How Americans Can Help African Gays Targeted by Anti-LGBTQ Laws

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Photo by Simon Maina/AFP/Getty ImagesIt didn’t take long. As we reported in Slate, the day after Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni signed his country’s notorious Anti-Homosexuality Bill into law, the names of 200 Ugandans said to be gay were published in a tabloid newspaper. In 2010, the identities of 100 alleged LGBTQ Ugandans were published by a different paper under the headline “Hang Them.” One of the two people featured on the cover of that publication, David Kato, was murdered the following year. What happens next is anyone’s frightening guess.

Following the passage of the Ugandan bill, police have begun to make arrests. Though the number of detentions is uncertain, that they will continue is not.

Global reaction has been varied. Norway, Denmark, and the Netherlands have announced that they will withhold aid to Uganda; the United States is reviewing its relationship with the East African nation. U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon wants the law repealed. These reactions have been a long time coming. Ever since the Anti-Homosexuality Bill was first proposed by Ugandan MP David Bahati in October 2009, the world has waited to respond.

Formulating responses to Uganda’s growing intolerance is important, but there are two challenges. The first is that this can’t only be about Uganda. There is a bigger story unfolding, and Uganda is but one chapter; 38 African states criminalize some form of homosexuality.

In Nigeria, where homosexuality is punishable by death in the northern part of the country, last month President Goodluck Jonathan signed into law a bill that increased prison sentences for gay sex, banned public displays of same-sex affection, and outlawed LGBTQ groups and providing assistance to such groups. In Cameroon, countless men are sitting in prison for violating that country’s anti-gay laws; one man, who is now dead, was imprisoned for sending a text message to another man saying he loved him. In Egypt, police subject suspected gays to rectal exams when investigating alleged instances of indecency or debauchery, as their anti-gay offences are termed. The silver lining on the continent is that this week Zambia acquitted a man who was charged with making pro-gay statements.

No state that I’m aware is withholding aid or reviewing its relationship with oil-rich Nigeria, Africa’s most populous nation. The U.S. Embassy in Cameroon has not released any statements concerning the treatment of LGBTQ Cameroonians in the past three years, but it has announced joint military exercises between the two nations. And Egypt was abusing gays long before the United States suspended some of its aid. It’s important to talk about Uganda, but on a continent that has suffered from generalizations, this time it fits—this is an African issue.

The second challenge is that that no one is really sure how to react. Anti-LGBTQ sentiments that are sweeping the continent are touted as Africans standing up for African culture against the imposition of foreign concepts of rights and morality. Suspending humanitarian aid plays into that narrative. Money is tied to morality, and aid is just another form of cultural imperialism. And, of course, as with most forms of sanctions, withholding aid will hurt ordinary Africans more than the politicians, creating further backlash against the West.

Funding LGBTQ rights organizations on the ground can also be tricky. Defenders of “African culture” will be quick to shine a spotlight on the foreign sources of funding behind these groups. Local NGOs need our support, but this must be approached cautiously.

Last—and, as a lawyer, this frustrates me to no end—reliance on international human rights law, which is devoid of real enforcement mechanisms, won’t provide any relief. If these states cared about respecting international law, they’d already have repealed their anti-gay laws.

The reality is that right now passions are running too high to respond to these developments with equally drastic measures. In the meantime, every concerned state with an embassy in a country with anti-LGBTQ laws should make it known that its doors are always open to those in need. Shelter and safe passage must be made available to what will inevitably become a growing number of LGBTQ refugees fleeing their homelands as states start cracking down or mob justice takes over. For those who stay, any and all resources they need to constructively engage with their fellow citizens should be made available. If the U.S. Embassy boardroom in Kampala is the only place where the group Sexual Minorities Uganda can safely host a community dialogue, then that’s where it should be held.

Another step we can take is to make sure Westerners engaged in anti-LGBTQ advocacy abroad are held accountable for the hate and harassment they facilitate. The Center for Constitutional Rights has one such suit against Scott Lively, a U.S. evangelical preacher who’s been instrumental in deepening Ugandan intolerance. If preachers want to take their culture wars overseas, they need to know they’ll face repercussions at home.

Like every major cultural shift, we’re engaged in a marathon, not a sprint, and this stage in the race has just gotten scarier for those running it. For concerned foreign observers, principled proclamations might make us feel good, but they won’t make LGBTQ Africans any safer, and that’s where we must focus our attention.

Josh Scheinert is a Canadian lawyer who spent a year teaching law at the University of The Gambia, where none of his students knew he was gay. He is also a researcher with global LGBTQ rights project Envisioning. You can follow him on Twitter.

 

Trans* Suicide Is an Epidemic. We’re Doing Nothing to Stop It.

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Trans* Suicide Is an Epidemic. We’re Doing Nothing to Stop It.

Earlier this month, the LGBTQ community and its allies exploded in controversy after Grantland author Caleb Hannan outed a trans con artist who then committed suicide. Hannan’s story revealed that both he and Grantland’s staff are startlingly oblivious to the struggles of trans people. But it also inadvertently brought a broader issue into the spotlight: Trans people in America are killing themselves at staggering rates—and we’re doing almost nothing to prevent it.

If any other population attempted suicide as frequently as trans people, the government would declare a public health crisis. According to a new study by the Williams Institute and the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention, 46 percent of trans men and 42 percent of trans women in the United States have attempted suicide. That’s far higher than the 4.6 percent national average, and more than double the 10–20 percent of gay and lesbian people who report a suicide attempt. And the numbers only get bleaker from there, revealing that trans people also experience homelessness, domestic violence, mental illness, sexual abuse, and employment discrimination at vastly higher levels than the general population.

How can this be happening in a country with majority support for marriage equality? It’s tempting to say that gay rights groups have left behind the “T” in LGBTQ, and it’s true that organizations like the HRC have privileged gay rights over trans issues. But the problem goes much deeper than that. In truth, gay rights and trans rights are fundamentally different fights. The gay rights movement can easily downplay the physical components of homosexuality and emphasize abstractly chaste values like love and marriage. Most Americans (though not all Supreme Court justices) have abandoned their squeamish fixation on gay sex, realizing how weird and intrusive it is to obsess about other people’s most intimate moments.

But it’s not so easy, it seems, for Americans to let go of their preoccupation—or really, thinly veiled disgust—with the physical components of trans life. For far too many straight people, trans identity equals strange genitals and gross surgery. Trans people have yet to attain equality in the United States because they don’t even have true personhood. While gay people have succeeded in a nationwide PR campaign to be seen as utterly average, trans people are still struggling to establish themselves as actual humans in the eyes of many Americans. Until that happens, the trans suicide rate will only climb, and discrimination against trans people will continue to run rampant.

To grasp just how the trans movement has fallen behind the gay rights movement, take a look at conservative responses to ENDA. All but the most vile extremists have stepped away from the classic canards—pedophilia, perversion, and so on—that fuel homophobia, and so anti-ENDA activists, like anti-marriage proponents, must rely on euphemistic sophistry like protecting “traditional values.” But when it comes to trans people, this cautious bigotry abruptly transforms into repulsive rants against the perceived grotesqueries of trans life. Suddenly, we’re back to the bad old days of LGBTQ vilification: Conservatives execrate trans people as degenerate freaks, barging into the wrong bathrooms and exposing their “pre-op junk” to little girls in locker rooms. They revive the tired old “protect the children” battle cry, shamelessly painting trans people as molesters, harassers, and exhibitionists. And, if all else fails, they fall back on the old bathroom horrible, playing to Americans’ basest fears (and fascinations) about trans life.

Why is this cruel calumny still acceptable from mainstream media outlets when similar charges against gay people have long since been relegated to the darker corners of the Internet? Because trans-bashing, unlike gay-bashing, remains effective when it’s played to a population still largely ignorant of trans issues. Grantland’s editors aren’t alone in their total ignorance of trans issues; the rest of the country is similarly uninformed about the suicide attempts, the discrimination, the hate crimes. And as long as Americans remain uneducated about trans struggles—as long as they see trans people as a set of mysterious genitals rather than actual humans—they’ll remain susceptible to such poisonous obloquy. Trans people don’t commit suicide because they’re trans; they commit suicide because the rest of us don’t treat them like people. Changing that won’t solve the whole problem. But it’s an excellent place to start.

Mark Joseph Stern is a Slate contributor. He writes about science, the law, and LGBTQ issues.

 

Several arrested for being gay in Nigeria under new law

By Becky Bratu, Staff Writer, NBC News
January 14, 2014, 3:55 pm nbcnews.com
Nigerian police targeted a group of gay men and tortured them into naming dozens of others, human rights activists said Tuesday, according to The Associated Press.

The men now face up to 10 years in jail for belonging to a gay organization under a new bill that criminalizes same-sex relationships.

The Same Sex Marriage Prohibition Act was signed into law Monday by Nigerian President Goodluck Jonathan, defying international pressure to respect gay and lesbian rights.

The bill, which bans gay marriage, same-sex “amorous relationships” and membership in gay rights groups, was passed by the national assembly last May, but Jonathan had delayed signing it into law.

Chairman Mustapha Baba Ilela of Bauchi state Shariah Commission, which oversees regulation of Islamic law, told the AP that 11 gay men have been arrested in the past two weeks, but denied torture or intimidation was used.

An AIDS counselor who spoke on condition of anonymity for fear he would be arrested, told the AP he helped get bail for some 38 men arrested since Christmas.

Activists worry that the new law will endanger programs fighting HIV-AIDS in the gay community.

The Associated Press and Reuters contributed to this report.

New Movie – “Bully” coming out in March – a must see

A movie about kids being bullied in schools by their peers.   Some commit suicide.  Many of the parents of the bullies, and school systems are apathetic about making changes – as they see it as normal behaviour, or they won’t acknowledge the issues as being real.

http://thebullyproject.com