The following is adapted from a piece that appeared on the website of The Guardian of London, UK, on March 20, 2014 (theguardian.com).
GROWING UP in Uganda, homosexuality was not something we talked much about. I knew I was gay from a young age, and I came out to those close to me when I was a teenager in the early 1990s. Some in my family accepted it, while others refused to acknowledge it. Homosexuality wasn’t always accepted but it was largely ignored.
There were characters from my youth that I remember as openly gay. There were snide comments and rude names, but I did not experience hatred. To be gay in Uganda back then was a fairly unremarkable thing. As a Catholic, I knew the church and religious leaders were homophobic. They preached the mantra that homosexuality is a sin, but that’s where it ended. Today’s Uganda is a different story. As the director of Sexual Minorities Uganda, the country’s leading LGBT rights organization, I have been on an advocacy trip in Europe and the U.S., encouraging the international community to speak out against the recently passed anti-homosexuality act, which I and a core group of Ugandans are now challenging in the constitutional court. As I prepare to return home, I know a law has been passed that will tyrannize my life and that of many Ugandans. The outlook is bleak. As a gay Ugandan, I know I am one of thousands. But as someone who has chosen to be “out” in Uganda, I am in a minority of fewer than twenty people. A day after the anti-gay law was passed, the Ugandan tabloid Red Pepper published my name and picture in a list of the “top 200 homos.” The last time a similar article was published in 2010 by the now-defunct Rolling Stone, it listed the name of my friend and colleague David Kato. He and others successfully sued the paper, but weeks later David was bludgeoned to death at home, undoubtedly as a result of his sexuality. Many people that I have met with over the past few weeks, including Britain’s foreign secretary, William Hague, have asked me: What has changed so dramatically? It is true that homosexual acts between consenting adults have been illegal in Uganda ever since the British introduced their penal code at the beginning of the 20th century. But this recent era of expanded criminalization and virulent homophobia has been another gift from the West, this time from the U.S. Well-funded American evangelical organizations have for over ten years been relentlessly stoking a disgust and loathing of sexual minorities, as illustrated in the 2013 documentary God Loves Uganda. Now we are told that Uganda will not bow to “the gay agenda”—a phrase I had never heard until a few years ago when American evangelicals introduced it. Among them was the firebrand pastor Scott Lively, who first came to Uganda in 2002 and began peddling his hot-headed variety of homophobia. He addressed many congregations, fueling a type of public outrage that was entirely new to Uganda. His profile gave him direct access to leading government and media figures. So strongly do I believe that his influence made a difference—and led to the anti-homosexuality act—that I am one of the claimants suing him for crimes against humanity under the alien tort act in the U.S. There is also evidence that he has helped to engender the same sort of hatred elsewhere, notably in Russia, which adopted its own draconian anti-gay legislation last year. Ugandan supporters of the anti-gay law say they are combating “foreign influences” that embrace homosexuality. In signing the law, President Museveni wanted “to demonstrate Uganda’s independence in the face of Western pressure and provocation,” as if this were an act of neocolonial resistance. It is simply not true that homosexuality is “un-African.” Same-sex sexual conduct existed in various forms throughout Africa before the colonial period. Same-sex relationships were known among several groups in Uganda, including the Bahima, the Banyoro, and the Baganda. King Mwanga II, the last pre-colonial ruler of what is now Uganda, was said to have engaged in sexual relations with male courtiers. I am a gay man. I am also Ugandan. There is nothing un-African about me. Uganda is where I was born, grew up, and call my home. It is also a country in which I have become little more than an unapprehended criminal because of who I am. I want my fellow Ugandans to understand that homosexuality is not a Western import. It is instead the current wave of homophobia that’s been imported from the “developed” world.
