Museveni’s “Gay Peril” in Global Perspective

by Michael J. Bosia

Though the quick embrace of marriage equality seemed to many in the West to be the most impressive news about LGBT rights, at the same time a global wave of repression and legal restrictions has produced a climate of brutal violence for sexual minorities. Only a few months ago, all eyes were on Russian restrictions on any positive talk of homosexuality. Then attention turned to Africa, as the presidents of Nigeria and Uganda signed even more repressive legislation – in the case of Uganda, that bill had been threatened by Parliament and enacted late last year as “a Christmas present,” or so said parliament’s Speaker. Though attention in the West has turned from anti-gay legislation to other, more seemingly urgent crises, and gay activists have pivoted to the Sultan of Brunei, the danger to sexual minorities in Uganda has grown, as the law is both a pretext for contestation over power and a bludgeon wielded domestically and internationally by an autocrat in peril.

More than 80 countries ban same-gender sexual intimacy, and a global “gay peril” emanating from the U.S. and European Union has become a convenient scapegoat for social crises. In our volume, Global Homophobia: States, Movements, and the Politics of Oppression, Meredith Weiss and I argue that this latest wave of state action is remarkably similar in policy and rhetoric, less connected to more local LGBT activism or some traditional beliefs than an increasingly modular toolkit of readymade perceptions, tactics, and laws. In fact, repression has often preceded organizing in what Weiss calls in her contribution “anticipatory countermovements.” In our chapters, for example, Kapya Kaoma and I consider the direct intervention of U.S. interests in Uganda and elsewhere as part of a broad governing coalition. He calls this the globalization of the U.S. “culture wars.” Looking beyond Africa, we can see similar forces at work in the cases covered in the volume, so that when officials can link LGBT rights to foreign interventions, homophobia is now the first recourse of the dictator.

So it should have been no surprise, despite Ugandan Prime Minister Amama MbaBazi’s protestations that it was, when his ruling party opened debate on the anti-homosexuality bill. The government and its cronies frequently turn to homophobia when challenged, and the opposition has been unusually bold. In 2012, a new law on oil resources that was riddled with opportunities for corruption was openly challenged; the government was forced to delay the legislation. Last fall, President Museveni’s supporters faced off against a popular opposition leader in Kampala’s city government. Museveni is also playing international powerbroker by backing his allies in South Sudan’s civil war, even as the international community and other regional leaders try to broker peace.

Though U.S. and European leaders now often embrace LGBT rights as emblematic of democracy, the link between the two is not strong. For example, Senegalese President Macky Sall, who ousted an aging despot, earned praise for standing up to foreign intervention when he condemned LGBT rights during President Obama’s visit in June 2013. In the U.S. and Europe, security imperatives nearly always trump LGBT rights. Just as Putin was necessary in the response to the Syrian use of chemical weapons, Museveni’s regime is the top U.S. ally in the campaign against regional warlord Joseph Kony, with an increased deployment of U.S. military forces to Uganda just announced in March. Similarly, the most explicit denunciation of the Russian law on homosexuality was lesbian and gay visibility in the U.S. delegation to the Winter Olympics in Sochi – a move that did more on U.S. streets than Russian ones – which is matched by Obama’s verbal reprimand of Museveni with little direct action. Advocates themselves often respond in terms of national security and obscure the real threats faced by sexual minorities, as they did last year when a key funder of the Human Rights Campaign’s new international initiative characterized homophobia as a product of states that are hostile to the U.S. – a misstatement contradicted by U.S.-supported regimes pursuing anti-gay crackdowns in Egypt, Nigeria, and Uganda.

In my research among sexual minority activists in Uganda and Egypt, I learned about the surprising isolation these activists experience despite the global attention they receive from time to time. In fact, events-driven indignation from U.S. activists can have the opposite effect, playing into a state’s effort to brand homosexuality as a corrosive import. Pressure from U.S. and European LGBT activists – especially pressure to reduce foreign aid – becomes rhetorical fodder for autocrats who claim gay men and lesbians are traitors, even after the global advocates have moved on to the next hotspot. As some European governments announced a reexamination of aid to Uganda after Museveni authorized the new law and the U.S. began to reconsider direct support for the government, Museveni launched a new campaign against those governments he considered colonizers because they wanted to impose their will in Africa today as they had in the past. Ugandan LGBT leaders told me that they feared President Museveni has been running a con all along, pressing his allies in Parliament to move anti-gay legislation so that he can delay it in exchange for concessions. Despite much waffling, Museveni decided to do more than sign the legislation; he has trumpeted it as if it were his own, at the same time using the law to stifle any opposition within the governing party to his decision to run for reelection – opposition that emerged because he withdrew his assurances he was going to retire at the end of his current term.

While state homophobia often precedes the LGBT rights claims, or at best they develop at the same time, Uganda represents a rapid escalation in the context of regime crisis. The law’s enactment was followed almost immediately by high-profile arrests and pink-baiting in the media. Local powerbrokers are conducting their own campaigns of intimidation and arrest. Kampala police raided a research facility at Makerere University funded by the U.S. military on accusations that the center was working with local sexual minorities to promote homosexuality. The government quickly released the staff members who were detained and attempted to both explain and deny any involvement.

Still, in many parts of the world, and even in urban centers like Kampala and Jinja, only a small group of sexual minorities openly advocate for gay rights; a few more might join in social networks around private parties and clubs catering to LGBT people. Many more will combine marriage and same-gender relationships without envisioning a closet to exit. In such contexts, modular state homophobia is a powerful force in the constitution of sexual identity. When advocates and Western leaders insist on “LGBT rights,” they risk describing a context that does not exist, and in some ways exacerbating the very repression they hope to forestall. And as the state escalates a campaign of “gay peril” in law and the media, it in turn speeds the transformation of sexual minorities along the lines of that same Western sexual identity they claim to abhor.

Michael J. Bosia is an associate professor of political science at St. Michael’s College in Colchester, Vermont. Co-editor of Global Homophobia: States, Movements, and the Politics of Oppression, Bosia last year conducted research on local organizing in response to state homophobia in Uganda and Egypt.