On a breezy October night two years ago, Frank Mugisha was having a beer with friends in Kampala, Uganda’s capital. They had gathered at a gay-friendly bar called Tcozy, in a congested area full of pubs popular with students from Makerere University. Over the sound of screeching karaoke, Mugisha heard his name and turned to see a friend holding up a newspaper. It was a local tabloid called Rolling Stone, and the headline on the front page, next to photographs of Mugisha’s friends David Kato, a gay activist, and Christopher Senyonjo, a human-rights advocate and former Anglican bishop, read “100 PICTURES OF UGANDA’S TOP HOMOS LEAK.” The tagline was “Hang Them.” Mugisha opened the paper to an article featuring his name, along with that of his boyfriend, Ronnie, and those of several friends. In some cases, their addresses, including Ronnie’s, were also listed, and there were photos clearly taken from Facebook profiles. The paper had made up quotes, and said that those named were using money and gifts to “recruit” new homosexuals, and were hosting orgies and infiltrating schools to enlist children. Mugisha, fearing a violent reaction from the public, worried for his friends.
The next morning, Mugisha took a copy of the paper to the modest bungalow that serves as the headquarters of Sexual Minorities Uganda, or SMUG, the country’s largest gay-rights organization, which he leads. He scanned the article and e-mailed it to other gay-rights activists and lawyers. The fallout was immediate: the house of a transgender man whose name was on the tabloid’s list was stoned by a crowd shouting, “We will kill you!” David Kato, at that time Uganda’s best-known gay activist, began receiving death threats; he was murdered three months later. Police put the murder down to a random home invasion. But activists think that the killer, who also robbed Kato, was motivated by the common perception in Uganda that gays are sent money and gifts by international donors. Ronnie, Mugisha’s boyfriend of five years, was harassed and threatened by his own family and eventually fled to the United States. Ronnie’s mother and his father, who owns a major business in Kampala, both learned that he was gay from the article. (Although activists are open about their work and much of their lives, many L.G.B.T. Ugandans I interviewed did not want to be identified by their full names.)
In 2009, a year before the article was published, David Bahati, a Ugandan politician, had introduced an anti-homosexuality bill to parliament. Commonly known as the “Kill the Gays” bill, it included a proposal to impose the death penalty on Ugandans who engaged in what it called “aggravated homosexuality,” which means gay sex when one partner is H.I.V.-positive, disabled, a “serial offender,” or a minor. Bahati told me that the death-penalty provision has been replaced by one calling for a life sentence, but, even so, any amendment to the bill as it stands has to go through parliament. And the bill remains troubling. If someone is found to be “promoting” homosexuality, he could be imprisoned for up to seven years. The broadly defined category of touching with “the intention to commit an act of homosexuality” can also bring a sentence of up to seven years.
When the Rolling Stone article came out, L.G.B.T. activists, already feeling under attack from the bill, which had not yet been put to a vote, decided to sue the paper for defamation and inciting violence. SMUG led the initiative, and last March I visited the group’s headquarters, where eight activists occupy four sparsely furnished rooms. Mugisha’s office is the locus of activity. The walls are cluttered with photographs of him at various awards ceremonies and conferences, along with postcards from well-wishers abroad. In the mornings, the office becomes a meeting room, where members strategize on how to design and implement upcoming campaigns, and on how to help out partner organizations. While I was there, SMUG was organizing a seminar to educate L.G.B.T.s in the law and the constitution. The wireless Internet network is named NOFEAR. In the afternoons, there is a steady stream of visitors, including foreign journalists and human-rights workers from other N.G.O.s.
The high court delayed judgment on Rolling Stone three times, and in the meantime the paper published an issue in which it outed more Ugandans and claimed that there was a connection between Ugandan gays and a Somali terrorist group. Finally, in early January of 2011, the court ordered the tabloid to stop publishing the identities of allegedly homosexual people. Soon afterward, Rolling Stone shut down. “We didn’t even ask for the paper to close down—just to stop publishing the list,” Mugisha told me. “We were asking for the right as human beings not to be defamed in the papers.”
Mugisha is thirty years old, five feet three, and weighs a hundred and twenty pounds. He has prominent ears, large eyes, and upturned lips; he is often smiling, even when he is exasperated. His cell phone is protected by a neon-pink case, and the ringtone is Madonna’s “Celebration.” He came to SMUG five years ago. At the time, he was a graphic-design student. As a new member of the then fringe gay-rights movement, he organized rallies, including SMUG’s first coming-out march. Back then, most Ugandans would have looked at him blankly if he had told them about gay rights.
In the past two years, SMUG has documented more than fifty cases of discrimination, harassment, and violence against L.G.B.T.s in Uganda. Mugisha says that law-enforcement officers followed up on seventeen of these cases, but most were not even reported to the authorities, because the victims feared that the police would arrest them on trumped-up charges, like “indecent conduct.” Mugisha frequently receives calls from gays he knows, and from many he doesn’t, who want to talk, or who have been beaten up or evicted from their homes or blackmailed by policemen looking to score money with threats of arrest or exposure. Mugisha will reassure them, bail them out using SMUG funds, even give them a place to sleep if they need one, at the premises of a gay support group, which Mugisha helped found, called Icebreakers Uganda.
In May, gay-activist groups, under SMUG’s leadership, opened the country’s first L.G.B.T. health clinic, a room in an office building on the outskirts of Kampala, where doctors and nurses see patients free of charge three days a week. In early August, Mugisha, wearing a sailor’s outfit, marched in the country’s first gay-pride parade, which was staged in the botanical gardens of the city of Entebbe, on the shore of Lake Victoria. About a hundred Ugandans took part. The space, which was reserved on the pretense of a birthday celebration, had been chosen because it was secluded. Although the activists had asked for police protection, they did not receive it. The fantastical costumes on display—glittery fairies, homemade angel wings—made it look like New York’s gay-pride parade, but there were key differences: the signs were pointedly not festive (“Killing Gay People Solves Nothing”), and many bystanders seemed confused by the spectacle. The police shut down the celebration under the orders of Simon Lokodo, the Ethics and Integrity Minister. They claimed, falsely, that a gay wedding was taking place. Three participants in drag were arrested, a photographer was detained, and statements were demanded from others. Still, Mugisha called the event a “great success”: after those who had been arrested were released, the police chief apologized. “We explained what we were doing, and had a dialogue,” Mugisha said.
Adrian Jjuuko, a twenty-eight-year-old lawyer, who coördinated the SMUG-led injunction against Rolling Stone in the high court, said that it was Mugisha who inspired him to work on gay rights, while he was still in law school. When I met Jjuuko, a nervous, intense man who is unfailingly formal, he shared his first impressions of Mugisha. “We have this idea that gay people are different, and Frank was not different,” he said. “When we first met, he told me about his experience of realizing he was attracted to boys, and it just sounded like my own experience with girls.” Jjuuko later told me that the Rolling Stone article had come at a key moment for the gay-rights movement. “We were just getting organized and were very eager to make a point,” he said. Once Rolling Stone had been stopped, the activists could return to fighting Bahati’s bill.
Kampala is a modernizing city, and the wealthier neighborhoods are full of cafés, shopping malls, and lush foliage. Mugisha grew up in a rougher, working-class part of town. When he was seven, his father was shot and killed on the way home from work. Mugisha never found out what happened. His mother brought him and a younger brother up alone. He was an extremely sociable child, who loved theatre, lawn tennis, and handball. When he realized that he was gay, at thirteen, he tried to bargain with God: if he studied hard and got good grades, maybe God would take his desires away. He went to an all-boys school, where the students were humiliated by the headmaster and expelled if they were caught in intimate situations. At fourteen, he told his family that he was gay. Relatives took him to family friends who claimed that they could help him lose his homosexual feelings. His family still wishes that he would stay silent about his orientation. Mugisha says, “They ask me, ‘Why does every person have to know you’re gay?’ ”
Ugandans have traditionally been indifferent to homosexuality, as long as it stays in the closet. It is common in Uganda to see heterosexual men holding hands or dancing together. Several gay men told me that their families were not even suspicious when they spent time with their first male lovers in their childhood homes. In 1999, newspapers reported that two gay men held a marriage ceremony in Kampala. In response, Yoweri Museveni, who has been the President of Uganda since 1986, ordered police to look for gays and arrest them. “God created Adam and Eve as wife and husband,” he said at the time, “but not men to marry fellow men.”
Museveni’s rhetoric no doubt encouraged the creation of Bahati’s bill, which is particularly chilling because it emphasizes the reporting of the homosexual behavior of others. It allows the government to arrest and punish not just gays but people who knowingly interact with them: health-care workers, counsellors, employers, landlords. For three years after the bill was introduced, it was pushed from one parliamentary session to another, and, with all the delays, it looked as if it might never become law. But, in November, Rebecca Kadaga, the speaker of parliament, announced her intention to put the bill to a vote before parliament adjourned for the holidays. If a vote occurs, the bill looks set to pass.
As soon as the bill was introduced, the government was forced to justify its position to the world. (President Barack Obama has called the bill “odious.”) In October, Kadaga sparred with John Baird, the Canadian foreign minister, who attacked Uganda’s gay-rights record at an Inter-Parliamentary Union meeting in Quebec. Kadaga accused Baird of having a colonial attitude.
Museveni has been a firm U.S. ally throughout his twenty-six-year rule. Bill Clinton called him the head of a “new breed of African leaders.” George W. Bush praised him for his aggressive campaign to limit the spread of H.I.V. Rates of infection have declined sharply during his tenure, from eighteen per cent in 1992 to 7.3 per cent today, although in 2008 they started rising again. Perhaps because Museveni sent Ugandan troops to Somalia to support America’s war on Al Qaeda-affiliated groups there, he has faced little criticism from the U.S. as he has crushed political opposition, tolerated corruption, and stood by as police committed human-rights abuses against the sizable Muslim minority. At home, he has done little to undermine Bahati’s bill. Overseas, he has soothed worried allies with the suggestion that if the bill passes he will veto it, returning it to parliament for another vote. (In U.S. State Department cables obtained by WikiLeaks, Museveni is quoted as telling a U.S. official that Uganda is not interested in a “war with homosexuals,” and agreeing that the legislation goes “too far.”) He will almost certainly follow through on the veto, if only to try to save his dissolving international reputation. Recently, after it was revealed that his administration had misappropriated government funds, six countries cut or reduced aid to Uganda.
International disapproval of the Bahati bill has allowed Mugisha and his fellow-activists to strengthen the Ugandan gay-rights movement; until the bill was introduced, the word “gay” was rarely used. The ensuing conversation has made Uganda one of the most hopeful places for gays on a continent where thirty-seven countries criminalize homosexuality. “There was a lot of blackmail by the police before the bill,” Mugisha said. “Before, you could be picked up and taken to prison. Now the police would think twice before doing anything to me.”
The activists’ resistance to the bill has been controlled and strategic. Instead of organizing street protests (which still pose safety risks), Mugisha has pushed for one-on-one meetings with members of parliament. He knows that any public spectacle could sway politicians further in favor of the bill, which has tremendous popular support. (A 2010 survey by the Pew Research Center found that seventy-nine per cent of Ugandans think homosexuality is morally unacceptable.)
Whereas previously it would have been professional suicide to aid the L.G.B.T. population, there is now a broader array of activists willing to challenge extreme legislation. Fifty Ugandan gay- and human-rights organizations have banded together to fight the bill’s passage. Chris Dolan, the director of a Ugandan organization called the Refugee Law Project, is part of the coalition opposing the bill. He told me that his group wanted to get involved so that they could “confront homophobes” with people who aren’t gay.
Anti-gay advocates like Bahati claim that they are defending “African values” from neocolonialists. Yet their efforts are also informed by outside forces—in particular, by American missionaries. Pentecostalism arrived in Uganda more than fifty years ago and is now one of the country’s fastest-growing religions. Many congregations, orphanages, clinics, and schools are sponsored or funded by evangelical churches in the U.S. To American evangelicals losing ground at home, Uganda offered a new opportunity for a Christianized nation. The First Lady, Janet Museveni, is a Christian fundamentalist and has met with the American evangelical Rick Warren several times; evangelical pastors regularly fill stadiums.
Bahati has said that the idea for his bill grew out of a conversation he had, in 2008, with members of an American organization known as the Fellowship. The Fellowship, whose members include Republican politicians, wants governments to act in accord with Christian principles. Bahati, who is soft-spoken but has a tendency to bombast, was first elected to parliament in 2006, a year after he attended a conservative leadership course outside Washington. He now helps lead the Ugandan branch of the Fellowship, which, by his estimate, counts about a third of parliament among its members. Rick Warren and American members of the Fellowship have visited Uganda repeatedly to speak to political and church leaders, and homosexuality is one of their topics. In March of 2009, Scott Lively, an American evangelical pastor, led a series of talks in Kampala, at which he and two colleagues spoke to thousands of attendees about the abuse of teen-age boys by gay men and the evils of gay marriage. He advised members of the Ugandan parliament that gays should be provided with therapy. Five months later, Bahati introduced his bill, using language that echoes Lively’s writings. A draft of the bill’s preamble, for instance, says that children are the “most vulnerable to recruitment into the homosexual lifestyle.” Martin Ssempa, a prominent Ugandan pastor who supports the bill, told me that he has met with Lively twice, and he praised his book “Seven Steps to Recruit-Proof Your Child.” (Lively told me that Bahati had gone too far: “He cares for his country, but the bill is just too harsh. I don’t support the death penalty, even for pedophiles.” Warren, under pressure, has tweeted that he does not approve of the bill.)
In July, Mugisha agreed to debate Lively in Washington, D.C., for “The Stream,” a show on the Al Jazeera English television network. Several months earlier, SMUG had sued Lively in a Massachusetts court over his involvement in the effort to persecute gay people in Uganda, citing his influence on the drafting of Bahati’s bill. SMUG, whose members had spent months gathering evidence of Lively’s anti-gay teachings, is being represented by the Center for Constitutional Rights, in New York. The suit is based on the alien-tort statute, which allows foreigners to file civil lawsuits against Americans for violations of international law, and is the first to be lodged on the basis of sexual orientation. On the set, against a glowing backdrop of laptop screens, Mugisha, in a salmon-pink collared shirt under a dark blazer, sat at a long table. Lively, whose face is framed by a full beard, spoke via satellite, his image projected on a screen. Mugisha’s only sign of emotion was an occasional knowing smile.
Lively alleged that there was a “gay agenda” in Uganda. Mugisha responded, “I am talking to people who are being constantly raped by their families because of who they are.” He was referring to the practice of “corrective rape,” which some lesbians and transgender women in Uganda have suffered at the hands of relatives or other people they know. “I’m talking about people being beaten on the streets. We are speaking about these violations, and you call that a gay agenda?” Lively was undeterred, asking, “Am I the only one who wants to have a family-based society?”
Sometimes Mugisha engages in debates that are surprisingly genial. One morning earlier this year, he was a special guest on “Minibuzz,” a show that features everyday Ugandans talking about current issues while riding in a matatu, or minibus. On this occasion, the van was travelling through rush-hour traffic in Kampala. Not knowing how the other guests would react to the topic of homosexuality, Mugisha looked wary. Although he is well known among an educated segment of the population, none of the commuters featured on this episode of “Minibuzz” knew that he was gay.
The air-conditioned van was outfitted with cameras and microphones, and the young hosts, a man and a woman, sat in the back. Mugisha sat in the middle, near a window, with a bemused look on his face as he listened to two men say that they had seen gay people only on television, and an older man explain that men were being seduced into the gay life style “because of wanting to get rich quickly.”
A woman next to Mugisha said, in Luganda, “These days, we don’t pray, we don’t listen to the words in church.” The woman said that her college-educated, unemployed younger brother was courted by a “man from abroad” with money and gifts. “If someone has God, you can’t do something like that,” she said.
“You say that gays and lesbians can’t be Christian,” Mugisha responded carefully, as he fidgeted with a newspaper on his lap. “Your younger brother had feelings for another guy. Where did his feelings come from? Maybe we can’t explain them. If he has faith, do you really want those feelings to stop him from going to church?”
“You sound like an activist,” the male host interjected, seeming eager to keep the conversation light. Everyone laughed and started talking at once.
After the show ended, Mugisha said that he felt he had changed most of the other participants’ minds a little. Off camera, he had encouraged the religious woman to be more mindful of her brother’s feelings. “I think she came halfway around,” he said. But he admitted that he sometimes felt frustrated: “On almost a daily basis, I meet very many people of that kind, and it can feel like my activism work has gone back to square one.”
Mugisha recognizes that he needs to frame his push for gay rights as a Ugandan effort. “We say that in this country people have always been persecuted for being different, because they’re women, because of tribal differences, because of ethnicity, and then people understand it,” he says. Rahul Rao, a professor of politics at the School of Oriental and African Studies, in London, told me that Ugandan activists have begun to emphasize the ways in which they are distinct. “The term that Ugandan sexual minorities use for themselves is _kuchu—_Swahili slang for ‘gays,’ ” he said. “But the borrowing of identities first cast in the West does make them vulnerable to being seen as Western.”
Maintaining credibility in Uganda means keeping a distance from well-meaning American or European politicians and human-rights groups, but some of the progress of the L.G.B.T. movement in Uganda has been due to Mugisha’s appeals for international solidarity, and the resulting pressure put on the Ugandan government by Western countries. SMUG was founded by Ugandan activists, but most of its money comes from the Fund for Global Human Rights, an American nonprofit foundation. “We cannot get funded by any Ugandan organization,” Mugisha said, a little defensively but not inaccurately. “I would be very happy if institutions in Uganda funded us. They would make our work legitimate.”
Mugisha’s international reputation continues to grow. In November, 2011, he received that year’s Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights Award. In that role, he attended this year’s World Summit of Nobel Peace Laureates, in Chicago, where he was photographed with Sean Penn, who was there to receive a Peace Summit award. The top of Mugisha’s head reached Penn’s chin. Samuel L. Jackson, who hosted this year’s Black Entertainment Television Awards, gave a shout-out to Mugisha during the broadcast, referring to the anti-gay bill and praising him as “courageous.” Secretary of State Hillary Clinton visited Uganda in August to present Mugisha and other activists with the 2011 Human Rights Defenders Award, calling them “organized, disciplined, and savvy.”
One night, Mugisha went to dinner at a restaurant on the roof of the city’s biggest mall with his assistant, Richard Lusimbo; Pepe Julian Onziema, a SMUG activist; and Onziema’s girlfriend. They discussed a workshop they had run that day with grassroots activists, as Mugisha flipped through e-mails on his phone. He looked exhausted.
“O.K., Frank, time out, time out,” Onziema’s girlfriend said, gesturing toward Mugisha’s phone.
“Two seconds,” Mugisha said.
The group ordered ribs and bourbon, and Lusimbo announced that he was worried about his boyfriend, who had missed two days of work and a job interview. Lusimbo believed that he was under what activists call “house arrest,” meaning that the family of an L.G.B.T. hold him captive at home and harangue him until he promises to abandon his partners and gay friends. “Sometimes parents can be O.K., then the next moment they can turn on you,” Mugisha said. “He won’t be locked up forever.”
Onziema’s girlfriend brought up the fiftieth anniversary of Uganda’s independence, to be celebrated in October, and the group debated the merits of the national anthem. Mugisha had told me that he felt he had a responsibility to make the country better. “I’ve had so many offers to take asylum in other places, but this is my country, and I’m not going to leave,” he said.
Lusimbo sweetly sang a couple of verses of the national song. “It’s the most beautiful anthem in the world,” he proclaimed.
Mugisha nodded. “Exactly,” he said.
Two months later, in mid-June, Mugisha led another gathering of activists, on the edge of Kampala. It was stormed by the police under Lokodo’s orders. For tonight, though, singing Uganda’s national anthem was enough. ♦
