Objective Epidemics impact individuals unevenly across race, gender, and sexuality. In addition to being more vulnerable to COVID-19 infection, evidence suggests racialized gender and sexual minorities experienced disproportionate levels of discrimination and stigma during the COVID-19 epidemic. Drawing on Critical Race Theory (CRT), we examined the experiences of gay, bisexual, queer, and other men who have sex with men (GBQM) of colour facing discrimination during COVID-19. Design Engage-COVID-19 is a mixed methods study examining the impact of COVID-19 on GBQM living in Vancouver, Toronto, and Montréal, Canada. We conducted two rounds of qualitative interviews (November 2020 to February 2021, and June to October 2021) with 93 GBQM to explore the evolving impact of COVID-19 on their lives. Transcripts were coded using inductive thematic analysis. Data analysis was conducted using Nvivo software. Results Fifty-nine participants identified as Black, Indigenous, and/or a Person of Colour (BIPOC). These GBQM of colour described multiple experiences of discrimination during COVID-19. Although participants did not report experiences of discrimination based on their sexual identity during COVID-19, we found that experiences of racism affected how they were treated within their sexual networks. Experiences of racism were most often reported by East Asian and Black GBQM. These participants faced racism in public and online spaces, primarily in the form of verbal harassment. Several participants were also harassed because they wore face masks. Verbal abuse against GBQM of colour was largely prompted by racist discourses related to COVID-19. Conclusion Racism remains a pernicious threat to the well-being of GBQM of colour. CRT highlights the importance of assessing how sexualized and gendered discourses about race shape the experiences of GBQM of colour navigating multiple epidemics like COVID-19 and HIV. These pervasive discourses unevenly affect racial and sexual minorities across multiple epidemics, and negatively impact health outcomes for these populations.

Grounded in my activist labor over the past few years, this article delineates the current state of Ku’er (queer)1 politics in (post)socialist China. I contribute to the discussion of GLBTQ politics in a non-Western context by asking questions about the ways in which the power of the state is negotiated by activists.2 I join a conversation with Shirinian about the possibility and the consequences of being seen.3 I begin my reflections with an overview of GLBTQ activism in China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan, focusing on China where my activist and scholarly work is based. Following a discussion of specific socialist and authoritarian legacies, I argue that queer activism in China has adopted a framework I call “graduated in/visibility” in order to organize and navigate repressive policies. This scheme of visibility affords queer people the ability to mobilize, but it is not without drawbacks. Indeed, in the final section, I consider the purpose and the politics of visibility in relation to what has been called “global neoliberal queering.”4 Further, I ask what the desire for visibility, acceptance, and assimilation mean in the context of an authoritarian capitalist regime. My intention is not to brand China as “bad capitalism” or a “backward society,”5 nor am I embarking on a detailed political analysis of the Chinese Communist Party and its sexual politics after the opening the country. Rather, I attempt to highlight the importance of activist knowledge in the context of emerging studies of Third World sexuality,6 which is unfortunately shaped by the coloniality of power, global capitalism, and imperialism.7

This article offers a queer postsocialist lens to theoretical contestations around neoliberalism, socialist legacies, capitalist reform, and the Chinese state. I foreground a queer Marxist position by situating Chinese capitalist developmentalism in global racial capitalism. I examine a recent GLBTQ hiring event in Shanghai alongside publications and personal involvement with the socialist organization “Queer Workers.” Based on this analysis, I contend that, rather than taking the Chinese state’s leftist legacies for granted, queer Marxism should be read as critical Marxism in the global postsocialist present. In the Marxist perspective, the sexual politics of queer liberation is inherently anti-statist and anti-capitalist. Further, queer Marxism in China, while remaining tied to postsocialism and the afterlife of the Cold War, should be situated within the broader struggle against racial capitalism. Groups like Queer Workers should be taken seriously as they are actively making space for historically and geographically grounded postsocialist radicality on their own terms.

This article questions the political branding of settler Canada as a place of sanctuary. I examine two seemingly paradoxical processes: “private-public partnership” in queer refugee settlement programs and migrant detention centres in Canada. This article argues that rescue and capture are not contradictory, but dialectical features of human bioeconomy. Such an economy renders the reproduction of life, vitality, and time bioavailable for extraction. In this sense, the queer refugee as rescuable and the detained as expendable are both the subject of value extraction. Although human bioeconomic processes do not promise life vitality, queer refugees and migrants do find ways to assemble a liveable life. Taking cues from Saidiya Hartman’s “innovators of life genre,” I discuss community building as processes of queer reproduction of liveability, countering bioeconomic violence.

Reflecting on a recent incident in China, this paper joins critical scholarship on necropolitics. The U.S has been the privileged site for the analysis of the politics of death; I argue that there is similar life debilitation/capacitation processes in China whereby different modes of death are deployed to restrict both Liberal and Left student activism. Hence, I call into question neoliberalism and its aftermath in post-socialist China and foreground abolitionism as an alternative theorizing against the state and capitalist relations.