The International Lesbian and Gay Association (ILGA), a member organization comprising some 400 national GLBT groups in more than 90 countries, is a leading advocate for the rights of gay, lesbian bisexual, transgender, and intersex people worldwide.

ILGA (originally known as the International Gay Association) was founded on August 8, 1978, in Coventry, England. In its early years, membership was essentially open to all GLBT groups, from small collectives to national organizations. Policy decisions were made by delegates from each group at annual world conferences. As ILGA’s purview expanded beyond its initial base in Europe and North America, it adopted a semi-autonomous regional structure in 1997. Today, the organization has an executive board consisting of a male and a female secretary general (currently Rosanna Flamer-Caldera of Sri Lanka and Philipp Braun of Germany) and two representatives from each of six regions. It also has a Women’s Secretariat, which focuses on issues of importance to lesbians and bisexual women, and in 2006 it instituted a Trans Secretariat.

Headquartered in Brussels, many of ILGA’s lobbying efforts have focused on international bodies such as the United Nations, the European Union, and the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe. In 1981, ILGA assisted with the preparation of a European Parliament report that led to the first recommendation that member countries should repeal discriminatory laws concerning age of consent, employment, and custody rights. That same year, ILGA co-founder Jeffrey Dudgeon, challenging Northern Ireland’s law criminalizing sex between men, won the first gay rights case before the European Court of Human Rights.

Beginning in the early 1980s, ILGA played a key role in supporting GLBT groups in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, at a time when sexual minorities in these countries were forced to organize clandestinely. In the mid-1980s, the organization began producing its Pink Book, a global overview of the legal and political status of GLBT people that evolved into the World Legal Survey.

Working with the International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission (IGLHRC)—which was founded in 1990 and briefly operated as ILGA’s Action Secretariat, spearheading activism on human rights issues—ILGA convinced Amnesty International, in 1991, to adopt as "prisoners of conscience" individuals incarcerated on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity. Two years later, it helped persuade the World Health Organization to remove homosexuality from its list of diseases.

In the summer of 1993, ILGA was the first-ever GLBT group granted consultative status on the UN’s Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC), joining some 3,000 other nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) permitted to participate in UN meetings. But the American religious right soon discovered that ILGA included a few groups that supported pedophilia— notably the North American Man/Boy Love Association (NAMBLA), a member since the early 1980s. NAMBLA refused to resign, claiming it was in full agreement with ILGA’s positions supporting "sexual and social self-determination" for young people, but opposing sexual exploitation and abuse.

U.S. Sen. Jesse Helms (R-N.C.) sponsored a bill, which passed unanimously, to slash UN funding unless the UN could certify that no affiliated NGOs condoned pedophilia. "I never fathomed that the day would come when the United Nations would officially condone the sexual molestation of children," he railed on the Senate floor. At its world conference in New York City in June 1994, ILGA voted 214-30 to expel NAMBLA and two other organizations, Project Truth and the Dutch group Vereniging Martijn.

Nevertheless, ECOSOC’s Committee on NGOs suspended ILGA’s status the following September—the first such action in decades.

ECOSOC voted against restoring ILGA’s consultative status in 2002 and again in January 2006, despite the organization’s repeated avowals that it does not support pedophilia and its institution of a policy requiring that prospective members be approved by the executive board. In 2006, the United States joined Cameroon, China, Cuba, Iran, Pakistan, Russia, Senegal, Sudan, and Zimbabwe in voting to summarily dismiss ILGA’s request without a hearing. After 40 gay and human rights groups sent a joint letter of protest to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, the United States supported a request for consultative status by ILGA-Europe and a national Danish GLBT organization the following May, but the groups were still voted down.

Despite its loss of status, ILGA continues to actively lobby on behalf of GLBT rights worldwide. For example, it helped ensure that the 1997 Treaty of Amsterdam—which consolidated the European Union—contained provisions against discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation, and has successfully insisted that new countries wishing to join the union must repeal their antigay laws.

Today, ILGA faces new challenges related to the worldwide rise of religious fundamentalism, as evidenced by the joint effort of the Vatican and the Organization of the Islamic Conference to defeat a resolution on sexual orientation before the UN Commission on Human Rights. Member groups also face increasing repression in Eastern Europe and Russia, where ILGA plans to hold its 2010 world conference.

But the organization remains optimistic. "Lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender rights are human rights," said former ILGA Secretary General Kursad Kahramanoglu after the 2004 Commission on Human Rights vote. "It is just a matter of time before the whole world recognizes this."