Uganda, a land placed under God’s protection, was never able to tolerate “depravity,” and the new legislation is a hardening of existing homophobic laws: homosexuality has been punishable with a prison sentence since the fifties. What’s new, other than the sentencing of those with HIV to the death penalty, is the creation of a crime of “non-reporting” (if you know someone is homosexual you must report them within 24 hours or face a prison sentence) and punishment even of “crimes” committed outside Uganda.
For a few days it seemed that the most extreme part of the bill, the death penalty, would be withdrawn, but it now seems that this isn’t the case. The complete bill is currently being debated by the Ugandan parliament. You can voice your concerns direcly tothe Ugandanstatehouse. It’s therefore urgent to fight this now. Thousands of people are in the process of signing this petition: http://gopetition.com/petitions/say-no-to-anti-human-rights-bill-in-uganda.html
As Rachel Maddow of MSNBC has revealed, this bill was inspired by a “missionary” visit by a group of American evangelicals at the beginning of the year. The story was covered in Tetu website around the same time. Such a visit was hardly a first. As Maddow - the most vocal speaker on this subject in the USA - pointed out, Uganda had already become a laboratory of evangelical Christianity and neocon influence in Africa. Stricken early on by the AIDS epidemic at the beginning of the eighties, Uganda managed throughout the nineties, with the support of various NGOs, to slow the progression of the disease. A strategy of prevention and an program encouraging condom use proved their efficacy. George Bush’s victory however changed the situation dramatically. US aid became conditional on a new strategy of promoting abstinence. Influenced by a religiously motivated campaign without precedent, Uganda transformed its policy, ceasing to promote condoms and offering instead abstinence as the only protection from HIV. Today’s new strategy of “eliminating” homosexuality can therefore be seen as the logical next step of their conversion to evangelical conservatism.
Rachel Maddow on MSNBC has investigated, informed and debated the subject at length. Gordon Brown and the Canadian prime minister Stephen Harper have raised the issue as the last Commonwealthsummit. Petitions are being created to further increase pressure. You can sign here. In the gay world, an American petition has been raised to target an anti-gay senator with links to Uganda, and demonstrations of forty or fifty people have taken place outside the United Nations building in New York. By demonstrating the link between American anti-gay evangelicals and the bill, Rachel Maddow’s coverage has forced them to distance themselves from it and even publicly request that the authors remove the death sentence clause. In France, the response has been limited to a simple brief from the CLGBT on the first of December. Considering that we’re talking about extermination of gay people here, the level of response has been modest to say the least. A brief? When you consider that this is one of the most overt attempts at programming genocide since Cambodia and Serbia mobilisation of the gay community would seem to be happening a little late.
Such a state of affairs should give us serious food for thought. These events provide a snapshot of our community, of our bourgeois nature, but also of our frightening vulnerability; of the adolescent nature of our support organisations clearly disinterested in anything that actually matters: warning people, defending people. In this instance defending their right to live.
Plenty of countries have discriminatory and even violent laws against homosexuality. At different times, in different places, we have seen gay people forced into psychiatric institutions and given electric shocks intended to “revert” them to heterosexuality. Even countries who see themselves as “advanced” have only recently softened such laws, forced to do so by the gay militants of the seventies and the struggle against Aids which brought the existence of so many gay couples out into the open. This in turn lead to various forms of recognition of civil unions. After the first great wave of “coming out” in the seventies, gay activism stalled in the eighties. And now it would seem that both gay activism and HIV campaigning have collapsed again. For many gay people their condition seems relatively satisfactory and doesn’t really seem to justify the mass demonstrations of the past. Support organisations, deprived of this momentum and the energy of all those now-nonexistent militants, go round in circles communicating to an ever diminishing clique. Successive governments and generous sponsors have turned them from radical activist organisations into lumbering quangos and as in the eighties, gay militants criticise their lack of action in favour of gay marriage or HIV prevention.
Of course, once laws on civil unions had been passed some of these groups did then take up the cause of gay marriage... They needed something to campaign about after all. But they never placed gay marriage within the wider context of individual freedom, a context which doesn’t limit itself to homosexuals. It’s here we see the inability of activism to ever see further than its own horizon, to ever reach out to strike up alliances with others converging needs. As for the fight against AIDS, it too has become a subsidised activity with its own yearly meetings: Gay Pride and World AIDS Day. It too has fallen victim to power struggles and money struggles for access to ever rarer financial windfalls. There’s little “fight” left in the fight against Aids.
Twenty years ago our positions were clear. Twenty years ago our clarity of purpose gained us a certain level of respect in society, and this respect wasn’t irrelevant to how much progress we were able to make in terms of legality and visibility. Today it’s the opposite: an artistic blur born in the age of antiretrovirals. We’re not quite sure if condoms are still really necessary and it seems that what’s important isn’t so much to protect yourself but to “talk about it”. And in case of “mishap” you need to make sure you know where you can get a quick prescription for PEP treatment. Those who continue to demand “old-fashioned” preventions strategies in the midst of this new whirlwind of confusion are accused of being “integrists.” They are, it is said, out of touch with what’s happening on the street. It’s becoming clear that we are watching the slow death of these failing quangoed outfits: governments faced with rocketing numbers of infections will soon be forced to admit the failure of these irresponsible “risk reduction” strategies and will have to re-seize control in favour of old-style prevention messages. The silence of most of the HIV groups will be seen as acquiescence and the state - itself fundamentally guilty for failing to adopt a single clear strategy over the last twenty years - will have found the perfect scapegoat. Until then, on world AIDS day, the HIV machine will continue to mobilise more journalists than gay men.
The Ugandan question reveals better than any other, the cul-de-sac in which we find ourselves. It also provides some ideas... Why is it that there hasn’t been a general uprising against what, if the bill goes through, will be the first genocide of the 21st century? The fact that a government sponsored association like CLGBT in France did nothing but publish a brief on the 1st of December should tell us everything we need to know: we have handed our destiny to heterosexuals, heads of state, sponsors, politicians and, if they fancy looking out for us, journalists. Our own campaigning is limited, it seems, to Gay Pride, nowadays little more than a carnival. We need perhaps, to look back at the era in which Act-Up was born.
What were militant Americans telling us in 1987? They were saying that the silence surrounding the Aids question came from the affected minorities themselves. Homosexuals, prostitutes, drug users for sure, but also the silent minority within capitalist society, the Third World, the voiceless of Africa, Frantz Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth. Black people. If, when faced with the Ugandan government, our silence and inaction have been revealed, it’s firstly because it is in Africa that this is happening, and because western gays react primarily not as gays but as Westerners. We don’t imagine that this legislation targets men and women who could quite easily have been our friends, our lovers, our mistresses. We have demonstrated through our inability to protest, our failure to oppose, the limitless bounds of our own egoism. The Ugandan government has suggested adding a death sentence to an illness and it’s no accident. Africans, gays, people with HIV... Yes, silence = death.
You have to admit that the indifference of our groups, and their incapacity to organise a demonstration of even ten people on this issue should make us wonder also about say, the future for trangendered people, or of gay marriage. As in the eighties, activism has ceased and our organisations instead content themselves with managing that which has already been acquired. When faced with a potential genocide against gay people and people with HIV they reveal themselves as nothing more than grouped sources of inaction. Minorites debated recently whether Act Up needs to disappear so that something new can be born. Maybe we can now consider that the failure of our organisations to do, or even try to do something here is, of itself, an act of disappearance.
What could we have done? Ten or twenty years ago, what militant, gay or straight, wouldn’t have dreamed of a tool that could connect people together in real time, that would enable us not only to mobilise, but also to circulate information? Iranian students - whose right to communicate has been curtailed - have beaten us to it. You can only deduce that their hopes and dreams are more powerful than our own desires for marriage or adoption. They, the Iranians, use Facebook, twitter, YouTube...
What’s needed is a whole new style of militancy. We don’t, in the end, need all these groups with their banners and their offices and meeting-rooms. Because when push comes to shove, they visibly don’t use them for anything. We just need to count on ourselves and a way of communicating. And social networking sites are incredible tools for broadcasting information.
What we could have done, what we should have done when faced with bill legalising genocide, was to circulate the information, to spread the news, to create a buzz. Because a buzz around this business would have got the press talking about it, and might even have inspired some “youngsters” to go and demonstrate in front of the Ugandan embassy, to spam their email, and saturate their phone and fax lines, after having created a page on FB, Skyblog etc. Our tired militants haven’t understood that what counts for all of us is that we find a way to re-seize control of our “stuff”. Our gay stuff. Our HIV stuff. All those things that we have subcontracted to others with such devastating results. In the end, the only pressure on the Ugandan government has come from the same American evangelicals who inspired the bill. And their “request” that the bill be “softened” looks like being ignored.
We have missed the opportunity to debate the conditions in which gay and HIV positive people live throughout the world. This missed opportunity reveals our true nature. We won’t get the right to marry after all, but it won’t be because straights don’t want it. We won’t gain the right to marry because we are incapable of seeing ourselves as we really are: at the mercy of homophobic demagogues, defended by organisations who do nothing but look after themselves whilst living on the generosity of the heterosexual majority.
Minorities.
We have new tools to enable us to climb out of this hole. And it’s time we used them. Spread the information. Create a buzz. Don’t hesitate in being spontaneous. Organise a protest. We don’t need a government sponsored agency in order to express our indignation. It costs nothing - just a few clicks. Don’t you care that they haven’t bothered to mention this bill on the nine o’clock news? Gay, HIV positive, African, living under a totalitarian regime, why would they care? It’s up to us to make them care.
The change to this new brand of activism is inevitable. Instant activism will put the big organisations before a fait accompli - they will evolve or disappear. It will be more supple. It will be less limiting. And using these tools we can get active today. There are only a few hours left before these laws get voted in Uganda, and then Rwanda who, inspired by Uganda are following suit.
A few hours.