In recent years, a growing body of work has investigated transnational linkages between queer movements that trouble easy interpretations of queer history as the product of the Euro-American world. Works such as Emily Hobson’s Lavender and Red and Roderick Ferguson’s One Dimensional Queer have pushed back against white-dominated success stories by revealing the entanglements of early gay liberation with expansive forms of often-transnational solidarities. In the European context, historians like Todd Shepard and Laurie Marhoefer have underscored the importance of colonial and postcolonial ties to the formation of European queer identities through the twentieth century. This panel builds on these pathbreaking studies by using the framework of mobility to argue that ties across artificial north/south divides were generative of queer politics, identities, and even ways of being during the twentieth century. Understood as overlapping and non-discrete forms of travel, tourism, and migration, mobility can help to recast the centering of queer history in the United States and western Europe. Rather than something that was invented in the United States and western Europe in the middle of the twentieth century and exported out, queer liberation politics were in fact formed through the transnational participation of queer people who eschewed easy and whitewashed categorizations. Further, a focus on mobility destabilizes the rigidity of categories of “north” and “south.” Northern Europe and Southern Europe, or the Global North and Global South fail to operate successfully as coherent and separate domains of queer politics. This panel therefore examines crossings across understood north/south divides while calling into question their analytic utility for understanding queer histories. Not only did individuals and groups working from Mexico to Thailand adapt gay liberationist framings, but they altered the ways in which people in the United States and western Europe did queer politics. Similarly, diasporic communities located in cities like West Berlin and New York developed political formations that pushed back against assumptions of whiteness and Europeanness that pervaded queer scenes through the twentieth century. However, these moments were troubled by the productive forces of otherization, which used perceived racial different to consolidate whitewashed understandings of sexual identity. Mobility as an analytic framework can help to untangle these contradictions by questioning the fixity of north/south divisions, reverse the colonial gaze, and situate marginalized groups as mobile, political agents of queer history.