Jeremy Smith PRINT – Counter Map of Global LGBTQIA+ Rights, 2023-2025

‘Counter-map of Global LGBTQIA+ Rights’ is a large-scale hand-drawn artwork charts the global state of queer rights in 2025. Every UN member state—plus Palestine, Taiwan, and Kosovo, is colour-coded according to its legal position on queer rights, ranging from full marriage equality to criminalisation and even the death penalty. Beyond legal status, it honours hundreds of LGBTQIA+ activists working within their countries, often invisibly and at great personal risk. These names were carefully researched in collaboration with renowned queer historian Garry Wotherspoon, forming a global roll call of queer courage and resistance.

Across the map, a visual timeline graph charts 25 years of legal change: since 2000, an average of 1.2 countries per year have decriminalised homosexuality, while 1.52 per year have legalised marriage equality. At this rate, by 2034, marriage equality will overtake criminalisation worldwide, a symbolic but significant milestone in the broader human rights struggle. The work deliberately rejects the colonial Mercator projection, instead re-centring the world around Oceania and the Global South. The result is a radical reimagining of global power, visibility, and inclusion. Currently on display at Qtopia Sydney, the drawing now exists as both a fine artwork and a future-facing political document. It asks: Whose lives are mapped? Whose are erased? Who gets to be at the centre?