The ironic gay spectator: The impacts of centring western subjects in international LGBT rights campaigns

Prevailing narrative

In one of queer theory’s foundational texts, Sedgwick posits that the heterosexual/homosexual binary, like the male/female binary, has been overdetermined as a constituent of identity, arguing that ‘many of the major nodes of thought and knowledge in twentieth-century western culture … are structured – indeed, fractured – by a chronic, now endemic crisis of homo/heterosexual definition, indicatively male, dating from the end of the nineteenth century’ (Sedgwick, 1990: 1). I will draw considerably on Sedgwick’s critique of this binary, but with two significant differences of application. First, while she limits her focus to western culture, the binary politics she identifies are undergoing a process of globalization, whereby the sexual behaviour of non-western actors is being subsumed into the structures of originally western identity politics (Binnie, 2004; Rao, 2010). Second, Sedgwick’s critique is explicitly situated in the context of the late 1980s, when panic and prejudice driven by the western AIDS crisis inspired an ‘urgent homophobic pressure to devalue one of the two nominally symmetrical forms of choice’ (Sedgwick, 1990: 9). While such pressure still exists in many contexts, this article is written against the backdrop of a drastically reconfigured politics of gay identity in the West and is concerned with a core of powerful LGBT and LGBT-affirmative actors, which includes outspoken celebrities, CEOs, and the leaders of several of the world’s most powerful states. Queer theorists and activists must now grapple with the reality that ‘what is queer and transgressive in one place is normative and even hegemonic in another’ (Thoreson, 2011: 23).

Sedgwick suggests that the straight/gay binary fundamentally marks other binaries, such as (within the homophobic lexicon) secrecy/disclosure, masculine/feminine, wholeness/decadence, art/kitsch and health/illness (Sedgwick, 1990: 11). I contend that imperialist modes of LGBT activism, dependent on the homo/heterosexual binary, mark a different set of categories: developed/developing, religious/secular, black/white, Arab/Israeli, urbane/provincial, cosmopolitan/communitarian, educated/ignorant. In this context, it is necessary to establish that, even in campaigns explicitly intended to win rights and freedoms for queer individuals, the overdetermination of the hetero/homo binary remains deeply problematic.

Among the most troubling discursive tropes of these powerful actors is the deployment of evolutionary narratives in relation to queer identity and rights in non-western states, a key facet of what Binnie describes as the ‘new racism’ of assessing states’ levels of development according to their tolerance of sexual diversity. Hoad (2000) undertakes a detailed exploration of the significance of evolutionary narratives of gay identity, arguing that the fundamental flaw in this narrative is the temporalization of space; ‘we were like them, but have developed, they are like we were and have yet to develop’ (Hoad, 2000: 148). In other words, rather than being understood as culturally or socially distinct, sexual minorities in the developing world are perceived to be inhabiting the European past. Within this framework of understanding, the out, western, gay-identified man remains ‘the single subsuming subject’ (Hoad, 2000: 144), whose individual and collective teleology is assumed to apply to all sexual minorities. ‘We are left with only one possible progressive trajectory – the transformation of actors in same-sex genital activity into political subjects’ (Hoad, 2000: 149). ¹

Numerous scholars (e.g. Puar, 2007; Rao, 2010; Shahksari, 2012) have explored the current manifestations of this ‘new racism’ (Binnie, 2004), particularly in relation to Palestine and the Israeli occupation, and Iran and the War on Terror. Massad (2007) offers the most aggressive critique, arguing that ‘the categories gay and lesbian are not universal at all and can only be universalized’ through ‘epistemic, ethical and political violence’ perpetrated by international human rights activists (Massad, 2007: 41). While elements of Massad’s critique resonate with this article, Rao (2010) argues that in critiquing the failures of cosmopolitan narratives of non-normative sexuality, Massad reinforces ‘communitarian authenticity narratives.’ Furthermore, some Middle Eastern queer activists have openly rejected Massad’s theory, arguing that he ‘produced a straw image of the ‘Gay Arab’ who is, by definition, complicit with cultural imperialism and an agent of international gay organizations’ (Schotten and Maikey, 2012).

In Uganda, Sylvia Tamale (2013) has highlighted the operation of this new racism since the introduction of the Anti-Homosexuality Bill in 2009. She accuses western researchers, scholars, activists, journalists and students of descending on Kampala ‘like locusts’, demanding explanations of Uganda’s perceived intolerance and perpetuating racist stereotypes. While Hoad’s critique (2000) is now somewhat dated, and queer scholarship both in Africa and elsewhere has moved forward, Tamale documents that the new racism, grounded in evolutionary understandings of African experience, remains prevalent in many discursive spaces. In her 2013 work, Tamale discusses ‘the lens of the western outsider’, reflecting local knowledge of (and resistance to) international spectatorship.

As multiple scholars observe, there is a necessary irony in works of criticism like this one, which are made possible by the same politicized queer ethics that they seek to contain. For many of the ‘ironic gay spectators’ under discussion, the current political configuration of LGBT identity in the West is liberating and worth expanding. However, we should resist wholesale defence of these actors as being well intentioned, since the same label could be applied to countless colonists and missionaries through history, and does not excuse the harms they have caused.

Section 1: The ironic gay spectator

This section will connect the queer scholarship discussed earlier with the broader dynamics of the international human rights regime via Chouliaraki’s (2013) conception of the post-humanitarian ironic spectator. Chouliaraki contends that humanitarian communication has fundamentally shifted from a pity-based ethics of solidarity, inspired by objective representation of the suffering of distant others, to a self-centred ironic solidarity, whose subjective portrayal of suffering offers an opportunity for the western spectator to explore his or her own feelings and experiences. I argue that this transformation is vividly apparent in certain types of LGBT rights activism, which treat politically contingent, context-specific attacks on sexual minorities as an attack on all gays everywhere, minimizing the experience of local victims, ignoring the political specificities of different states, and centring the experience of western spectators.

In explaining the boom in international LGBT rights activism, Rao (2010) suggests that LGBT rights activists in Britain and northern Europe have rather too much time and money on their hands. After decades of struggle against repressive domestic law, the relatively rapid attainment of decriminalization, ‘marriage equality’, and other rights has sparked an existential crisis among gay activists that is ‘alleviated to some extent by human rights abuses in the Third World that can be framed as gay rights violations’ (Rao, 2010: 184). Essentially, the core contention of this section is that international gay solidarity is not mobilized by objective observance of the suffering of sexual minorities in the developing world, but by a narcissistic perception that attacks on ‘gay’ people anywhere represent an attack on the western gay subject.

The key text I will critique in this section is Stephen Fry’s BBC documentary Out There, released in 2013, in which Fry travels to various locations (the UK, Uganda, Brazil, Russia, and the USA) to meet ‘some of the most notorious homophobes on the planet to challenge their prejudice and to find out where their hatred comes from’ (Fry, 2013). There are several reasons for this choice. First, Fry explicitly locates the film within a broader social and political struggle, claiming that he is ‘taking a more international cosmopolitan approach in terms of international human rights’ (Fry, 2013). Second, as a confessional celebrity who frequently assesses political situations through the lens of his personal experiences, Fry very much fits the mould of Chouliaraki’s ‘ironic spectator’ (see Fry, 1999, 2012). Finally, as a wealthy, intelligent, Cambridge-educated, British man mocking conservative Africans, Fry is, arguably, the epitome of the white queer saving brown queers from brown homophobes (Rao, 2010).

The documentary constructs a narrative of binary struggle between ‘us’ – an imagined worldwide community of gay-identified people – and ‘them’ – a motley army of ‘rabidly homophobic’ heterosexuals. The repeated invocation of the international gay ‘us’ in LGBT rights activism reinforces Sedgwick’s hegemonic hetero/homosexual binary, albeit with a view to elevating the status of the homosexual. By representing everyone from Indian hijras, to Russian lesbian parents, to a Ugandan HIV nurse, to Elton John as members of a single, unified community, the documentary elides differences of race, class, politics, and sexual identity. As Sedgwick observes, ‘it is rather an amazing fact that, of the very many dimensions along which the genital activity of one person can be differentiated from that of another,’ the gender of the object choice (rather than, for example, the choice of sexual act, number of participants, respective ages of partners) has been established as ‘the dimension denoted by the now ubiquitous term ‘sexual orientation’’ (Sedgwick, 1990: 8).

In a particularly unsettling scene in Out There, Fry, speaking to Ugandan government minister Simon Lokodo, argues that, given the rape of young girls in Uganda, ‘surely heterosexuality is far more dangerous to children than homosexuality. Far more! It’s a country where heterosexual rape is almost endemic!’ (Fry, 2013). As well as being gratuitously racist, this interpretation suggests the hetero/homo binary overrides even the presence or absence of consent, mirroring the homophobic assertion, apparent in Uganda’s Anti-Homosexuality Bill, that ‘homosexual rape’ and ‘heterosexual rape are qualitatively different crimes.

This approach is out of tune with the work of local activists and scholars, who have responded to government claims to defend the ‘traditional African family’ by exploring the many configurations of African families and sexualities, suggesting that the African family is not defined by its heterosexuality, and can accommodate queer relationships and families (Nyanzi, 2013; Tamale, 2009).

Chouliaraki (2013) devotes a chapter to discussion of the role of celebrity in post-humanitarian aesthetics, which offers a useful lens through which to assess Fry’s activist journalism. She warns against:

The hyper-emotionalization of humanitarianism, that displaces a focus on suffering and its causes onto a focus on celebrity and his or her publics [which] may ultimately reproduce a narcissistic solidarity obsessed with our own emotions, rather than oriented towards action on suffering others. (Chouliaraki, 2013: 79)

The consistent centring of Fry himself displaces the focus from the suffering of sexual minorities in Uganda and on to the experiences of the celebrity’s public, in this case the British LGBT community. The need to portray western subjects as threatened by non-western homophobia is a strangely recurrent trope in LGBT rights activism. For example, in a widely-circulated image from a protest at the Ugandan Embassy in London, a placard features the quotation (from Martin Luther King) that ‘an injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere’, despite the fact that homophobia in African states has clearly not slowed the progress of LGBT rights in Europe or North America (and may, in fact, have had the opposite effect). In a blog post from its ‘Bringing Human Rights Home’ series, Amnesty USA juxtaposed the image with a shot of American protests to illustrate the ‘unfortunate connection’ between anti-gay laws in Uganda, Cameroon, Nigeria, and Côte d'Ivoire, and a failed bill in Arizona that would have allowed businesses to refuse services to LGBT customers. ‘Lest anyone suggest discrimination in the United States is benign in comparison to what has unfolded in Uganda,’ the blog reads, ‘we should take a closer look at the pain and suffering – and yes, the hatred – laws like these fuel’ (Akwei, 2014).

In a BBC documentary remarkably similar to Fry’s, The World’s Worst Place to Be Gay (Mills, 2011), the narrative climax is constructed through an allegation that the presenter, British DJ Scott Mills, is at risk of arrest. In the documentary and subsequent media coverage (e.g. Roberts, 2013), Mills suggests that he was forced to flee the country and that returning to make another documentary would be too great a security risk. Yet within two years, the BBC authorized another documentary, Out There, during which Fry did not appear to face any significant security risk, despite repeatedly identifying himself as gay (Lokodo does threaten to arrest him, but this seems to be a rhetorical threat used as a response to Fry’s blatant goading; ‘homosexuality is fantastic, you should try it,’ he tells Lokodo). Even if one takes Mills’s fear of arrest at face value, it is significant that the threat to the western spectator himself has become part of the broader narrative of the documentary. Furthermore, the film ends, not with a reflection on Ugandan politics, but with Mills reflecting that the trip has shown him how lucky he is, prompting Rao’s observation that at the centre of the process of international comparison lies a need to establish ‘a hierarchy in which the western self finds proof of its emancipation and worth in the shackles of its non-western other’ (Rao, 2014: 173). In other words, the supposed exercise of solidarity is instead framed as an opportunity for the ironic spectator to gain a greater insight into his own feelings and experiences.

The same process is apparent in Fry’s documentary, which begins with a civil partnership ceremony in London and, via a whistle-stop tour of the world’s supposedly less civilized regions, ends with the presenter celebrating the legalization of same-sex marriage against the backdrop of Trafalgar Square. While British viewers have been exposed to supposed threats to the international LGBT community, Britain is reaffirmed as a space of safety and progress. In keeping with Puar’s (2007) argument, the folding into life of the western subject is premised on the folding into death of the African subject.

By relegating African queers to the realms of necropolitics, these films fail to acknowledge that Uganda cannot be straightforwardly classified as the world’s worst place to be gay and that, rather than being helpless victims, a section of Uganda’s queer community is in fact highly-engaged in resistance, both to their own government (Jjuko, 2013; Nyanzi and Karamagi, 2015; Tamale, 2009) and to patronising and neo-imperialist western interventions (Tamale, 2013).

Section 2: Decentring British colonial law

England and Wales decriminalised most homosexual conduct in 1967. That came too late for most of Britain’s colonies though. When they won independence in the 1950s and 1960s they did so with the sodomy laws still in place. (Human Rights Watch, 2013: 88)

While I criticize this trope as West-centric, it is important to acknowledge that African queer activists also draw on the colonial import narrative, indicating that they consider it a useful advocacy tool (see Mugisha, 2011). However, when local voices (Jkuko, 2013; Nyanzi, 2013; Tamale, 2014) invoke the importation of legalized homophobia, they do so from within a textured understanding of Ugandan history and politics, both colonial and postcolonial. It is not, as is so often the case in western coverage, used as an ahistorical ‘zinger’.

To begin, it’s necessary to briefly consider the argument that, of the states that continue to criminalize homosexual behaviour, ‘more than half … have these laws because they were once British colonies’ (Human Rights Watch, 2013: 86). It is true that 42 of the 78 states that criminalize sodomy are members of the Commonwealth but the claim that British imperialism is the predominant causal link is analytically suspect for several reasons. First, a number of former British colonies have abandoned these laws, including developing states (e.g. South Africa, Fiji, and Hong Kong). Second, several non-British colonies have independently adopted similar laws (e.g. Cameroon, Benin, and Senegal). Third, former British colonies, including Uganda, have independently expanded the scope of the colonial laws. And finally, while codified anti-sodomy laws typically did not exist in African states prior to the arrival of British colonizers, this does not preclude the existence of indigenous forms of hostility to non-normative sexual behaviour. ‘The claim that “homophobia” is western may therefore be true but trivial, if it cannot take cognisance of this wider realm of indigenous phobic affect’ (Rao, 2014: 177). Indeed, the Human Rights Watch report consistently emphasizes that these laws were introduced ‘with no debates or “cultural contestations” to support colonial control’ and are democratically illegitimate (Human Rights Watch, 2013: 86). But the report does not question whether, if consulted, indigenous populations would actually have rejected the laws and fails to meaningfully engage with the fact that in many states the laws have been significantly overhauled with some degree of democratic consent. All of these factors indicate that, while the colonial origin of anti-homosexuality laws may be significant, it does not demonstrate that queerphobia is fundamentally ‘un-African’ (see Evaristo, 2014).

Furthermore, as Rao (2014) argues, the exclusive attribution of blame to British colonialists denies the agency of African actors, both pro- and anti-LGBT. For example, in its report on this subject, Human Rights Watch offers the following explanation for postcolonial states overtly criminalizing sexual contact between women:

British law never punished sex between women – and hence British colonialism never imported criminal penalties for it. However, the breadth of the British ‘gross indecency’ provision has given states an opening to penalise lesbians as well. (Human Rights Watch, 2013: 108)

In recent years, this tendency to centre the western culprit has been mirrored by the emphasis on the role of ultra-conservative American preachers in whipping up homophobic sentiment in Uganda (Rao, 2014). Most famous among them is Scott Lively, who is currently being investigated in the USA on claims of crimes against humanity, in a case brought by Sexual Minorities Uganda and US-based Center for Constitutional Rights, under the Alien Tort Statute (CCR, 2015). The role of these preachers is significant in assessing the genealogy of African homophobia, and Ugandan activists are entitled to seek accountability wherever they can (Kilborne, 2014). However, overemphasis of the role of American pastors diminishes the agency and significance of African religious figures, just as the excessive focus on British colonialists distracts from the actions of contemporary Ugandan politicians. Indeed, it echoes Lively’s own narcissistic claim that he is the ‘father’ of Uganda’s anti-queer movement and that his visit in 2009 was like ‘a nuclear bomb against the “gay” agenda in Uganda’ (Lithwick, 2013). In her study of the conflict between conservative and liberal elements in the Anglican Communion, Hassett argues that alliances between African and American churches are, in fact, ‘fundamentally reciprocal’ arrangements in which ‘materially poorer partners [are] sharing spiritual resources of equal or greater value than any material resources they may receive’ (Hassett, 2007: 7).

Nyanzi and Karamagi’s (2015) analysis of the social and political dynamics of the bill acknowledges the role of colonial law and American preachers in the development of anti-homosexuality legislation, but they are understood as just two of the many factors that drove the legislation forward. Far greater significance is rightly afforded to the ulterior motives of a number of Ugandan politicians. They affirm Tamale’s (2013: 31) contention that, rather than reflecting deep-rooted prejudice among Africans, ‘homophobia has become a political tool used by conservative politicians to promote self-serving agendas’.

The frequency with which British colonial homophobia and American evangelical influence are invoked in communication related to LGBT rights is another manifestation of Chouliaraki’s theory of ironic spectatorship. In relation to the various debates that have taken place over Uganda’s Anti-Homosexuality Bill since 2009, the repeated insistence on British culpability (see, for example Fry, 2013) has simply circumvented serious intellectual engagement with Ugandan politics, like that undertaken by Nyanzi and Karamaga (2015), Jjuko (2013) and other local scholars. Rather than inspiring solidarity based on the culturally and politically specific experience of sexual minorities in Uganda, this narrative invites western spectators to reflect on their own historical experience. Once again, the end point of this process is the reinforcement of western superiority. As Rao summarizes, ‘this condescension comes out of being embedded in cultural contexts that are seen to be developmentally superior, by virtue of having already posed the questions, fought the battles, and won the liberties that distant sexual minorities now struggle for (the assumption being that they struggle for the same liberties) (Rao, 2010: 192).

The dangers of the homogenizing assumption that all queer communities are engaged in a single struggle will be explored in more depth in the next section. As a precursor, however, it is worth noting that Hoad sees ‘the universalization of the homosexual as a transhistorical, trans-spatial subject’ (2000: 153) as, prima facie, an act of ‘ethical violence’ perpetrated by the international human rights regime. Although the analysis in the next section focuses on the politics of human rights, particularly in terms of the management of public perception, the ethical fault may run considerably deeper. While feminist movements have, through the promotion of intersectionality, begun to assimilate the critiques of ‘global sisterhood’ offered by feminists of colour and feminists in the developing world (Rao, 2010), international gay rights movements continue to lag behind. If the human rights project is to survive, in relation to LGBT issues among many others, international organizations cannot simply develop strategies to avoid seeming neo-imperialist, but must grapple with the reality of being neo-imperialist.

Section 3: The failures of queer internationalism in Uganda

This section highlights a number of ways that international LGBT rights activism can actively undermine struggles against homophobia in the developing world. Focusing primarily on the international response to Ugandan state homophobia from 2009 to the present, I will consider four major negative impacts of western activism: the ‘spectacularization’ of Ugandan homophobia; the pressure on western leaders to take some kind of action, even if it is tokenistic or counterproductive; the loss of credibility that comes with focusing disproportionately on a specific rights issue; and the stifling of possible solutions that do not align with a western sexual teleology.

In October 2009, David Bahati, an MP from President Yoweri Museveni’s National Resistance Movement, submitted a Private Member’s Bill to the Ugandan parliament, calling for a strengthening of the country’s existing laws on homosexuality, with the stated goal of protecting the heterosexual family, children, and ‘the cherished culture of the people of Uganda’ from the efforts of ‘sexual rights activists seeking to impose their values of sexual promiscuity on the people of Uganda’ (Bahati, 2009). The bill rapidly gained international attention and soon came to be known as the ‘Kill the Gays Bill’ because it included a recommendation that the death penalty be used in cases of ‘aggravated homosexuality’. Nearly five years of domestic and international debate followed before Museveni signed a revised version of the bill (with aggravated homosexuality punished by life imprisonment rather than death) into law. The arguments that follow deal primarily with this five-year period, when Uganda became the frontline of an ideological battle between internationalist human rights advocates and traditionalist African leaders (Petrova, 2014). While western pressure was invited by Ugandan activist groups, and did motivate the softening of the bill’s provisions, western actors also did a great deal that increased the stigma surrounding homosexuality in Uganda and worsened the lived experience of its ‘kuchus’ (the preferred identity description of many queer Ugandans). It should be noted that in August 2014 the Anti-Homosexuality Act was struck down in court because it was passed without proper parliamentary quorum, but this does not out rule its reintroduction (Gettleman, 2014). Therefore, the power struggle over this issue cannot be assumed to be over.

Mwikya argues that the debate over Ugandan homophobia has been characterized by ‘spectacularisaton’, one of the best-known examples being Rolling Stone’s publication of the names and pictures of ‘Uganda’s Top Homos’, with the subheading ‘Hang Them’ (Rice, 2010). However, Mwikya argues that western media outlets and queer blogs were also responsible for the ‘spectacularization’ of the issue because they amplified the message of Rolling Stone and its predecessor, Red Pepper. Before it published the names and pictures, Rolling Stone was a fairly minor tabloid with a readership of approximately 3000 people but, within days, it had been featured in high profile publications in Africa and around the world, including The New York Times and the Guardian (Mwikya, 2013). Its editor, Giles Muhame, was to become a minor celebrity, frequently interviewed by western journalists attempting to showcase Ugandan homophobia (e.g. Rice, 2011; and see Wright and Zouhali-Worrall, 2012). Discussing coverage of the incident in the Guardian, Mwikya speculates that the story, rather than being truly centred on Ugandans, was produced to cater to an audience interested in ‘the internationalism of queer’ (Mwikya, 2013: 146). The power of Rolling Stone’s feature, then, did not simply derive from the sensationalism of the subject matter, however reprehensible. It was also a product of the gullibility of western spectators, willing to use the rants of a small-time Kampala tabloid as proof of their preconceived notions of African homophobia. Mwikya accuses the western media (specifically the Mills documentary discussed earlier) of having ‘imposed itself as the leader in “helping” … queer activism on the continent not as it really is but how they want it to be’ (2013: 147). This mode of queer internationalism serves to bolster the domestic perception that queer activism, like homosexuality itself, is alien to African societies and that queer Africans are, to borrow Massad’s phrase, ‘native informants’ (2007). By contributing to the spectacularization of the discourse – think, for example, of Fry telling Lokodo he should give homosexuality a try – western actors strengthen the claim that a culture war is taking place and incentivize African politicians’ use of homophobia as a proxy for nationalist and anti-western sentiment.

Mwikya also emphasizes that queer internationalists in the West consistently expect their leaders to bring ‘something’ to the table. That something, at least in relation to African states, is almost invariably the threat to reduce or redirect aid. During the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting (CHOGM) in 2011, Prime Minister David Cameron issued an ill-advised warning that the UK was considering cutting aid to anti-gay governments, drawing accusations of imperialism from African leaders (BBC, 2011). Perhaps more significantly, African social justice activists publicly denounced the decision, claiming it would compromise local queer activism and potentially cause a ‘serious backlash’ against queer people (Black Looks, 2011). However, Cameron’s message was not a response to queer activists in Africa, but rather to pressure from British activist Peter Tatchell, who demanded that Cameron use CHOGM as an opportunity to apologise for Britain’s implementation of sodomy laws (Rao, 2014). This is a clear manifestation of the dangers of the Eurocentric ‘colonial import’ narrative prevalent in rights activism. ‘The historical reminder of sodomy laws as an inheritance from British colonialism is turned into an argument for Britain to play a leading role in their removal’ (Rao, 2014: 177), even if British action is ineffective and counteracts the efforts of local activists.

Indeed, Michael Holman of The Financial Times describes American and British leaders as ‘bear baiters’, poking and prodding Museveni with moral denouncements despite having little power to influence his actions (Holman, 2014). Holman emphasizes that, given Uganda’s importance as a military staging post for international campaigns against Muslim extremism, the discovery of oil, and the risk that China will fill a possible aid vacuum, the threats of western governments and NGOs tend to ring hollow. Such posturing damages the credibility of the West’s human rights interventions.

Furthermore, during the five years in question (apart from the brief anti-LRA (Lord’s Resistance Army) frenzy inspired by the viral video ‘Kony 2012’), LGBT rights in Uganda have been emphasized in isolation from (and perhaps at the expense of) countless other rights violations, including the shooting of protesters, the suppression of anti-government individuals and publications, the misappropriation of public funds, and the army’s involvement in the civil wars of neighbouring states (Epstein, 2014; Tamale, 2013). Indeed, Epstein goes so far as to suggest that the National Resistance Movement has deliberately timed its anti-gay outbursts to distract attention from other political abuses, echoing Nyanzi and Karamagi’s (2015: 37) claim that ‘homosexuality presents an easy tool that rogue regimes marshal to divert attention (criticism) away from domestic governance failures’.

Either way, the emphasis of human rights groups on LGBT rights, which are of little concern to most Ugandans, and neglect of everyday political, economic and social rights entrenches the perception that the priorities of the human rights regime are defined by the values of western donors rather than the needs of African recipients.

Perhaps most importantly, the West-centred evolutionary narrative of LGBT rights is harmful to queer Ugandans because it forecloses ‘other possible desires, languages, cultures and positions’ that lie outside the universalist lexicon of gay progress (Hoad, 2000: 143). A political ontology that assumes that decriminalization and legal reform are the keys to progress (as was arguably the case for many western queers), cannot accommodate, for example, Ward’s (2013) argument that, although post-apartheid South Africa is remarkably legally tolerant of queer people – the only African state coloured in green on maps of global homophobia (Rao, 2014) – the occurrence of homophobic violence there is vastly higher than in Uganda. Despite their additional legal privileges, therefore, informal homophobia may have a greater impact on South African queers than highly visible state homophobia does on Ugandan kuchus. Indeed, Thoreson undertakes a conceptual critique of human rights themselves on the grounds that they ‘reify the state’s authority to recognize and legitimate particular kinds of sexual subjects’ (2011: 5). This connects to Bosia (2014) who, while acknowledging the importance of decriminalization, draws on Sen’s theory that development should focus on ‘the expansion of the “capabilities” of a person to lead the kind of lives they value – and have reason to value’ (quoted in Bosia, 2014: 268). A discourse based on LGBT identity politics may, as this section has shown, increase the risk of state violence. Drawing on this premise, Bosia (2014: 268) suggests ‘setting aside rights based on sexual identity in favour of those based on bodily autonomy, including an end to prosecution and intimidation, protections for all citizens equally, and the provision of necessary capabilities in terms of health care, security, and intimacy’.

Crucially, modes of queer resistance and identity building must be led by local queer actors. Nyanzi and Karamagi (2015) highlight that reified discourses of African heterosexuality and homophobia leave little space for queer African-ness, let alone queer, Christian Ugandan-ness. However, they also highlight that in Uganda, queer individuals are already carving out that space for themselves in resistance to both government and neo-imperialist pressures:

Uganda’s self-identified homosexual individuals variously assert their Africanness through multiple routes, including actively laying claims to their ethnic group belonging, membership to kinship structures, civic participation in democratic processes, national identity, social organising of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, intersex and questioning-support groups, language and lexicon, visibility and voice in local communal activities, solidarity, adherence to and participation in cultural rituals.

Conclusion

In his critique of the evolutionary narrative of gay identity, Hoad suggests that rather than assuming that all queer struggles everywhere have pre-determined goals that slot into the hetero/homosexual binary, activists should focus on ‘creating a silence, so that something as yet unspoken can be heard’ (Hoad, 2000: 143). This resonates with my argument that the struggle for queer empowerment has been severely compromised by the centring of western gay subjects. While critics must acknowledge the risk that dismantling the prevalent neo-imperialist mode of activism may result in a political vacuum in which traditional, communitarian prejudice is less challenged, this article has demonstrated that the dominant mode of international gay rights activism is deeply flawed, in its epistemology as well as its application. Furthermore, it has highlighted that contrary to western media portrayals of helpless African queers, there are local communities of resistance in Uganda, and such networks exist in India, Brazil, Nigeria and across the global south. Indeed, Tamale explicitly calls for transnational queer cooperation not led and coordinated by the West. Rather, she argues that ‘Africans must begin thinking seriously about how to engage newly developing countries, particularly Brazil and India, in which the degree of homophobia is comparable to that of Africa.’

While ‘outness’ and ‘gayness’ are liberatory vectors of identity for many queer subjects, if queer politics is to be a democratic, inclusive and empowering space, its key terms must remain ‘in the present, never fully owned, but always redeployed, twisted, queered from a prior usage and in the direction of urgent and expanding political purposes’ (Butler, 1993: 173). We must question whether human rights organizations, whose activism is fundamentally premised on the need to ‘speak out’ or ‘speak truth’ in defence of an established body of universal rights, are existentially incapable of remaining silent and allowing alternative, non-western ontologies to emerge. If not, I suspect that sexuality rights will remain a flashpoint in the human rights movement’s struggle against international irrelevance.