‘Resilient’ LGBTQ+ Ugandans vow to fight bill that ‘criminalises their existence’

As she has done so many times before, Sundi stepped out of her home to fetch some water.

Being the ‘mother’ of the sex workers she lives with in Uganda, Sundi brings the warmth so many of her queer siblings feel the world outside has denied them.

But as she and some of her roommates walked outside only weeks ago in southwest Uganda, a group approached them.

‘We was ambushed by a gang, a mob, and they assaulted us, and they beat us until we had to run,’ she tells Metro.co.uk through an interpreter.

‘They shouted at us saying the president has decided that all homosexuals must be punished.

‘We have just one question: How long must we live like this?’

Metro.co.uk spoke with nearly a dozen LGBTQ+ people in Uganda, many of them sex workers, refugees and considered ‘activists’ by virtue of existing.

They all described fears and memories of being beaten by homophobes or police outing them, worries about accessing healthcare, the future of LGBTQ+ activism and the little say they have in how they are described by those in power.

The way police are conducting more and more raids on LGBTQ+ spaces to arrest, ‘out’, ‘torture’ and blackmail detainees in custody is another concern.

Many are members of the Last Hope Refugee Association, a 26-strong LGBTQ+ group known as the Lahora Association who live together. They only recently had to relocate their offices after a spate of attacks.

But adding to their already long list of woes, lawmakers in Uganda passed a law last month and the name says it all: The Anti-Homosexuality Bill, 2023.

Muganzi Ruth, of the LGBTQ+ advocacy group Convening for Equality, says the legislation makes it a crime to simply identify as queer.

‘Our mere existence as human beings is being criminalised,’ she says, adding: ‘I personally feel like I’m being robbed of the right to exist.’

The act, among other things, introduces life imprisonment for gay sex and the death penalty for so-called ‘aggravated homosexuality’.

The sweeping term is defined as homosexual acts committed by anyone living with HIV, involving children or disabled people.

Under-18s convicted of engaging in homosexuality also face up to three years in jail, along with a period of ‘rehabilitation’. While any entity convicted of ‘promoting’ homosexuality will be slapped with a fine of one billion Ugandan shillings, about £220,000.

This will make LGBTQ+ groups in Uganda – many of which provide essential health and homelessness services – even more of a target, Ruth adds. Organising queer rights campaigns will become even tricker as everything ‘shifts underground’.

Ruth, who also works as a programmes director for the KuchuTimes Media Group, says anti-LGBTQ+ violence has increased drastically in the last three weeks.

‘We’re seeing people being evicted from their homes, we’re seeing our homeless shelters being targeted. It’s a chaotic time for the movement,’ she says.

Members of Lahora, in particular, fear for the future ahead now the bill is hurtling towards President Yoweri Museveni’s desk. That is if they have a future at all.

Lauren, a trans woman, says death is something that feels inescapable for them, a feeling intensified by the act.

‘We are being led to our deaths in Uganda,’ she says. ‘Many of us risked being killed where we came from to get here.’

She described how one of the group’s trans women was forcibly ‘undressed’ in public by police: ‘It was so shaming and painful.’

‘We are being hunted (by our fellow refugees). They are looking for us. They want to watch that moment of killing us because of our gender,’ she says.

‘We’re broken. We’re sick. We’re being beaten. We have no medication or food.’

‘We are like nothing,’ another trans woman who preferred to be anonymous says. ‘They consider us nothing more than cows.’

For Martin, a gay refugee, three words came to mind on what life is like in Uganda as an LGBTQ+ person.

‘It’s a constant struggle filled with fear and insecurity,’ Martin says.

‘Despite fleeing from our home countries in search of safety, on the contrary, we find ourselves in a society that does not like us at all, even worse than our country of origin. And we have no way to get back.’

That is why LGBTQ+ groups like Lahora can be so lifesaving. ‘Whenever we are outside, we are abused, discriminated and never accepted. When we are together, we have acceptance and love. We are free to love,’ Martin says.

Members also said a top worry for them is accessing medical treatments, especially for trans people where gender-affirming healthcare can be a lifeline.

Among them is Okerry, who fled her homeland because of her gender identity. She says she was ‘beaten almost to death’ before she found Lahora.

‘It’s why we decided to come together to protect ourselves – but to get good it’s hard. I’m no longer receiving hormones and it’s really hard for me. My life is in danger. I do not have my freedom,’ she says.

Kisila, a trans woman, adds: ‘You find that with trans women, we no longer go to the hospital and we suffer a lot and we use local medication and treatment.’

This is a fear shared by people living with HIV who rely on antiretroviral therapy (ARV), a drug regimen which stops the virus from replicating in the body.

‘There aren’t enough drugs in the hospital,’ Kisila says, ‘they don’t even take it the proper way due to a lack of food.

‘Because of the discrimination and harassment in the hospital, many of our members don’t have access to medication. They don’t offer confidentiality – when they discover you are LGBTQ+ and positive, they expose you to people.’

Only two months ago, a major Ugandan military officers call on health officials to stop treating LGBTQ+ at government-run health centres. In January, a probe was launched into schools suspected of ‘encouraging’ homosexuality.

The parliamentary vote for the Anti-Homosexual Bill caps a battle over LGBTQ+ rights in Uganda that has dragged on for more than a decade, says Edward Mutebi, 31, the founder of the Kampala-based group, Let’s Walk Uganda.

It’s almost déjà vu at this point, he feels, given that lawmakers pitched an identically named bill in 2009 which was passed four years later before being struck off due to a political technicality.

The bill, dubbed by international campaigners as the ‘Kill the Gays bill’, was approved by Parliament without the necessary quorum.

‘The last 10 years for the LGBTQ+ community in Uganda have not been in any way easy,’ he says. ‘It’s been a total mess, a total abuse of our rights and a total abuse of power by the government.’

The 2023 legislation is dragging up the ‘tears and sorrows we had in 2013’.

‘I’m not surprised this bill has come back and is biting us so badly. I was expecting this to happen,’ he says.

There are a lot of reasons for why the bill passed now, Mutebi, who lives in Nairobi, Kenya, as he carries out research for his Master’s, says.

One is how silenced the community has become over the years, with the Anti-Homosexuality Bill making it even harder for queer groups to have a voice.

‘People are calling us paedophiles and rapists – all the information is coming from homophobic people or the media. We can’t counter the misinformation or reduce the lies that are said about us,’ he says.

With LGBTQ+ people in Uganda having little say over how they are described by politicians and the press, religious leaders turning their backs on a vulnerable community like theirs can feel especially painful.

Many Ugandan religious heads have been outspoken drivers of anti-LGBTQ+ measures, presenting homosexuality as a Western import and a threat to family values.

Evangelical Christians in the US backing them isn’t helping either, Mutebi says, adding: ‘No one is coming out to say, hey, what they’re doing is wrong. There is no one calling for accountability.

‘They’re calling for their community masses to go and start murdering people. That is calling for genocide.’

Mutebi feels that politicians, meanwhile, treat LGBTQ+ people as a wedge issue to whip up some easy popularity points or distract voters from other issues.

‘They’re trying to diver the country away from their own wrongs, they’re trying to bring out homosexuality to look like the “worst”, the “bad thing we have in our country”,’ he says.

‘Yet these are the bad people. They are the baddest of evils in this country. They are the problem.’

This tactic is being seen up and down Africa, such as in Kenya, Ghana and Zambia, the LGBTQ+ campaign group Rightify Ghana warns.

‘We believe that some of our lawmakers are in contact with their peers in Uganda and will learn from them to harm the Ghanaian LGBTQI community,’ the group say.

‘We believe that situations are going to worsen for the LGBTQI+ community in the entire African continent, not only Ghana, Uganda, Kenya and others currently with discriminatory bills.

‘It is also a wake-up call that where progress has been made on the continent, we need to protect it.’

Ruth strikes a similarly hopeful tone. She feels that as much as Uganda has given some African nations a blueprint to crack down on the community’s rights, it will be a ‘stepping stone for us to create an African LGBTQ+ movement’.

‘We’ve always been a resilient lot,’ she says, adding: ‘I believe that, in the next five years, we’re going to see a stronger movement.

‘It takes work to stand up against oppression and to change systems. I know that for so many of us, giving up is not an option. We are resilient. We will not give up.

‘We are going to fight this bill as long as it takes.’

Hope is something Kisila, from Lahora, at times struggles to feel. ‘Being gay in Uganda, there is no future. Today we are in this situation, tomorrow we might be dead,’ she says.

‘But if we have an opportunity to get a place where we can love and have the freedom to be LGBTQ+,’ Kisila adds, ‘I think we will find peace.’

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