Scott Long (born June 5, 1963, in Radford, Virginia) is a US-born activist for international human rights, primarily focusing on the rights of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) people. He founded the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Rights Program at Human Rights Watch, the first-ever program on LGBTQ rights at a major "mainstream" human rights organization, and served as its executive director from May 2004 - August 2010. He later was a visiting fellow in the Human Rights Program of Harvard Law School from 2011 to 2012.
Journalist Rex Wockner called Long "arguably the most knowledgeable person on the planet about international LGBT issues." David Mixner called him "one of the unsung heroes of the LGBT community." Long's blog, A Paper Bird, which focuses on global politics and sexuality, has been acclaimed as "must-read," "indispensable," and "brilliant." Hadi Ghaemi, executive director of the International Campaign for Human Rights in Iran, praised Long's "exemplary dedication and diligence," saying that "His articulate and relentless defense of LGBT rights everywhere is unparalleled, and his tremendous efforts on this front have been a guiding voice for justice and equality."
Early life Scott Long was born June 5, 1963, in Radford, Virginia. He graduated from Radford University at the age of 18, and received a Ph.D. in literature from Harvard University in 1989 at the age of 25. In 1990 he moved to Hungary, and taught literature at the Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest. He became involved with the emerging lesbian and gay movement in Hungary as it developed during the democratic transition. He organized the first course on sexuality and gender at the Eötvös Loránd University.
Early human rights activism In 1992 Long accepted a senior Fulbright professorship teaching American studies at the University of Cluj-Napoca, Romania. There, together with a few underground Romanian activists, he became deeply involved in campaigning for LGBT rights in Romania, including campaigns against Article 200 of the Romanian penal code, a law dating from the Ceauşescu dictatorship that criminalized consensual homosexual acts with five years' imprisonment.
Working independently from any institution, Long visited dozens of Romanian prisons over the following years, interviewing prisoners, linking them to legal assistance, and documenting torture and arbitrary arrest of lesbians as well as gay men. One of the first cases he investigated was that of Ciprian Cucu and Marian Mutașcu, two young men – respectively 17 and 19 – who had become lovers. Jailed for months, the two were tortured brutally. Soon after Marian Mutascu committed suicide. Long visited their home towns, interviewed family members, and confronted the arresting officer and prosecutors. Information he provided persuaded Amnesty International to recognize the two men as prisoners of conscience, the first time the organization had taken up the case of a couple jailed for their sexual orientation. The international pressure Long helped create won the two their freedom.
Long was an outspoken voice on LGBTQ rights within Romania, participating in a controversial Bucharest conference on "Homosexuality: A human right?" organized in 1995 by the Dutch Embassy and UNESCO – the first public discussion of LGBTQ human rights in the country. He was a founding member of the Romanian gay and lesbian organization Accept. His documentation was crucial in persuading the Council of Europe to strengthen its stand on lesbian and gay issues, and to demand that Romania repeal its sodomy law. His work spearheaded a European campaign and contributed strongly to Romania's eventual repeal of Article 200 in 2001.
In 1993 Long conducted the first-ever mission to Albania to investigate the state of LGBTQ rights and to meet with gay activists there, and his documentation of arrests and abuses helped lead to the repeal of that country's sodomy law.
IGLHRC Returning to the United States in 1996, Long accepted a position with the International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission (IGLHRC) — a NGO combating rights abuses based on sexual orientation, gender identity, and HIV status — first as its advocacy director, then as program director. He continued to work with activists in Romania, returning to the country in 1997 for additional research. During that research, he learned of the imprisonment of Mariana Cetiner, a woman given a three-year sentence for attempting to have sex with another woman. Long later testified to the U.S. Congress that
I interviewed Mariana in prison. She had enormous bruises; she had been physically and sexually abused by the guards. The prison doctor told us, "After all, she is different from other women. You can hardly expect the guards to treat her as if she were normal.
Long documented Cetiner's story and persuaded Amnesty International to adopt her as a prisoner of conscience, the first time the organization had taken up the case of a lesbian imprisoned for her sexual orientation. Later that year, he wrote Public Scandals: Sexual Orientation and Criminal Law in Romania, a detailed study jointly published by IGLHRC and Human Rights Watch – the first report on LGBTQ issues ever issued by the latter organization.
In Bucharest in 1998, Long met with Romanian president Emil Constantinescu, who "promised to pardon all those incarcerated under Article 200 and to give priority to the repeal of the discriminatory article."Ramet, Sabrina B., "The way we were - and should be again? European orthodox churches and the 'idyllic past'", Religion in an Expanding Europe, ed. Byrnes, Timothy A., and Katzenstein, Peter J. (Cambridge University Press, 2006) p.168. Long specifically lobbied for Mariana Cetiner, who was promptly freed on the president's order. In the next three years, according to political scientist Clifford Bob, Long "enthusiastically and skillfully" pushed the Romanian government toward full repeal of Article 200, which was finally achieved in 2001.
Between 1998 and 2002, he organized a project bringing many grassroots lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender activists from the global South to speak and advocate before the then United Nations Commission on Human Rights. Long also gave UN bodies extensive information and analyses on abuses against LGBTQ people. This lobbying brought about an unprecedented commitment by key U.N. human rights officials to work on issues of sexual orientation and gender identity. In 2001, six independent experts—high-level individuals appointed by the UN to investigate patterns of human rights abuse—publicly reached out to lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) communities, formally declaring that these issues lay within their official mandates. Long said of the move, "Today the United Nations has lived up to its promise: to defend the dignity of all people without exception."
Long also led IGLHRC's lobbying at the groundbreaking 2001 United Nations General Assembly Special Session on HIV/AIDS. IGLHRC was invited to address the session, then blocked by conservative Islamic states and the Holy See. The crisis eventually reached the floor of the General Assembly, which had never discussed LGBTQ rights before but was forced to vote on whether the LGBTQ group could speak. Long's advocacy led to a victory and to IGLHRC's reinstatement. "This was the first time a gay and lesbian issue has ever been debated on the floor of the General Assembly," Long commented on the unprecedented vote. "It's a precedent that will have serious impact on the way vulnerable groups and marginalized groups and outsiders from all parts of society can get involved in the U.N."
From 1998, when he led a delegation to the World Council of Churches's world conference in Harare, Zimbabwe, and visited Zambia during a huge national furor over a young gay man's public coming-out in the media, Long was closely involved with sexual rights movements across Africa. He connected homophobia and moral panics in many African countries to economic and political factors, especially the poverty and dislocation caused by structural adjustment programs. In an interview with the Chicago Tribune, Long said that "there's a sense of economic and political powerlessness, and when you feel powerless about your economy and your country's politics there's a tendency to turn to culture as the one thing you can exert control over." In 2003, IGLHRC and Human Rights Watch released More than a Name: State-Sponsored Homophobia and its Consequences in Southern Africa, a 300-page investigation of the roots of homophobia that Long had researched and authored.
Long also co-authored or edited major reports on gay, lesbian, and transgender parenting, and on sexuality-based attacks on women's organizing. He also wrote a widely used guide to grassroots advocacy at the United Nations. While at IGLHRC, Long was responsible for one of the first broad statements on sex workers' rights ever issued by any international human rights organization, affirming that "Sex workers enjoy the rights to work, to equality before the law, to family, to sustenance, and to a sexual life, in the same degree and under the same conditions as do all other persons."
Human Rights Watch Egypt In 2002, Long left IGLHRC to join Human Rights Watch (HRW), the largest U.S.-based human rights organization. Since 2001, Long had been deeply engaged in combating a crackdown on homosexual conduct in Egypt. In May 2001, police in Cairo raided a floating Nile discothèque called the Queen Boat, arresting dozens of men and staging a show trial for "blasphemy" as well as "debauchery." Long later wrote:
On the night of May 11, 2001, as I worked late in my office in New York, my inbox began filling with e-mails from [an] anonymous man, whose roommate had been seized in the discotheque raid. His messages spread news of the arrests around the world.
Long went to Egypt for the first time to attend and report on their trial. In succeeding months, hundreds, possibly thousands of other men were arrested in raids and through Internet entrapment. Working for Human Rights Watch, Long lived in Egypt for several months in 2003 documenting the extent of this crackdown. Through Human Rights Watch, he also documented a brutal government assault on anti-war activists, Islamists, and the political Left, as well as persecution of African refugees and other vulnerable groups. In all this, Long worked closely with Egyptian human rights organizations, including the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights, the El Nadeem Center for Psychological Management and Rehabilitation of Victims of Violence, and the Hisham Mubarak Law Center. The bridges he built helped persuade parts of Egypt's human rights community to take lesbian and gay issues within their work.
In 2004 in Cairo, together with Human Rights Watch executive director Kenneth Roth, Long launched a report on the Egyptian crackdown against gays. In Cairo, Long and Roth met with Egyptian officials including the country's Prosecutor General and deputy Minister of Interior. Human Rights Watch later stated:
Perhaps [Long's] most significant achievement was working cooperatively with Egypt's human rights community to develop a strong and unified response to the crackdowns. In the end, five major Egyptian human rights groups joined Long and Human Rights Watch in announcing and carrying out advocacy based on the documented abuse, making clear their conviction that sexual rights claims were core human rights concerns--a position still atypical at the time.
The New York Times praised the strategic way Long framed his advocacy: