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Since the 1990s, the term “advocacy” has been widely adopted in the third sector to describe actions undertaken to promote causes and legitimate protest models. Despite differences among national and local situations, the global diffusion of these models has led to the emergence of non-governmental transnational coalitions that work to advance homogenized causes. Yet the notion of advocacy and the actions with which it is associated are multiple and heterogeneous in nature, as are the manner in which causes are formulated and the groups and individuals engaged in them. In order to examine the concrete conditions under which what are known as advocacy actions are produced, the present article considers the case of a network of Franco-African associations, Africagay against AIDS. It seeks to determine what advocacy consists of in this case, how the network’s transnational action is constructed and the nature of its aims and national determinants. I contend that the raison d’être of Africagay against AIDS has as much to do with the dominant role played by the French association AIDES and the spread of its activities in Africa as it does with a collective desire to champion the “homosexual cause” in the international activist arena involved in this struggle.