What was once a fledgling lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) community in the Bangladeshi capital of Dhaka is now destroyed. In 2014 and 2015 the Bangladeshi gay scene was cautiously becoming more open. ‘Rainbow Rally’ pride parades were held and a gay magazine called Roopbaan was in print. But the LGBT community has since been scared back from the streets, and to be openly gay in Bangladesh is now life threatening.

Members of Bangladesh’s LGBT community regularly receive threatening messages via telephone, text and social media from various radical Islamist groups. Extremist groups like Basher Kella, Salauddiner Ghora and Hizb ut-Tahrir post extensively about the LGBT community online, calling on the people of Bangladesh to resist the ‘evil’ of LGBT.

In February 2015 Avijit Roy, a secular blogger and the author of a book on homosexuality in Bangla language, was murdered by Islamist extremists. The secular author and publisher Ahmedur Rashid Chowdhury (also known as Tutul) was critically injured in a similar attack in October 2015.

In 2016, the Bangladesh Olama League and Hefazat-e-Islam (both close to the ruling Awami League) and 13 other Islamist organisations put forward a 15-point list of demands to the government. Among the list are demands for the government to enact the blasphemy law and to take action under Section 377 of the Bangladeshi Code of Criminal Procedure (which bans ‘carnal intercourse against the order of nature’ with a maximum sentence of 10 years in prison) against named groups supporting LGBT rights. Read more via East Asia Forum