Book Talk - Fear of Queer Taiwan: Anti-LGBTQ Movements between Taiwan and the U.S. Religious Right

Taiwan has been praised as the first Asian country to legalize same-sex marriage in 2019, celebrating its vibrant democracy and LGBTQ+ communities. Taking a different approach to studying this social change, Dr. Ying-Chao Kao’s new book—Fear of Queer Taiwan: Anti-LGBTQ Movements between Taiwan and the U.S. Religious Right (NYU Press 2026)—focuses on anti-LGBTQ conservatives who fervently opposed marriage equality and LGBTQ+-inclusive education. As a queer Christian, LGBTQ activist, and gender equity educator, Kao conducted 23 months of ethnography in conservative churches and interviewed over 100 people whose political ideologies ranged widely from the far right to the far left. In this talk, Kao will delineate the rise and fall of Taiwanese anti-LGBTQ conservatism, offering a new theoretical framework called “liquid conservatism” to understand the liquidity (mobility, heterogeneity, and transformability) of modern moral conservatism. Particularly, he will reveal the transnational networks through which global conservative groups distribute resources and discourses among “Asian Tigers” (South Korea, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Singapore) and their American, African, and European counterparts. Based on Queer Asian studies, Kao will discuss inter-Asian comparisons of LGBTQ-related attitudes and policies, highlighting Taiwan LGBTQ experiences’ socio-political implications for global Asias and the world.