“When You Love Something, You Fight for It”: LGBTIQ rights Advocacy in Uganda
By Clare Byarugaba
Content warning: the following piece discusses topics of homophobia, violence, and rape.
I always get culture shock whenever I’m in a place like New York or Washington, D.C. I am not used to being free, or around people that celebrate rather than condemn my work or my sexuality.
I was born in a country that I love, that doesn’t love me back, a country that rejects every aspect of who I am and seeks to erase me.
The communities that taught me love and tolerance have become wary and fearful. Families are denouncing and condemning their LGBTIQ children. Like a friend of mine who came out and was almost run over by his father. Why? Because his father said he would rather have a dead son than a gay son. Or like my mother who refuses to recognize my sexuality and my work, often saying she wishes I was a bank teller.
Mob violence is not just when you are being stoned on the street, It’s when, like us, you live in fear and uncertainty every day. Community members are routinely outed by radicalized vigilantes. I cannot walk on the streets of Kampala or use public transport. My daily routine is always changing. I receive constant threats and I am forced to move from one house to another frequently. Acting on tip offs, the police raid community safe houses and throw community members in filthy cells to subjugate them to inhumane and degrading treatment, including isolation and forced anal examinations, which have no evidential value. Police have shut down workshops organized by the community, and arrested attendees.
When I was arrested for daring to organize a pride event, my lawyer came just in time before the police handed me over to detained criminals, who were frothing at the mouth with excitement at the chance to teach me and other detained organizers a lesson for being homosexuals. I survived corrective rape that night.
The crisis facing my community has only gotten worse since last year, when Uganda’s President of almost 40 years passed the Anti-Homosexuality Act of 2023.
This draconian law, like the 2013 “kill the gays” law that was repealed on a mere technicality, has unleashed the darker side of an increasingly authoritarian government that is hellbent on scapegoating a vulnerable community for diversionary and populist reasons. Few things are more dangerous than leaders with no fear of reprisal, who face no accountability for treating LGBTIQ citizens like second-class citizens.
The new law increases the penalty for same-sex consensual adult sexual relations to imprisonment for life. It creates several new crimes, such as “aggravated homosexuality,” which includes consensual sex with a person living with disabilities, for which LGBTQI+ Ugandans could face the death penalty. For the crime of “attempted homosexuality,” we could face 10 years. The law criminalizes “promoting homosexuality,” punishing all forms of advocacy in support of LGBTIQ+ Ugandans with a possible 20-year prison sentence. Activists, public health workers and others face long prison sentences and hefty fines for implementing programs or voicing allyship. Over the last one-and-a-half years of the law’s enactment, we have documented and verified over 1,550 gross human rights violations against the Ugandan LGBTIQ community.
October 9th, 2024 marked 62 years since Uganda’s independence from British rule — but the anti-sodomy laws from the colonial era have never been repealed. Moreover, the Ugandan LGBTIQ community suffers from a horrible form of re-colonization from a powerful Anti-LGBTIQ movement. US far-right religious extremists from Project 2025, Sharon Slater of Family Watch International, Agenda Europe, and their Russian propaganda counterparts have — under the guise of promoting family values — advanced their dangerous anti-rights campaigns through corruptible pundits in Uganda and other African countries, to the peril of a minority community whose only affront to society is their fabulous differences.
You must be wondering, in the face of all these odds, Clare, why don’t you leave the country that seeks to erase you? See, when you love something, you fight for it, you fight to belong, you fight for the freedoms that authoritarian regimes will not give freely, you fight because so many communities all over the world have to fight. I am no different.
I fight because I want those who come after me to have a softer landing, to know a different Uganda.
I believe in the African culture of “Ubuntu,” which means in my language, “Omuntu, Nomuntu ahabwa bantu.” This essentially means “a person is a person through other persons.” The practice of ubuntu is fundamentally inclusive, involving respect, tolerance and concern for one’s family, friends and neighbors.
The never-ending onslaught of hate towards the LGBTIQ community would make it easy for me to stand in front of you and say my brothers and sisters back home are barbaric and will not change. But the backbone of my activism is optimism and hope.
Ugandans have been taught to hate. I believe the spirit of respect, brotherhood, tolerance and acceptance is not dead among my people.
Through the PFLAG-Uganda I founded, I work hard to help Ugandans unlearn their homophobia and regain their ability to accept different people into their communities, while creating a safe space for families to build firm foundations of meaningful allyship for their LGBTIQ children where it matters the most: at home.
Through Chapter Four’s strategic litigation programs, we are fighting to end institutional inequalities and discrimination. Through strategic advocacy, we raise social consciousness and global awareness about the plight of the LGBTIQ community to mitigate the dangerous consequences of State-Sponsored homophobia and transphobia in Uganda. We work with our international partners to increase the cost of gross human rights violations committed by state and non-state actors by demanding targeted sanctions and strategic review and conditionality of Government to Government funding.
Our calls for justice and freedom are reverberating across the African continent. We demand that Uganda commits to her international and regional human rights obligations because Uganda belongs to all citizens.
In July, we filed an appeal against the Constitutional Court ruling in the legal challenge against the Anti-Homosexuality Act at the Supreme Court, asking the highest appellate court in Uganda a simple but fundamental question: do Ugandan LGBTIQ+ individuals enjoy the same inherent human rights enshrined and guaranteed under the Bill of Rights of the Ugandan Constitution, or not?
This hateful law means I wake up everyday to the reality that the country I was born and raised in, a country that I knew to be peaceful, where we were taught to love and be tolerant towards each other, denies my existence.
They call me many names. An economic saboteur, a lesbian mercenary, an aggravated homosexual, a lost generation leader, a waste of womanhood. I wear all these names as a badge of honor. They mean I am doing something important. Respectability politics has never benefited anyone but the oppressor. Afterall, well-behaved women never make history!
In my visit to New York and D.C., I felt the spirit of Ubuntu. I saw solidarity and love. I draw so much strength from it. It builds on my hope that Ugandans shall one day share the freedoms I witness in the United States.
I implore you to keep an eye on Uganda, I implore you to continue to offer moral, financial and technical support to national activists and organizations working on the ground. Your solidarity shall help us get the freedom we are desperately fighting for.
Until then, I remain a sexual outlaw. I continue to resist compulsory heterosexuality. I continue to resist dominant cultures. I continue to operate on hope.
Clare Byarugaba is the 2024 recipient of the William D. Zabel Human Rights Award in recognition of her remarkable work advocating for the rights of LGBTQI+ people in Uganda and fighting against discriminatory laws and practices that have violated their fundamental rights. These remarks were originally presented at the Human Rights First Annual Awards Celebration in October 2024.
