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Approximately a year after the Ugandan MP David Bahati introduced a bill that would have imposed the death penalty for some homosexual acts and life imprisonment for others, the Ugandan local tabloid paper, Rolling Stone, (not affiliated with the American the one) published a list of names and addresses of Ugandans they believed to be homosexual. The egregious October 9th of 2010 Rolling Stone’s front story was also accompanied by a banner reading “Hang Them”.
AFTERMATH:
- According to activists, the people on the list have been harassed “Some people could not even get out of the house, as they’ve been throwing stones,” said the director of LGBT group Sexual Minorities Uganda (SMUG), Frank Mugisha.
- After the Rolling Stone published another list with the headline “More homos faces exposed”, SMUG took the matter to the court. The High Court ruled that the paper had violated the privacy rights of Ugandans. The paper has since then ceased publication.
- One of the people on the list was, David Kato, one of the founding fathers of Ugandan LGBTQ right movement.. Kato was subsequently assaulted in his home. With two strikes from a hammer to his head, Kato died on the way to the hospital the 26th of January, 2011. There is a disagreement between the police and human rights activists whether or not his death was a hate crime.
- Managing editor of the weekly Rolling Stone, Giles Muhame said in a statement that he felt “sorry for the family of Kato "but that he has “no regrets about the story. We were just exposing people who were doing wrong."
Sources: (x), (x), (x), (x), (x).
Picture: Rolling Stone Vol1 No. 05 October 9th, 2010.
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- Buy a pair of pants
- Cut ties with your family
- Go on the road and look for women who are also wearing pants and have cut ties with their family
Embracing one’s lesbianism during in the U.S. during the 1930s was no task for the faint of heart. After bisexual experimentation had been fashionable with the sexual liberalisation of the 1920s, economic collapse and the spread of medical opinion regarding the abnormality of love between women reversed the little progress that had been made in establishing lesbian subcultures.
The loss of financial independence for middle-class women expunged any possibility of committing themselves to same-sex relationships. It wasn’t necessarily that fewer women worked - the number of working women actually increased slightly during the 1930s; women were cheaper to hire but not encouraged to compete against men for better-paying jobs. Thus, a second income became crucial for survival, making marriage to men a necessity. The bold beliefs about lesbian and independence among female college students lived no more.
Nevertheless, poor queer women had never even felt momentary liberation nor been led to believe that they should expect more remunerative work. So when the depression rendered them jobless or homeless they fully embraced it. Hobo-life seemed to be the next best alternative. It permitted them to wear pants, embark on adventures, and commit their lives to other women. Statistics from 1933 estimate that approximately 150,000 women were wandering around the country as hoboes or “sisters of the road”. Depression historians argue that such working class lesbian couples were not uncommon among the hobo population. A “sister of the road” herself, Box-Car Bertha wrote in her autobiography that lesbians on the road usually travelled in small groups and had seldom troubles with getting rides or obtaining food. Bertha asserts that the majority of “automobilists” who gave lesbians rides were not only generous but would not think of attacking them physically or verbally.
This is part 2 of this series. Read part 1 HERE
Sources
Book: Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers - a History of Lesbian Life in 20th-Century America by Lillian Faderman
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