Then he walked in and even my often unreliable gaydar pinged immediately. He had a certain out-and-proud swagger, and his rainbow bracelets and pride jewellery rustled and clicked as he walked. He was indeed long, topping out at nearly two metres, not counting the unpruned stalks of dreadlock growing out of his head. And the shirt. Bright purple, hanging like a bright gay sail on the dark mast of his frame, it seemed to propel him forward with the breeze.
During the past several years, a broad societal revulsion toward homosexuality has erupted into frank attempts to identify, persecute, and ultimately execute gays.
The anti-homosexuality bill never passed, but Bahati has reintroduced it in every legislative session since. When I arrived, parliament had moved its deliberation behind closed doors, so no one knew whether it would pass this year or, for that matter, this afternoon. But anti-gay plots in Uganda had something special about them — the intense, abiding attention of the Western media.
Since they learned about the persecution of gay people in Uganda, a cavalcade of filmmakers, journalists, and human rights activists has descended on Kampala over the past few years to bring back story after story about the worsening conditions for gays, and the fraught lives they lead, pinched between the threat of lynching by the common man and prosecution by the government. Why was Uganda, a country of sickening anti-gay hatred but no executions, whippings, or anti-gay pogroms, singled out as the worst of the bunch?
And they raised interesting issues about the unintended effects, positive and negative, of foreign outrage on what was, just a few years ago, a quiet domestic struggle for social justice.
