SEOUL – Seoul’s Pride parade will take place on July 1, following months of wrangling after officials rejected an application from organisers to hold it at the usual spot in front of City Hall.
The annual event, which began 23 years ago as a gathering of a few dozen people, is expected to attract more than 100,000 people to the capital’s Euljiro business district.
The location, at a major intersection that will be closed down for the festivities and march, is about half a mile away from the usual spot in grassy Seoul Plaza, a symbolic spot often used by unions and other groups for protests.
Both Pride organisers and a Christian group applied to host events on July 1 at City Hall, but the municipal authorities gave permission to the Christian youth concert instead, saying that it was more family-friendly, despite the fact that Pride had taken place there since 2015.
The organisation hosting the concert, the Christian CTS Cultural Foundation, is linked to the CTS broadcasting system, which has made anti-gay remarks on-air.
The struggle to get the event off the ground highlights the hurdles faced by the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer (LGBTQ) community in South Korea, a socially conservative country where Christian groups exert a powerful influence in politics. Such groups have successfully thwarted attempts to pass anti-discrimination legislation, and the country remains one of the few nations in the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development without such a law.
“It’s going backwards – the situation doesn’t change much depending on the political regime,” said Ms Yang Sun-woo, chair of the Seoul Queer Culture Festival organising committee. “The biggest fear is still coming out. If you come out, you lose your job, you get kicked out of school, and it goes on and on. It’s hard to live as an LGBT person.”
The parade had faced regular opposition in the past, as conservative protesters showed up in droves with signs and tried to block the route. Police attempted to ban the event in 2015, which ended up going ahead after pushback locally and from human rights groups. It was cancelled during the pandemic.
Some members of the country’s conservative leadership, backed by religious groups, have recently fanned homophobic sentiment.
Seoul Mayor Oh Se-hoon has said publicly that he does not support homosexuality. And at a June LGBTQ event in Daegu, South Korea’s fourth-largest city, Mayor Hong Joon-pyo led a group of city workers to physically block the route, arguing the roughly 1,500-participant event was inconvenient for traffic.
Last year, President Yoon Suk-yeol’s conservative People Power Party revised the national school curriculum to remove the terms “gender equality” and “sexual minorities”, and Mr Yoon has floated the idea of dissolving the country’s Ministry of Gender Equality and Family.
Mr Tom Rainey-Smith, a campaign coordinator for Amnesty International in Seoul, said: “These public figures making these kinds of statements is highly problematic – it opens ground for other people to think it’s fine to speak in this way and increases discrimination and hatred.”
There are also laws in place in South Korea that actively discriminate against LGBTQ people. It is illegal for two men in the military to have consensual sex, for example – a crime punishable by two years in prison.
Same-sex partners cannot yet access the same health benefits as heterosexual couples, and a landmark ruling this year granting them is set to be appealed by the National Health Insurance Service and will head to the Supreme Court.
“South Korea has very strongly fixed gender roles within the family – the patriarchal system is deeply entrenched,” said Ms Cha Hae-young, a council member from Seoul’s Mapo area and the only openly gay elected politician in the country.
And unlike in other Asian cities such as Hong Kong and Tokyo, where corporations are major supporters of Pride and LGBTQ causes, most local and international companies in South Korea are careful to avoid doing the same. No major Korean conglomerates appear on the list of supporters, and Ikea is among one of the few major corporate sponsors.
“There’s a huge opportunity in Korea with positive brand association and millions of dollars in tourism – but officials seem to be out of step with the economic best interests of the country,” said Mr Todd Sears, founder of Out Leadership, an organisation that works with companies to increase LGBTQ equality.
Mr Peter Grauer, chairman of Bloomberg LP, sits on the organisation’s board of directors.
Views are slowly changing, particularly among younger Koreans. About 40 per cent of the country favours the legalisation of same-sex marriage, according to a June report from Pew Research Centre. More than half of South Koreans aged 18 to 39 support it, the data show.
Mr Ilhyeong Jeon, a 30-year-old bartender in Itaewon, Seoul’s night-life district that includes a gay area, said he has not faced backlash when introducing his same-sex partner to friends and says broader representation on TV and social media has helped.
“No matter the government – conservative or not – people are becoming more open to the LGBTQ community,” he said. BLOOMBERG
