C Street

by Jeff Sharlet

  The question isn’t whether American fundamentalists support the death penalty for gay people. Most don’t. The real question is one of ideological transmission, the transfer of ideas. If Inhofe and Warren, for instance, eventually caved to public pressure and came out in muted opposition to Uganda’s gay death penalty, it isn’t because they dispute the motive behind it, which is the eradication of queer people. They may disagree on the means, favoring a “cure” rather than killing, but not the ends.

  For years, American fundamentalists have looked on Uganda as a kind of laboratory. They sent not just money but also ideas. If the money disappeared, the ideas took hold. Ugandan evangelicals sing American songs and listen to sermons about American problems, often from American preachers. Ugandan politicians attend prayer breakfasts in America and cut deals with American businessmen. But it’s not a one-way exchange. American evangelicals cite Ugandan churches as models for their own, and point to Ugandan AIDS policy—from which American politicians nearly stripped condoms—as proof that public health is a matter of morality. It’s a classic fundamentalist maneuver: move a fight you can’t win in the center to the margins, and then broadcast the results back home.

  David Bahati denies any direct American influence on his bill. That’s not how it works, he told me. It’s about a shared passion, he said, not orders; a common desire for a government by God. That desire might be centered in Washington, but it had grown just as strong, maybe even stronger, in Kampala. When I asked if there was any connection between the Fellowship in Uganda and his legislation, he seemed puzzled by the question. “I do not know what you mean, ‘connection,’ ” he said. “There is no ‘connection.’ They are the same thing. The bill is the Fellowship. It was our idea.”

  A young man who called himself Blessed had agreed to meet me in front of the Speke Hotel, the oldest in Kampala, but he was late, very late, and I had no way to contact him. E-mailing me from a café, he’d said he didn’t have a phone; calling from a pay phone, he’d said he didn’t have a watch. The friends who’d put me in touch with him said he didn’t have an address. I’d seen a picture of him: he had a long neck and a tall, narrow head, a broad smile that made him look both kind and a little sly. I wanted to talk to him precisely because he was hard to find, because he was gay and because he was on the run. His pastor had outed him; his parents could not bear the shame. “Am being hunted by my family at the moment,” he’d written, by way of apology for his difficulty making dinner plans. “Am moving place to place now.” Then, in case I didn’t understand: “They want to kill me.” He suggested that I bring a magazine to read while I waited in the lobby.

  The Speke Hotel is nothing grand, just a succession of stucco arches, but smartly located halfway up the hill from the business district to the seat of presidential power, with the gated gardens of the luxury Sheraton in between. Late at night, muzungus, white men—missionaries on the down low, aid workers, oilmen—come to shop for twenty-dollar prostitutes at the outdoor bar. Earlier in the evening, little clusters of gay men—mostly foreigners these days—mingle at the garden restaurant. Throughout the day, the Ugandan elite meet at the sidewalk tables. They ignore the whores and their giant madam, regal women sipping colas while they wait for the night, and have no idea that the hotel also serves as one of the city’s few havens for gays and lesbians.

  Certainly Miria Matembe didn’t know. I’d been looking for her, too. Then one night, there she was, pointed out to me by my friend Robert, a Ugandan radio journalist I’d hired to show me around town. “That is Honorable right there,” said Robert. Uganda’s first minister of ethics and integrity, she retained the honorific though she was out of government and working as a private lawyer. A small woman in a brown power suit, with short hair cut upward, she charged through the café’s tables with two cell phones simultaneously in action.

  “Honorable!” I called, and ran after her. She trapped one phone between her shoulder and her ear, stared at me, and held up a finger. Stop. She crooked it: follow. She pointed: speak. I whispered beneath her two conversations, telling her that I’d heard she’d been at a planning meeting for the Anti-Homosexuality Bill; that I was writing about the Fellowship; that I wanted to understand the connection.

  “Wait!” Matembe said into her phones. Then, to me: “You are funny!” She chortled, held up five fingers, and walked away. Half an hour later she and two friends plopped down at my table. Night had come and the air was cooling, the whores were rustling, and the guards, skinny men with wide-mouthed shotguns, were guiding the white-and-silver SUVs of Uganda’s elite in and out of the drop-off zone a few feet from our table. “The funny guy,” said Matembe, her East African accent hard on the consonants and sharp on the vowels. “You wanna talk about homos?” She drew the word out for comic effect, mimicking my homely American accent. Honorable—the names of all politicians could be shortened this way—had a booming voice that rose above the boda-boda bikes, the careening motorcycle taxis that rule Kampala’s cratered streets. Her eyes were glowing wrath-of-God beacons as she stage-whispered a list of practices she knew to be common to homos—boy-rape, blasphemy, “golden showers”—and then they became ball bearings rolling around in their sockets as she threw back her head and cackled at the obscenity of it all, the “piss-piss” of the homosexuals and our top-volume conversation about their secret ways.

  “I was the first person to fight homosexuality!” she shouted. She meant during the late 1990s. American missionaries were rushing in, a revival sweeping the land, Ugandan Catholics and Anglicans caught up in the power of evangelicalism and all its concerns—including homosexuality. Matembe, one of the original members of Uganda’s parliamentary Fellowship group, was among the first to grasp the new creed.

  “I used to come here and catch them!” She mimed sneaking up and pouncing with hands like claws. “Catch these people!” Her eyes watered. “Eh?” she said to her friend, a woman named Joy, who didn’t need the prompt to giggle. “Eh?” Honorable stopped, choked by laughter, and then grew serious. “People used to tell me where they were hiding. This Italian thing here—what is it?” The hotel restaurant, called Mama Mia. For a brief period, gay life had almost flourished in Kampala. Gay men cruised straight men on the street, and parties at the restaurant began to take on the political cast of an identity in formation. “Mama Mia!” Matembe shrieked, throwing her hands in the air. She’d put a stop to that. “Ha!” She’d march through the café, leading her troops herself. “And did I find them here?” Joy and the other friend—a shy older man in a sport shirt whom she introduced as Uncle Ben—nodded. “You see Matembe walk into a place,” said Matembe, “and you disappear!” Matembe took a sip of beer and ate some groundnuts. “Eventually, of course, people went underground.”

  That was all right with her. The closet, she believed, was a fine African tradition. That made her a liberal; unlike her successor at the ethics ministry, the current chairman of the Family’s Ugandan outpost, she didn’t want to kill gays. “First of all, I am a human rights activist,” she said. To prove it, she dispatched Joy to her car to retrieve a copy of a book she had written, a feminist memoir called A Woman in the Eyes of God. “I think you should buy,” she said. “Ten dollars.”

  “No, twenty!” said Joy, turned out for the evening ahead in a plunging red dress.

  “I said ten,” declared Honorable. Then she instructed me to buy them a round of drinks. “My activism is guided by godly principles,” she continued. “Therefore, I don’t support homosexuality as a human right. I don’t! Why? Because my beautiful—my godly conviction is that homosexuality is not a sin but a curse! Looking at homosexuality as a curse by God, I do not prescribe the death sentence for such people.”

  The bill’s most draconian clause would add “aggravated homosexuality” to Uganda’s short list of capital crimes. But that wasn’t what really brought Matembe out in opposition. The problem, she said, “is it makes us all potential criminals.” She was referring to a provision of the law design
ed to make every Ugandan a soldier in the war against the gays. “Like, if I am speaking with you, and if I find you are a homosexual… If that turned out to be the case, she’d have twenty-four hours to report me or face a prison sentence of up to three years. This, she thought, was unfair. To her.

  “But that is a good purpose,” Uncle Ben interjected. “It will lead to prevention. It is necessary. We must use all means to stop this!”

  Matembe scowled and said something in Lugandan, central Uganda’s native tongue; Ben answered likewise, bickering. Then he switched back to English. “We have no choice,” he said, turning to me. “They”—the gays—“are trying to end the human race.”

  Before we could discuss this apocalypse, Matembe brought the subject back to her. She wanted to make it clear that she bore no responsibility for the bill. “The Prayer Breakfast continues, but I no longer go to it. They were corrupted. It is the Americans! Confused as usual, exploiting.” She sighed, depleted. Then she rallied, remembering the good old days, returning to the beginning of her monologue. “But I was the first! I fought the homos!”

  The owner of the hotel swooped down on the table, cutting her off. “Honorable Matembe,” he cried. He took her gently by her arm and lifted her from us, petting her and flattering her, quieting her. She was scaring away the trade.

  The lobby was empty when Blessed arrived, an hour late. He wore crisp black slacks and a lime green long-sleeved shirt underneath a black sweater vest, too warm for the weather. Blessed was twenty-one, but he tried to carry himself like an older, courtlier man. He apologized for his impeccable appearance with what he hoped sounded like a joke. “I am a bit homeless at the moment,” he said, and then chuckled, as if this was merely an inconvenience. As we walked up the hill to the Sheraton for dinner—Blessed’s choice, and who could deny him a good meal when every one might be his last—he began to tell me his story.

  He was the oldest child and only son of an educated family, his father a lawyer and his mother a bureaucrat. He had a happy childhood, “normal,” he said, in every way. His parents loved him, and he loved them. They sent him to an elite boys’ school in his father’s hometown, and Blessed loved that, too. He was an affectionate boy, and he liked to touch people, to hug, to kiss. By the time he was twelve, he knew that his hugs and his kisses with other boys—not unusual in Uganda, where straight men sometimes hold hands—felt different from those with girls. And this didn’t bother him, either. He was a bright boy, a good student, but his teachers told him his head was in the clouds. He thought that sounded nice. Up there, he didn’t see conflict. Instead, he saw love. By the time he was fourteen he’d found six other boys in the school who felt as he did, and he loved them.

  All of them?

  “Of course I loved them. Because God loves me.”

  His family was Catholic but not very religious. Neither was Blessed; he said he felt spiritual. Not in the vaguely agnostic American sense. More like a holy fool, a boy for whom everything was sacred: church and his friendships, and the rainbows over Lake Victoria, the white egrets in the trees, and also his studies, his books, his romances—his first love was an older boy named John—and his pleasures, the touches, the caresses. The orgasms? Of course. Everything sweet, he believed, everything he’d been given by God, was holy. He began calling himself “Blessed,” for instance, not long after he and his group of friends were turned in to their headmaster. Blessed said the headmaster beat them, expelled them, and then sent them to the police, where they spent forty-eight hours in prison before a lawyer for Amnesty International managed to get them freed. “It was so much fun!” Blessed exclaimed. Just imagine, he said—he held my eyes, his voice low. “Remember when you were sixteen?” Sixteen, forty-eight hours, the six sexiest people in the world, as far as you were concerned, all in one cell. “I call myself ‘Blessed,’ ” he explained, “because that’s what I am, so fortunate to be born like this.”

  Like this: gay, and so in love with the world that even in jail he forgot about the bars.

  We’d taken an outdoor table, as far as possible from other people. Dinner was a buffet, and Blessed had heaped his plate high. He was built like a willow sapling, but the hillock of food disappeared and he went back for seconds. “I think you need to eat more, too,” he told me, even though I’m no sapling—more like a baobab tree. “I like white men,” he added quickly, reassurance in case he’d accidentally insulted me. “Are you gay?” he asked. “Well, no,” I said, embarrassed, a straight man in a country ruled by would-be gay killers. But Blessed didn’t see it like that. “Oh!” he said. “Then you have children?” That’s how it is in Uganda. “Let me see!” said Blessed. He spent the next ten minutes cooing over pictures of my daughter.

  After Blessed was expelled, he moved back to Kampala and began attending a new school. His parents wouldn’t pay; Blessed washed cars. Now his love took a more political form: he began organizing youth clubs to talk about sex. Not just gay sex but straight sex, too, and all the shades in between. He knew he was an unusual kid, straight or gay. He’d never experienced sex as anything but a gift. But he understood that most teenagers are as terrified of sex as they are drawn to it. He wanted them to know about the precautions, condoms; about HIV and abortion; and also about the good parts. He wanted them to believe that the good parts were good parts, “good news,” in fact, just like their pastors said of Christ. “I don’t think Jesus is against us,” he said, waving the absurd thought away with such a fey gesture I looked over my shoulder to make sure the waiter hadn’t seen.

  Around the time Blessed became Blessed, he began attending Pentecostal churches, “spirit-filled” places where you sang and danced and maybe experienced the gift of tongues, babbling in languages granted to you by God. The songs were American as often as African, the churches were sprinkled with handsome muzungus, and there was a lot of laying on of hands. It felt cosmopolitan, international, modern. Blessed’s favorite pastor was a man named Martin Ssempa, who appeared in music videos in Uganda and in pulpits in America, where he was a favorite of Pastor Rick Warren’s. Every Saturday night Ssempa led a service—a party, really—called Primetime, held at Makerere University’s outdoor pool. It’s fun, even though, technically, it’s anti-fun, an abstinence rally. But Blessed, and plenty of straight kids, were there to cruise. It was hard not to—there were usually at least a thousand students, girls in their Saturday best, hot-pink dresses tight around the hips and clinging baby T’s, boys dressed in American hip-hop, their pants low and their shirts giant and their young faces lean. Ssempa was beautiful too, golden-skinned, the handsomest bald man you ever saw, a smooth man beckoning them from the stage across the pool that glowed in the night. The band thumped and Ssempa called, as if the kids might actually walk on the water. The story he told was almost always the same: sex, “the greatest sex” (it’s going to be awesome!), sex (it’ll be wonderful someday), sex (wait…), sex (just a little bit longer now…). And then everybody would jump. A thousand, sometimes two thousand young Ugandans hopping in time as high as they could, holding on to one another lest they fall in the pool, giggling. “Holy laughter,” some called it. It was a gift they believed came from the Holy Ghost, just like tongues; and some had heard about “holy kissing,” too, another gift—not carnal!—the Spirit in the flesh. There were gay boys there, and drag kings, and straight kids who might peer around the bend, all of them waiting, of course, abstaining, all of them not having sex together, except when they were. “It was so hot!” said Blessed.

  Then came the day Blessed had to choose a side. It was 2007, and he was in court, as spectator and supporter. The case being heard was called Victor Mukasa and Yvonne Oyoo v. Attorney General. Victor Mukasa, a transman, born female, living male, interested in girls, taught Blessed, the sweet, femme boy, to be a man—a gay man—without ever meeting him.

  Like Blessed, as a child Juliet Mukasa knew she was attracted to children of the same sex. And like Blessed, she’d been raised Catholic but had joined an American-st
yle Pentecostal church, hoping that in the music and the dancing and the Holy Ghost—the ecstasy—she would find the resolution of her desires. But Juliet Mukasa was not as skilled as Blessed at leading two lives. She dressed as Victor; she couldn’t think dressed like a girl. A pastor determined that she was possessed by a “male spirit” and asked his flock to help him heal her. The exorcism took place at the altar, in front of a thousand Christians, boys and men from the church’s healing ministry laying on hands and speaking in tongues as women in the pews swayed and sang for Mukasa’s liberation, as the pastor called it: her freedom. They took her arms, gently then firmly, and then they held her, and stripped her. Slowly, garment by garment, praying over each piece of demonically infused cloth. She’d bound her breasts. They bared them. “I cried, and every time I cried they would call it liberation.” They slapped her, but it was holy slapping, and when she stood before them completely naked, the men’s hands roaming over her body and then inside, they said that was holy, too.

  Then they locked her in a room and raped her. For a week. This is known as a corrective; a medical procedure, really; a cure.

  When it was all over, the pastor declared that the church had freed Mukasa. Maybe, in a sense, it had. Victor Mukasa no longer believed there was a demon inside him. The demons were in the church.