Somewhere over the rainbow (crossing): reflections on LGBTQ allyship at NATO

In June 2019, I found myself at NATO headquarters in Brussels, staring at a poster featuring a rainbow flag superimposed with silhouettes of armed forces personnel. It was an unexpected encounter. I was there along with my co-authors to launch our new book (Wright, Hurley, and Gil Ruiz 2019) and participate in the 43 Annual Conference of the NATO Committee on Gender Perspectives (NCGP). In the conference programme, what was billed as a ‘side-event’ discussing ‘integrating LGBTQI perspectives in allied and partner armed forces’ was scheduled for the upcoming Thursday. I was curious. NATO is dominated by cisgendered, heterosexual, militarized masculine norms (Ibid) and is an alliance made up of 30 member states with differing socio-cultural and military levels of LGBTQ rights. The inclusion of such an event, in such a space, felt a little radical. There were murmurings among the delegates. Holding the event within the framework of the NCGP conference was an interesting move. Including it as a side-event, noted on, but not part of, the official schedule of the NCGP conference, provided some delegates an opt-out. The event was organized jointly by the European Organisation of Military Associations and Trade Unions (EUROMIL), the Permanent Representation of Belgium to NATO and the Joint Delegation of Canada to NATO. Another interesting move. EUROMIL is an international non-profit organization which promotes military professional organization and trade union membership for European (not just NATO) soldiers and ‘the inclusion of military service personnel into the social and labour legislation of the European Union’ (EUROMIL, n.d.). One of its core goals is to ‘promote the fundamental rights and freedoms of members of the armed forces in Europe’ (Ibid). The exact motivations for the Canadian and Belgian delegations were not immediately clear, but both states are understood to be (more) inclusive in their LGBTQ (social and military) policies in a way that other NATO states are not. Of course, reading Canadian and Belgian ‘progressiveness’ vis-à-vis ‘other’ NATO members is neither uncontested nor unproblematic. Whatever the motivations, the alignment of these two national delegations with EUROMIL allowed for an LGBTQ rights and inclusion-focused space to emerge within an already established gender rights and inclusion-