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BELGIUM | As religion gains ground, LGBTQIA+ people fear progressive politics are looking away from homophobia

by Timothy••0

De Morgen journalist Paul Notelteirs argues that Belgium is failing to confront one uncomfortable reality: homophobia does not only come from the far right or the online manosphere. As religion becomes more prominent, he warns that progressive voices and LGBTQIA+ organisations risk being too cautious to acknowledge homophobia within some religious and migrant communities.

Homo-acceptance is under pressure in Belgium, and Paul Notelteirs – gay himself – argues that the problem cannot simply be blamed on the much-discussed online manosphere. In a De Morgen article from 3 October 2026, he points to research showing lower acceptance of LGBTQIA+ people among some religious and migrant-background groups and asks whether progressive politics has become too reluctant to confront that reality.

De Morgen sits on the progressive side of media, which embrace diversity. 

The subject is particularly personal for Notelteirs. Reflecting on the experiences of queer people around him, he argues that there is a striking reluctance to speak openly about hostility from religious communities. The fear of feeding racism or Islamophobia, he suggests, has created a climate in which some forms of homophobia are discussed only in whispers.

The issue came sharply into focus after the controversy surrounding content creator Jonatan Medart and his boyfriend. VRT journalist Riadh Bahri had warned against focusing so heavily on homophobia within migrant communities that the behaviour of white, right-wing Flemish men goes unnoticed. Notelteirs accepts that homophobia is a shared problem, but argues that this should not mean pretending that its different manifestations have the same impact.

For someone with a strong social network and the ability to avoid hostile online spaces, right-wing homophobia can often be relatively easy to escape, he argues. His own experience is different. In Antwerp‘s Seefhoek neighbourhood, he writes, he can find himself wondering whether his voice, clothing or appearance could provoke a homophobic confrontation on the street.

A reality that is difficult to discuss

Abdel Bijat, the first Muslim contestant at Mister Gay Belgium, describes a similar fear. He says he is particularly wary of groups of young people whom he perceives as coming from religious backgrounds and sometimes crosses the street to avoid potential harassment.

Bijat says his own experience has gone far beyond unpleasant remarks. During his participation in Mister Gay Belgium, he received death threats and was confronted on the street by people who warned him that he would suffer consequences if he continued.

After years of trying to claim space for LGBTQIA+ people within Islam, Bijat eventually converted to Christianity. He now argues that Islam has a particularly serious problem with LGBTQIA+ acceptance, while stressing that Muslim communities are not monolithic.

Notelteirs acknowledges why conversations about this subject are so uncomfortable. LGBTQIA+ people are themselves accustomed to being stigmatised and therefore may be reluctant to contribute to the stigmatisation of another minority. There is also a shortage of credible political allies. The traditional conservative right, after all, has rarely stood alongside LGBTQIA+ people when their rights were being fought for.

That makes its sudden interest in homophobia within migrant communities deeply suspect. Notelteirs argues that conservative politicians can use LGBTQIA+ rights as a weapon against migrants and Muslims while having little genuine commitment to defending queer rights themselves.

But, he argues, that does not absolve the progressive left.

When caution becomes silence

Historian and teacher Imran Nawaz, author of ‘Tussen regenboog en gebed‘, argues that there is an enormous fear across the political spectrum of naming uncomfortable problems. Political parties want to keep their voters happy, while progressive organisations are particularly reluctant to suggest that homophobia may be more prevalent in some migrant communities.

Notelteirs is especially critical of LGBTQIA+ umbrella organisation çavaria and similar progressive organisations. He argues that they have become so committed to nuance and intersectionality that the discussion can disappear altogether. Every observation is accompanied by another qualification, every statistic by another exception, until the underlying problem becomes almost impossible to name.

The criticism is not that every migrant or Muslim person is homophobic, nor that religion automatically produces intolerance. Rather, Notelteirs argues that the opposite assumption can become equally dangerous: treating any discussion of homophobia among religious or migrant-background communities as inherently racist or Islamophobic.

Nawaz believes that simply identifying a problem does not make someone racist. He fears that LGBTQIA+ people are being turned into political currency, with their experiences selectively invoked or suppressed depending on which political interests are at stake.

There is evidence that makes the issue difficult to dismiss. Research by the Ghent University Hospital (UZ Gent) and the Transgender Infopunt found less positive attitudes towards gay and lesbian people among ethnic-cultural minorities than among ethnic Belgians. The relationship remained after taking socio-demographic factors such as education and socio-economic status into account. The research also found a relationship between religiosity and lower acceptance of sexual diversity.

A 2023 study by the Jeugdonderzoeksplatform (JOP) found that Muslim and Jewish young people scored an average of 5.38 and 5.43 respectively on a 0-to-10 scale measuring homophobia, compared with 3.2 among young people overall. The sample of Jewish respondents was very small, however, with only 21 participants, meaning that broad conclusions about Jewish young people cannot reasonably be drawn from that figure alone. Similar Dutch research by the Trimbos Institute nevertheless found more negative attitudes towards homosexuality among young people with a migration background.

Blind to what happens on the street

The bigger problem, Notelteirs argues, is that Belgium does not know enough about how attitudes translate into actual violence. Police do not routinely record the religious background of perpetrators, while victims often face significant barriers when reporting incidents. Even when a complaint is made, an attack is rarely formally classified as homophobic.

That leaves an important question unanswered: how many people merely disapprove of same-sex couples, and how many are prepared to act violently on that disapproval?

For Notelteirs, this distinction matters enormously. Statistics about attitudes alone cannot tell us how many LGBTQIA+ people are actually at risk on the street. Yet the lack of data should not become an excuse for refusing to discuss the issue.

He warns that this problem could become more pressing as religion gains a greater role in Belgian society. Migration is one factor, but religious revival among young people searching for meaning is another.

Anthropologist Wim Peumans, who has written about queer Muslims, is particularly concerned about the possibility of traditional conservative parties finding common ground with increasingly religious voters around opposition to gender and sexual diversity. Recent examples suggest that such alliances are not entirely theoretical.

The political right has increasingly focused its attacks on gender diversity, while some conservative religious groups have opposed aspects of relationship and sexuality education. Notelteirs asks whether these apparently separate movements could eventually find common ground around a broader conservative agenda.

Peumans remains cautious about predicting an actual political alliance. He argues that Muslims and other ethnic minorities remain politically vulnerable and warns that politicians can exploit incidents of homophobia to set minorities against one another while leaving structural racism and Islamophobia untouched.

An uncomfortable challenge for the LGBTQIA+ movement

This is what makes Notelteirs’ intervention refreshing. The piece challenges not only the political right, but also the way the progressive camp – and the LGBTQIA+ movement itself – approaches homophobia.

There is a genuine danger in allowing LGBTQIA+ rights to be weaponised against migrants and Muslims. But there is an equally uncomfortable danger in becoming so determined to avoid that weaponisation that the experiences of queer people are effectively talked out of existence.

In that sense, the criticism of Çavaria deserves attention. The organisation is eager to reach LGBTQIA+ people with a migrant background, yet here it faces criticism from precisely that part of the queer community. That makes the debate more, rather than less, important.

Çavaria and other progressive organisations can be accused of tying themselves in knots over political correctness: endlessly adding context, exceptions and qualifications until an uncomfortable reality becomes almost impossible to articulate. Intersectionality is valuable when it helps us understand overlapping forms of discrimination. It becomes counterproductive when it makes some forms of discrimination too politically awkward to name.

The answer is not to abandon nuance. Nor is it to treat Muslims, migrants or religious people as inherently homophobic. It is to allow queer people, including queer people with migrant and religious backgrounds, to describe their experiences without first having to prove that doing so will not upset a broader political narrative.

That may be one of the most valuable aspects of this debate. The criticism is not simply coming from the anti-immigration right looking for ammunition. It is coming from within the LGBTQIA+ community itself, including people who have experienced the collision between queer identity, religion and cultural background first-hand.

The uncomfortable middle ground

That creates the central dilemma for LGBTQIA+ politics.

On one side is the very real danger that homophobia becomes a convenient weapon for the far right to attack Muslims and migrants. On the other is the danger that fear of playing into that narrative makes progressive politicians, activists and LGBTQIA+ organisations reluctant to acknowledge homophobia when it occurs within religious or migrant communities.

Notelteirs’ argument is that LGBTQIA+ people should not have to choose between opposing racism and confronting homophobia.

Religious communities are not immune from criticism simply because their members belong to a minority group. At the same time, religious communities are not uniform, and there are important voices working from within them to reconcile faith, cultural identity and LGBTQIA+ equality.

Nawaz points to organisations such as Merhaba, which supports people struggling to reconcile their cultural background with their queer identity. He also sees an important role for religious figures such as Muslim theologian Khalid Benhaddou and Catholic Bishop Johan Bonny. Their willingness to speak in favour of LGBTQIA+ acceptance, he argues, can help open doors that secular politicians cannot.

That may ultimately be the way forward: not abandoning intersectionality, but refusing to let it become an excuse for silence.

Beyond the manosphere

The debate also challenges the tendency to explain a new generation’s conservatism primarily through the online manosphere. Research cited by Notelteirs suggests that parents’ attitudes towards gender have a much stronger influence on young people than social media.

The manosphere may therefore be less a machine producing conservative young men than a symptom and amplifier of broader conservative trends.

For LGBTQIA+ people, however, the source of intolerance matters less than the consequences. Whether hostility comes from a far-right activist, an online influencer or someone invoking religious beliefs, the result can be the same: queer people becoming less willing to hold hands, kiss their partner or simply be visibly themselves in public.

The challenge for progressive politics is therefore to resist two temptations at once. It must not allow LGBTQIA+ rights to become a weapon against migrants and religious minorities. But neither should the protection of those minorities make LGBTQIA+ people invisible when they experience prejudice from within those communities.

Notelteirs’ conclusion is blunt: anyone genuinely committed to queer rights has to be willing to name the uncomfortable realities as well as the politically convenient ones. If those conversations are avoided, he warns, a new generation could come to power with a fundamentally different understanding of equal rights.

Queer Belgium

🇧🇪 Blogger, keen vexillologist, train conductor NMBS/SNCB, traveller, F1 follower, friend of Dorothy.

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