Africa’s LGBT Movement and Interest Groups

The dominant belief in Africa is that same-sex intimacy is a child of modern civilization and Western culture. Hence, we see a high level of homophobia and continuous policing of same-sex relationships in most African countries, including those that have decriminalized them. Over time, different scholarly discourses have emerged about homosexuality in Africa. Although some writers believe that same-sex intimacy is fundamentally un-African, others argue that same-sex intimacy is inherent in African culture. Arguably, the introduction of Western religion, such as Christianity, which forms part of the colonization agenda, favors the monogamous, heterosexual relationship (the basis of the “ideal family unit”) as the acceptable natural union while any relationship outside it is regarded as unnatural. Given deteriorating socioeconomic and political situations in Africa, political leaders often find it expedient to use religious-based homophobic narratives to distract their impoverished citizens and muster popular support. Put together, this has led to the criminalization of same-sex unions in most African countries. Modern discourses in Africa on gender equality and sexual freedoms reveal more liberal attitudes, but the same cannot be said about how same-sex desire is viewed. Toleration of same-sex intimacy is seen as a threat to the dominant African definition of marriage, family, and patriarchal gender and power relations. Despite the prevalence of homophobia, the establishment of gay networks and movements that championed the liberation struggles of sexual minorities in South Africa from the apartheid to postapartheid era have sharpened the sense of belonging of LGBTIA groups. While some countries (e.g., South Africa, Lesotho, Cape Verde, Rwanda, Mali, and Mozambique) have abandoned sodomy laws that criminalized same-sex relationships (often after much pressure was exerted), others (e.g., Chad, Sudan, Nigeria, Ghana, Egypt, Tunisia, Tanzania, Uganda, and Mauritania) have upheld the laws with stiff punishment—prison terms up to 14–30 years or death sentences for the crime of being homosexual. The first half of 2019 raised some hopes about LGBTIA rights in Africa when Angola (January 2019) and Botswana (June 2019) decriminalized homosexuality. However, Kenya, which had previously shown a “glimmer of hope” in decriminalizing same-sex relationships, upheld laws that criminalize homosexuality in May 2019. Currently, more than 30 of the 54 recognized African countries still have laws (with harsh punishments or death) that outlaw consensual same-sex relationships. Both theoretical and empirical insights into the current state of Africa’s LGBTIA rights and scholarship are discussed.

Surrounded by Spirits: Hauntings of Identity in Waimea Summer by John Dominis Holt

In 1976, John Dominis Holt published what would be considered the first novel by a Kanaka Maoli [Native Hawaiian] author in English, Waimea Summer. This coming-of-age narrative set in 1930’s Hawai‘i follows fourteen-year-old Mark Hull, a half White, half Kanaka Maoli boy who experiences a series of hauntings on his uncle’s farm, all the while grappling with a burgeoning queer identity and conflicted cultural loyalties. In the post American-occupied Hawai‘i, the teachings of Christian missionaries and anti-sodomy laws have all but eradicated the aikāne [homosexual] relationships practiced by the ali‘i [royals] of Marks’ genealogy, and yet the boy’s queer desires refuse to die. In this paper, the novel is interpreted through Laura Westengard’s theory of the queer Gothic, in which concepts of the American nuclear heterosexual family are challenged by the burgeoning past, thus returning the narrative and agency to the queer Indigenous subject.

Politics and the Patriarchal Order

This chapter explores how Mormons engaged with the politicization of gender roles in its anti-feminist crusade against the Equal Rights Amendment and its anti-homosexuality efforts in sodomy laws. Church leaders joined with an emergent Religious Right that was reshaping American politics. These efforts warned against gender fluidity and sought to protect against it in the law and culture, especially with respect to women working outside the home. But Church leaders also began to adopt moderate feminist reforms, including softening teachings on patriarchal marriage to accommodate egalitarian relationships, birth control, and more permissive sexuality within marriage.

Spectres of Colonialism

Awareness that anti-sodomy laws in the global South are a remnant of British colonialism has generated a discourse of atonement for colonialism among a British political elite not typically known for such contrition. This chapter investigates why this has been the case through a parallel reading of British parliamentary debates on the bicentenary of the abolition of the slave trade, and on the state of global LGBT rights. Drawing on Melanie Klein’s notion of manic reparation, it demonstrates how elites have sublimated their shame around historic wrongs perpetrated by Britain into moral crusades purporting to remedy them. It then contrasts categorical expressions of atonement for the ‘sexual’ legacies of colonialism with a more ambivalent reckoning with its ‘racial’ legacies. Taking issue with the separation of these analytics, the chapter reveals how atonement for the colonial imposition of anti-sodomy laws abroad is enabled by a whitening of queer suffering at home.

The Location of Homophobia

This chapter criticizes two practices of locating homophobia in space and time, visible in debates surrounding Uganda’s Anti Homosexuality Act. In homonationalist accounts, homophobia is attributed to African tradition. In homoromanticist accounts, it is attributed to Western actors, evidenced by the colonial imposition of anti-sodomy laws and more recent US evangelical Christian-led efforts to institute anti-queer laws in the global South. Both accounts converge in their view of places as discrete entities with distinctive essences. The chapter offers an alternative view of place formation as transnational and temporal, making visible the manner in which place is redefined and stabilized by elites in moments of flux. The argument is illustrated with reference to two such moments in Ugandan history: in the first, homophobia is articulated with imperialist collaboration; in the second, it is articulated with decolonization. In both moments, homophobia emerges as a transnational collaborative construction involving Ugandan and Western elites.

Chris Vargas's Consciousness Razing

Chris Vargas's exhibition Consciousness Razing: The Stonewall Re-Memorialization Project commemorates the fiftieth anniversary of the Stonewall rebellion by smashing pervasive mythologies that erase transgender people from most retellings of the uprising and showcasing multiple artists' proposals for monuments that at least address if not remedy this absence. Stories of gay and lesbian civil rights victories that came out of Stonewall—like the dissolution of sodomy laws, the creation of employment nondiscrimination protections, and gay marriage—all tend to trace back to the rebellion, while the critical role that transgender women, many of color, played in these advances has slipped deep into unseen corners of historical memory. This forgetting is both a symptom and cause of the continued erasure of transgender people, especially transgender women of color, from contemporary LGBT activism, community, and discourse. As a gesture of amelioration, this monument implores us to reconstruct memories of Stonewall as a way of not merely supporting celebrating contemporary trans existence but ultimately shaping trans futurity.

Laws of Sex, Changed

The dramatic legal and social developments in the domains of sex, gender, and sexuality in the last several decades are often understood as progress. But this is not the whole story. This chapter presents these developments through a genealogy in which “bad” legal actors have turned into “good” legal actors. Three factors have facilitated this transition: (1) development of constitutional legal rights; (2) shifts in medical expertise; and (3) emergence of rhetoric of pity for allegedly suffering individuals. The chapter demonstrates this insight by examining three sites of social and legal change: one involving reproduction, one involving homosexuality, and one involving gender identity. In each of these domains, individuals or acts that were once labeled legally criminal are now considered, under the law, as dignified or morally praiseworthy. First, many types of reproductive technologies (such as sperm and egg donations) that were once strictly prohibited have been legalized and are now encouraged. Second, homosexuality, once condemned through criminal sodomy laws, is now understood by the Supreme Court, in the context of marriage, as dignified and respectable. Third, nonconforming gender identities, once criminalized in various ways, are gradually gaining anti-discrimination protections and social acceptability. Each of these social and legal transformations began in criminal prohibition and ended with an extension of liberal rights to individuals or couples. The chapter closely examines how, in these three transformations, Judeo-Christian values such as pity and dignity have seeped into current social and legal consciousness. The chapter concludes with some general thoughts on queer legal studies.