reasons we fled our home countries are all rooted in systemic hate: we were accused of witchcraft, imprisoned for who we love, subjected to forced “conversions” or exorcisms, and physically assaulted by family members and neighbors alike.
Lesbian women in Uganda and Rwanda were forced into marriages with men, some even raped by their own relatives to “cure” them. Gay men in Burundi and Congo were arrested, tortured, and publicly humiliated. Transgender individuals in Ethiopia were stripped of all dignity, mocked in the streets, denied medical treatment, and in some cases beaten to the point of unconsciousness. Bisexual youth were disowned and kicked out of their homes. And queer children — or children simply perceived as different — were molested, assaulted, or abandoned.
We thought Kenya might provide refuge. For a while, it did. But soon, even the refugee camps in Kenya became unsafe. Attacks on LGBTQ+ individuals increased. Some of us were sexually assaulted inside UNHCR facilities. Local authorities turned a blind eye. The Kenyan government ultimately declared it would no longer support resettlement for LGBTQ+ asylum seekers. And so, once again, we fled.
This time, we crossed into South Sudan. And again, we hoped for safety. But at Gorom Refugee Settlement, we found yet another kind of danger — one that is quieter, colder, and just as cruel.
What life looks like in Gorom: constant threat and no protection
At Gorom, we face daily verbal abuse, physical violence, economic isolation, and state indifference. LGBTQ+ refugees are attacked by fellow refugees and members of the local host community. In some cases, we are targeted by our own block leaders, who refuse to distribute food or health services if they suspect we are queer. In clinics, trans women are mocked, told they are “possessed,” and denied even basic medical care. Those of us living with HIV face layers of stigma — our sexual orientation is blamed for our condition, and we are often left without access to lifesaving medication.
Safe housing for LGBTQ+ refugees does not exist in Gorom. Couples are forced to pretend to be siblings or risk being separated — or worse. One gay couple was recently threatened by men in their block who accused them of “bringing demons.” They have not slept in the same shelter since.
Lesbian sisters, sharing a small shelter to survive, told us:
“We sleep in turns at night — one keeps watch while the other rests. We’ve been threatened with rape three times. Our block leader told us to leave or act straight.”
Children of LGBTQ+ parents, or those who are gender non-conforming, are bullied at school or excluded entirely. Some are even denied meals at community kitchens — punished simply for who their parents are.
For many queer women, survival sex work becomes the only option. There is no employment, no support, and no safety. This leads to alarming rates of sexual assault and HIV infection. Yet when they seek help, they are either ignored or blamed.
And while mental health crises are rising, there is no trauma support designed for queer refugees. Many of us have attempted suicide. Some have succeeded.
We have evidence, but no urgency
In early 2024, a SOGIESC (sexual orientation, gender identity and expression, and sex characteristics) assessment was conducted by peer human rights monitors inside Gorom. It documented the situation clearly and thoroughly.
• Many transgender individuals had been physically assaulted in the span of just three months
• Lesbians received death threats or were targeted with “corrective rape”
• LGBTQ+ persons were denied medical services
• Attempted suicide
These are not just statistics. These are names, lives, and stories. And yet, most of the reports were never acted upon. Bureaucratic delays, unclear processes, and shifting responsibilities have turned urgent threats into forgotten files. Each time we cry out for help, we are told to wait. But in our world, waiting can be fatal.
Acknowledging those who have helped; and those who must do more
We extend sincere appreciation to the Commission for Refugee Affairs of South Sudan. Since December 2023, LGBTQ+ refugees were allowed to remain in Gorom with a degree of tolerance. In a country where same-sex relationships are widely condemned, this space mattered. But the relief was short-lived.
We now face an eviction order, issued for June 20, ironically, on World Refugee Day. The government has declared that all LGBTQ+ individuals must leave the settlement. No safe relocation site has been offered. No plan for protection has been shared. Once again, we are being pushed out — not for something we did, but for who we are.
We also recognize the continued engagement of UNHCR South Sudan and some officials working on the ground. Their intent is clear. They listen to our voices, acknowledge our pain, and try to act within their mandates. But the pace of intervention is too slow. In many cases, the process of documentation, assessment, and relocation takes months. By the time help arrives, it is too late.
We also commend the advocacy of Rainbow Railroad, which has raised awareness globally about the plight of LGBTQ+ refugees. Their work has saved lives. But we need them to be faster, more connected to those of us already in danger, and more responsive to grassroots alerts from inside the camps.
If coordination, funding, and trust between grassroots advocates and major institutions could improve, we would not be burying so many of our community members. We would not have to keep writing these cries for help.
Real voices, real pain
“I was beaten because my jeans were ‘too tight.’ They said I looked like a woman. I am a woman — trans — but they made me feel like an animal,” says Daniella, 24.
“We put our names on the protection list. My partner was attacked at the water point the next day. Nobody came to help us,” says Joseph, 31.
“I am HIV-positive. The clinic nurse laughed and said I got it through sin. I haven’t gone back since. I just stay in bed now,” says Amina, 28, a lesbian mother of two.
These are not rare stories. These are everyday truths for queer refugees in South Sudan. And still, we are expected to stay silent and grateful.
Our call to the world
We are not asking for special treatment. We are demanding equal protection under the same humanitarian principles that others receive. We ask that:
• UNHCR and all partner organizations prioritize LGBTQIA+ safety in refugee camps, not as an afterthought but as a core responsibility
• Safe shelters and protection units be created for queer refugees facing internal violence
• LGBTQ+ refugees be consulted in decisions about policies, services, and resettlement programs that affect us directly
• Emergency medical and mental health services be inclusive of queer identities and trauma
• Pathways to resettlement for LGBTQ+ individuals be accelerated, especially for those in crisis.
Let this World Refugee Day mean something
To be queer in a refugee camp is to constantly fight for your life. It means being forgotten by both your country of origin and your supposed place of refuge. It means sleeping in fear, eating in shame, and living without dignity. It means being told that safety exists, but not for you.
We are tired of running. Tired of hiding. Tired of begging for our humanity to be acknowledged. But we are still here. We still believe that the world can listen. And we still believe that justice is possible — if only someone chooses to act.
This World Refugee Day, remember that we are not just refugees. We are LGBTQ+. We are survivors. And we deserve to live.
Abraham Junior lives in the Gorom Refugee Settlement in South Sudan.
Israel
Iranian missile destroys Tel Aviv’s last gay bar
Mash Central is a few blocks from US Embassy

An Iranian missile on June 16 destroyed a gay bar in Tel Aviv, Israel.
The missile struck Mash Central, which is a few blocks from the U.S. Embassy on Allenby Street, and surrounding buildings. Israeli sources confirmed to the Washington Blade that Mash Central was the only gay-specific bar in Tel Aviv.
“Iran’s missile strike yesterday destroyed Tel Aviv’s only dedicated gay bar,” reads one Instagram post with pictures from inside the bar. “This place provided a safe space for minorities to express themselves — now it’s trashed.”
Mash Central describes itself as Tel Aviv’s “last gay bar standing,” even though the city promotes itself as one of the world’s most LGBTQ-friendly cities.
Israel on June 13 launched airstrikes against Iran that targeted the country’s nuclear and military facilities. Iran since the war began has launched hundreds of missiles towards Israel.
Tel Aviv’s Pride parade was scheduled to take place on June 13, but authorities cancelled it. Caitlyn Jenner, who was to have been the event’s guest of honor, is among those who were stranded in Israel after the war began.