The members of Uganda’s parliament are on vacation now, and won’t be coming back to work until February. It might not be much, given the threat hanging over them, but during those two months, L.G.B.T. Ugandans can rest a little easier. As I write in my story in this week’s issue, from the moment last month when Rebecca Kadaga, the speaker of parliament, announced that she would pass the proposed Anti-Homosexuality Bill, which would imprison gays (and originally suggested the death penalty for certain homosexual behavior), as a “Christmas gift” to Ugandans, activists have been coördinating a global effort to kill the bill, and those whose sexuality would be criminalized have been watching their government closely, as the bill seemed to be the closest it has come to passage since it was first introduced, in 2009. But lawmakers left for vacation on Friday without holding a vote on it, so now the notorious “Kill the Gays” bill is back in limbo, along with the lives of those in Uganda’s L.G.B.T. community.For several tense weeks, the bill hovered near or at the top of parliament’s agenda. As contentious oil legislation stalled and the government faced aid cuts from several European nations over a corruption scandal, it appeared to be a friendly unifier for politicians—a guaranteed popularity booster. “I think it might be voted upon soon, that’s my feeling,” the gay-rights activist Frank Mugisha told me when we spoke a week ago. “But I also feel that the government wants to keep the bill alive as a distraction. I’m so angry at our parliament—they’re embarrassing themselves.”
Mugisha is a consummate workaholic—I was shocked when he and other activists told me they had actually taken a vacation—and it was clear that his constant community organizing and public campaigning had started to take effect. Most strikingly, Ugandans had started talking about homosexuality.
“In the U.S., you could get away with saying that gays recruit children, and people will laugh. Here, people believed it and said, ‘Let’s stone them!,’ ” James Onen, the provocative and playful host of a popular morning show on the Ugandan radio station Sanu FM, told me earlier this year. Onen leads Freethinkers, a spirited intellectual group in Kampala, the country’s capital, which hosts weekly discussions attended by middle-class Ugandans who, in Onen’s words, “ought to know better about certain things.” The frequency with which Ugandans now talk or hear about homosexuality is heretofore unmatched, he said. But Onen is not able to talk about gay rights on his show without being charged with breaking the Electronic Media Act, which prohibits any broadcasting that violates public morality. He does invite anti-gay figures on the air to poke holes in their arguments, however. Not long ago, the show featured one such guest—a pastor, Solomon Male.
“He told me that the bill should be called the Pro-Homosexuality Bill because it was the best thing to happen to the gay community in Uganda,” Onen recalled. “That it created this conversation that is making people learn about gays, whether they like it or not, and it demystified homosexuality. But, of course, he said this with spite in his voice.”
There has been other, unexpected, progress. In a cartoonish turn of events, six pastors (including one I interviewed named Martin Ssempa) were recently convicted of falsely accusing a rival pastor of homosexuality, raising suspicions among Ugandans about who, exactly, the bill and the anti-gay crusade is targeting. There is a growing feeling that bill is simply a tool for political rivals to use against each other, regardless of sexuality. This past February, the bill was re-introduced to thunderous applause in parliament. L.G.B.T. Ugandans are still hoping for something different the next time around.
Original Article
Source: new yorker
Author: Alexis Okeowo
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