At Women in the World, the Reality of Uganda’s Brutal Gay Ban

Ugandan gay rights activist Clare Byarugaba speaks during the Women in the World luncheon in Los Angeles on March 14, 2014. (Joe Kohen)

 

Clare Byarugaba endures the fear and violence that have followed her nation’s cruel crackdown. In Los Angeles, she and other female activists reported on their struggles for equality.

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Ugandan gay-rights activist Clare Byarugaba spoke out against her nation’s oppressive new ban on homosexuality  Friday afternoon at Los Angeles’s first Women in the World luncheon, delivering an harrowing first-person account of how her life and the lives of other gay Ugandans have changed since President Yoweri Museveni signed the legislation into law last month.


“As a lesbian living in Uganda, it has been very difficult,” Byarugaba told hundreds of attendees who gathered at the Montage hotel in Beverly Hills. “My mom said, ‘I’m going to hand you into police.’ What that means is corrective rape. That I can’t see my family anymore. I have received so many death threats. And now I’m facing seven years to life imprisonment simply because of the work I’m doing—and because of my sexual orientation.”

Byarugaba was one of five women from around the globe who joined Women in the World founder Tina Brown and her co-hosts Melanie Cook, Rashida Jones, Nancy Josephson, Misimbi Kanyoro, Marta Kauffman, Kelly Meyer, and Katherine Ross to tell their stories and, in so doing, help fulfill the organization’s mission to “see the world through women’s eyes” and bring attention to “a hidden army of women with the talent and will to reinvent their futures,” according to Brown.

After Byarugaba was involuntarily outed by a Ugandan tabloid “witch hunt” earlier this year, she had to take a week off from work to cope with the personal fallout. “Coming out was supposed to be my journey,” she said. “Unfortunately the media did it for me when I was not ready.” She has seen friends lose their jobs and get assaulted by the police. “A transgender friend, a mob attacked her and undressed her in public,” Byarugaba said. “I know people who have tried to commit suicide. People call me on a daily basis and say, ‘Give me five reasons why I shouldn’t kill myself.’”

The ban is politics, plain and simple—the result of “U.S. anti-gay extremists” such as Evangelical pastor Scott Lively “coming to Uganda and saying ‘the gays are after your children,’” which inspired the president to seize on the issue, Byarugaba said.
“This is a dictator using the LGBT community as a scapegoat,” added Roger Ross Williams, director of the acclaimed documentary God Loves Uganda, who joined Byarugaba onstage. The goal is “to distract the public from the real issues, corruption and survival,” and turn them against “a vulnerable population on which they can take out their frustration.”