Uganda's Anti-Gay Laws and the Western Liberal Reflex

It's a fact of life, probably in most of the globe as we speak, and usually in so-called 'underdeveloped' countries that being gay is frowned upon, oftentimes savagely. There's no value judgement whatsoever implied in saying this; my default position here being perfect neutrality - but with what speed & assurance we all alight on our liberal hobbyhorse propounding the best way forward, pointing fingers and denouncing wholesale laws which are clearly 'savage and backward'!

I think what's missing here is the corresponding intolerance of people in these countries who are of the honestly held viewpoint that homosexuality is an unwanted and undesirable factor in their family lives. I personally have no difficulty getting my head around the fact that some people's environment predisposes them to view homosexuality with nothing less than abject horror - this attitude is reinforced by everything said and done around them and little by way of progress is ever going to be gained by telling same folk they are deficient or lacking in some respect vis-a-vis our own 'remarkably, tolerant and wonderful society'.

Anyway, the progressive liberal agenda then, the 'movement' that is, which I by and large subscribe to as exercised here in the West - as obviously there's ethical & human rights issues involved in forcibly constraining the expression of innate sexual urges & genuine feelings of love and affection which clearly do exist - this 'movement' simply needs to re-assess it's self-confident onwards and upwards momentum when it seeks to apply it's own standards in the wholly different context of developing countries where traditional mores prevail.

There's a time-lag dissonance here that can't be cured merely by pointing the finger & howling 'oh how barbaric' as clearly the (anti-gay) attitude is culturally embedded and to a large extent derived from (a) an often harsh living environment (b) strong 'tribal' traditions and (c) the greater power and authority of religious leaders.

Whereas wealth, secularisation and an atomised & 'individualistic' metropolitan life are probably the strongest factors in promoting more liberal sexual attitudes over here, in myriad working class, rural or 'traditional' societies the reaction received 'on being gay' of an age mate of said vintage will differ enormously. Even within our own Western metropolitan pockets of 'enlightenment' the matter is scarcely viewed as typical or mainstream whatever way we choose to play on the semantics.

I wouldn't be so sure on people (from 'developing' countries) 'gradually coming around' either although it's always a distinct possibility. Can we lay claim though to have discovered the correct path for all communities everywhere to regulate themselves? There are in place many hard to define 'folkways' which amount to a corroboration of what's taken to be acceptable 'masculine' behaviour - and these don't usually emerge out of thin air but are tried and tested formulas which account for much group cohesion and solidarity. An influx of open-minded liberalism foisted down a community's throat under the guise of catching up with the modernity express can rapidly backfire in spectacular ways.

In addition, I would be quite surprised if there wasn't a large element of social conditioning involved in many individual's transition to homosexuality. I'm not saying it's anything like a lifestyle choice which a person can pick and choose at whim and drop just as conveniently if the need arises - there is obviously a large innate biological determinant at play - but for many folk perhaps wavering on the brink of an undetermined (possibly bisexual) disposition it will be the readily available social re-inforcers (mores & folkways) which sway them one or the other. In the West we are currently riding a wave of liberal acceptance.

Hollywood, which is extremely influential and the media in general have sanctioned in unprecedented fashion over the past twenty years a 'gay lifestyle' and this has brought many into the 'pink' fold who would have otherwise knuckled down and gotten on with their (to them) private and personal 'deviations'; bearing them stoically for want of disturbing the familial applecart. In some sense there is attached to it all a culture of rebellion - in the absence of any other discernible political & social cause around which to rally a disgruntled youth may at least don the mantle of disaffected sexual outcast.

Given this, as it appears to me, somewhat transient and possibly short-lived cultural phenomenon who are we then to inculcate the mix any further by declaring an all out war on the recalcitrance towards (a moreover dictated) change on behalf of traditional societies?

On the level of down to earth human impulses you have to feel for anyone undergoing the torture of what is (ostensibly at any rate) the pain of social ostracisation on account of scarcely alterable, strong sexual preferences and the banishment of said individual from their nearest and dearest wholly on their account. This is a tragedy of weighty existential proportions which few mothers regardless of how hard they've tuned their heart will fail to respond.

Fathers though are less inclined and such is the male transmitted 'folkway' in many traditional cultures that some can stoutly proclaim 'your dead to me' without a flicker of remorse as in many ways the avowed choice of sexuality is a running insult to everything he has set his heart on teaching the boy. This is just the stark presentation of the case but it probably runs true in many instances - there's something within 'homosexuality' itself in these places which is an affront to people's basic notions of family life and much of what it comprises

The fact of the matter is that homosexuality is viewed as abnormal in many of these areas and no amount of de-stigmatising talk sessions will ever erase that reality. Growing up confessing a tolerance for homosexuality will get you demoted very rapidly amongst your circle of peers in most post-pubertal age sets within traditional societies.This set of attitudes simply mushrooms outwards and becomes the de facto attitudinal stance of all and sundry come adulthood. It takes an exceptional character in such 'harsh environments' to buck that trend and effect a rapport or a means by which the community at large can accommodate the emergence of homosexuality.

There's such a thing after all as 'cultural cringe' whereby earnest Western-orientated progressive liberal folk in these countries try their hardest to emulate our norms, reject almost wholesale the traditional milieu from whence they sprang and basically sputter with embarrassment when asked to explain the 'entrenchment' of anti-gay attitudes - but most sensitive, thinking types (in positions of power) who are truly attuned to Western liberal advances must also pay attention to local constituencies and domestic populist sentiment.

They will be acutely aware and in most cases proud of their own traditional heritage, it's long-held customs and so on (certainly not all of which can be construed as 'backward') - and won't bear lightly charges of 'barbarism' being applied to them.

The attitude has an in-built logic more perceptible to the native and it's through the offices of the more open-minded sort that change can be best secured; as opposed to blundering into a complex foreign environment all guns blazing and demanding instant realignment with our own value systems - which smacks of a patronising, almost neo-colonial type assertion.

In places like Uganda they want to do things their own way first and foremost and the most promising avenues it would seem in protecting gay rights in this instance would be to understand the culture in it's own terms; establishing links with informed locals and not making unilateral uninformed chauvinistic assertions of right.

The real factors which contribute to the anti-gay attitude in these places should give us cause to reflect what type of 'education' would be more effective would they not? There's just no point in approaching it from a singular plane of understanding as we seem to be doing at present.

The following video is pretty informative vis-a-vis the type of struggle which lies ahead. Some of the ostracised gays in Uganda are living in unimaginably dire conditions with zero government support or sympathy, in fact, legislation there is becoming increasingly intolerant -

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fV0tS6G8NNU

In a lot of respects the cultural diffusion of Western mores asked for, demands transplanting an alien 'liberal' orientated attitude into the mindset of parents of a traditional community - in practice the difficulties to be surmounted in terms of accumulated stigma and 'negative' moral sanction are insuperable. The individual so afflicted with his 'confused' sexuality will most likely bolt elsewhere and/or hide it indefinitely. Sure, in theory cultural mores can be malleable and subject to constant revision but in practice they are stubbornly reinforced. Your talking about overcoming feelings and attitudes ingrained from the earliest age without any corresponding rebuttal from the predominant media or traditional leaders (local chiefs, imams, religious guides etc). This is an extremely sticky web of prejudice from which to extricate and ultimately successfully project oneself.

More often than not parents in these environments will be unsympathetic to their child's sexual conversion - life is tough enough without your first or second born son suddenly declaring himself a 'whoopsy'. Cross-dressing shamans were common among some of the North American Indian tribes and the role of village necromancer traditionally soaked up many with a 'liminal' sexuality - kind of like the social structure opening up to provide a function in the absence of any other socially approved variant. I don't downplay the nobility of best intentions in providing a safe haven of love and understanding for your offspring; just questioning how widespread these intentions may actually be found among traditional communities.

Uganda anti-gay death penalty bill reintroduced - CBS News

Uganda is by no means the only country to have adopted such measures either nor will it be the last and the harsh penalties adopted are ultimately populist by nature - they correspond very much to grass roots frustration at effeminisation in all it's forms. As said previously a harsh living environment tends to produce a ground swell of intolerance towards perceived 'bullet-dodging limp-wristery'; possibly if some calamity afflicted us in our own affluent abodes we too would respond with equal harshness. This only reinforces the point I am making about family's not wishing to be 'bothered' about the whole issue of homosexuality; you keep it to yourself or naff off out of town. It drains their resources as it usually takes an able hand out of circulation as he will now be unable to show his face any further for fear of violent physical reprisals. It's very much a chicken and egg situation but until you address the underlying economic constraints which force behaviours into the aforementioned prejudicial boxes little reform of lasting merit can be achieved.

I'm not sure whether I enjoy seeing standardised ready-wrapped liberal sensibilities recoil in horror at a social structure which lies beyond their comprehension but that indeed appears to be the recurring theme here. Homosexuality, whether you like it or not is an abomination in most of sub-Saharan Africa and illustrating legislation by governments as an attempt to keep it in check as an example of 'backwardness', 'lack of development' or anything else as the solitary criterion from which to base an 'analysis' would stretch any man's patience. This is clearly an "embedded" phenomenon that has to be dealt with using different tools of analysis and understanding.

By way of illustration this sort of stuff is not far behind us here in the 'enlightened West'. I think we in Ireland were in 1982 or thereabouts when homosexuality was decriminalised. I remember at least in school at the time there seems to have been a frantic rush to "acclimatise" people to the new "arrangements" as when our religious teacher organised a couple of pep-talk sessions (obviously dictated from above) with our class. We were given newspapers with stories of "queer-bashing" episodes and asked to comment and expand on our feelings about the whole issue of homosexuality. Very patriarchal culture back then where 'men were men' and women's place was still in the home, as in corporal punishment was still widespread and kids definitely knew their place in the larger scheme of things - as in step out of line and any sundry adult could give you a whack, or a twisted ear, or a slap on the back of the head.

All very brutish at any rate compared to today. But I distinctly recall that this issue of "quares" (as then called) was all over the headlines due to a spate of savage attacks by roaming gangs picking on the "suspected" and literally beating the crap out of them, merely for their inclinations, much like Uganda today - so, our whole society badly needed a crash course in human rights management. Its not something I followed closely with any great attention but its only as you passed into the nineties that you realised a massive sea-change had occurred, slowly beneath the surface; helped largely by imported TV and film, mainly from America.

But lingering prejudices yet remain .. after all, we are not so non-traditional as yet to say that a son or daughter's "announcement" would not come as a shock, if not a body blow in many instances. You can erect in it's defence the whole principled panoply of modern enlightened liberalism but few parents deep down will accept with good grace a revelatory clanger of this nature. Dress it up any which way you please but for most folks an unsuspected ceremonial outing (as in a drum-roll "de-closetting") will be a downer of cataclysmic proportions.

What too, if he's an only child?

Automatically the thoughts of cossetting prospective grandchildren into the final years of dotage are scuppered on the rocks of biological caprice. In generational terms it's the virtual annulment of one's lineage whereas on the social plane it becomes an unmentionable albatross. Conversations are now steered away from your offspring instead of towards them.

But who cares what people think, right?

Wrong, we're social animals with exquisitively tuned sensibilities - a pack of jackals are now let loose in the tearoom with cake and crumpet on their hungry unforgiving tongues. And this is only the knee-jerk response among the 'respectable' urban middle classes - think of what it's like in rural farming communities? Or in traditional industrialised working class areas where labour power & family wealth comes from the strength of a man's sinews - here more often than not it's an unspeakable abomination. And now, where the social fabric is loose to the point of non-existence amidst a city's atomised high rise apartments there will be the cradle of our outcast sons and daughters.

A lot of parents are emotionally disconnected from the inner lives of their children particularly when it comes to sexuality which is often shoved under the carpet and banished from the realm of broach-able subjects. The event when it does fall is often like a hammer blow particularly when your children do not exhibit the stereotypical behavioural responses of your 'typical' gay person.

In general though a healthy open relationship with one's children should elicit much by way of forewarning. I have something like sixty odd first cousins most of whom were born within fifteen years of one another and regular gatherings of extended family meant we all grew up feeling fairly close & intimate. Out of all of us (ages 35-55 now) only one of us has emerged to be gay (we're all either married or have been in long-term heterosexual relationships) and that was scarcely an eye-brow raiser.

As far back as I can recall she used to be a tomboy; playing football, cowboys & Injuns, horsing around play fighting, keeping a tight crew cut - anything in fact but act the part of a little girl (to the disbelief of her mother at times). A beautiful blonde too all her life - extremely attractive, not 'butch' in any sense. Despite all the evident signals which should have amounted to sufficient forewarning I gather this came as a bit of a shock to both her parents (now divorced) - she flew off to Vegas and got married to her long-time lover about five years ago. She couldn't be any other way really, it's simply who she's always been as far as I can tell - even before the hormonal scattering of the pubertal years announced themselves. I don't think there was ever much of a blowout with her parents - it just kind of triggered the readjustment of certain mental parameters and expectations.

Where I grew up (a typical Dublin suburb in the 70's) being 'gay' was practically unheard of and those who were became pitiable objects of derision. There was no instinctual sympathy whatsoever with the 'condition' and were somebody to announce they had any sympathy (let alone be gay themselves) life would have become rapidly unliveable. Your talking here about getting a hiding every day for the rest of your school days.

Tough guys, macho wannabees and would be hard men lurked on every corner & kids instinctually gravitated towards what was good for their own security - this meant invariably the sorry projection of what their own germinal notions of 'manliness' consisted; all for the sake of street 'cred' and survival. You can attribute much of this testosterone boosting behaviour to group dynamics & psychology but you can also rest assured that it's an inwired propensity of the typical male psyche; evolution wouldn't make any sense otherwise.

So, there you have it, on an instinctual level and certainly for the more red-blooded males among us homosexuality is at it's core inescapably and vaguely repulsive. The beauty of (some) civilisations is that they attempt to soak up all that testosterone by channelling and displacing it elsewhere - martial ideologies, armed forces, packed football terraces fulminating an us/them mentality & even provide us with a hard-working liberal media which does it's utmost to chip away at instinctually derived prejudices. Softening up in the process our more cruel and unforgiving natures. "Nature (after all), is what we are put on this earth to rise above", as Hepburn told Bogie.

Many churches do promote homophobia but as mentioned earlier when 'queer-bashing' reached outrageous proportions here in the mid-80's the official condemnatory stance of 'adultdom' came to us kids not in the form of guards or secular teachers but through the auspices of the church - it was priests & Christian Brothers who piped up & told us it was wrong, some from the pulpit, others in the classroom; they were the traditional 'voice of compassion' who took the lead in such matters.

Christianity, for all it's faults does have an official ideology which looks after the downtrodden, the poor and the oppressed and many of it's public practitioners have happened to take this aspect of it's role seriously - some of the world's great social reformers were after all priests. This levelling principle explains it's longevity more than any other factor in my opinion; it's why the public cling onto it and it's why they expect them in return to be the voice of the voiceless when the need arises. In many regions of the world and throughout time if you couldn't get sympathy from the Church then you wouldn't find it anywhere. Unhappily, as we're all aware, the inverse to this proposition has also been true.

On the subject of values & instincts. I was brought up a Catholic (now happily lapsed) and this is I presume where I get many of my moral compass points from (aside from my father who never attended mass) and my understanding of the Christian message up to the point where I reached my teens was that it was wrong and incompatible with Christ's teachings to bully or discriminate against anyone on account of any sexual proclivities that they may have. I never heard any priest ever condemn homosexuality and I've never heard any of them speak with anything but compassion on sundry social issues.

It seemed to me, if anything, that the church's presence provided a civilising rudder which helped keep in check the natural propensities of teenage kids to run adrift altogether. Priests kept us on the straight and narrow, they were the respected voice of moral authority. Dubliners of a generation previous may well dispute this but in our time many of the excesses (corporal punishment and so on) were being rapidly expunged and becoming unacceptable. So, whereas my value system predisposed me to view homosexuality in a tolerable & compassionate light the same cannot be said for my instincts which have been honed through millenia's sludge of crimson tooth & claw evolution.

And frankly, the sight, thought or mention of two men kissing each other turns my stomach and no amount of social engineering will ever erase that gut instinct. Do I need to apologise for that? Most probably - as though I can do little about it, yet it still amounts to an in-wired evolutionary snobbery. A few of the male gay people I know tell me that the attraction towards the same sex was something that was always there even before the years of puberty. They just never had any inclination towards women whatsoever, fullstop.

This is probably the case with most gay people. Another guy on the other hand who is the brother of a friend of mine always behaved in your stereotypical red-blooded male fashion, had a string of girlfriends in his teens but then met calamity in the form of a she-bitch who shattered his heart and initiated a deep depression from which he emerged professing a new found sexuality. Today, he appears as happy as Larry with a live-in lover half his age.

Different strokes for different folks.

I personally am not inclined to regard this as the result of a natural inclination but rather the result of him having received a battering in the often brutal quest for a 'normal' heterosexual mate. If the signals your receiving from the opposite sex disincline you to fancy your chances the need for intimacy and sexual relations will nevertheless oblige you to look elsewhere for fulfillment. I've seen borderline cases of this nature in two spheres; one in College where I studied English literature & Anthropology where there was a higher proportion of openly gay students than in any other faculty and the other in the pub trade where I once managed a bar for an openly gay publican.

In the first case, in college, I've seen one or two openly professed straight guys getting 'sucked in' gradually into the social whirl of the Gay & Lesbian Society of which one of our lecturers was a prominent member (though he himself was a self-confessed 'pendulum'). "I come from a very balanced family", he'd say. "My brother's gay, my sister's lesbian and I'm bisexual".

Anyway, to cut a long story short I've seen instances of folk getting very confused about their sexuality in their early days and emerging from it all years later wishing no-one could remember their 'experiments'.

The openly gay publican I worked for would hire attractive looking young men with what I would describe as, to put it charitably, "weak and impressionable personalities" - malleable and suggestible types who would have a hard time of it asserting themselves anywhere. They would be 'groomed' in one of his boozers for a couple of months until they were dispatched down the road to his other pub - an openly gay bar - where their heterosexual dispositions would be test to their limits. Needless to say, some of them were here on working visas and were open to exploitation on several levels.

Once you put your hand in that honey jar ..

In a nutshell though, I see the social structures created by these necessarily harsh and abused environments (i.e in Uganda) as tending not to give a lamplighter's fig for the liberal West's 'luxurious' adoption of homosexuality as a bona fide lifestyle or otherwise choice - survival alone is too immediate a deal to be ultimately concerned with such perceived wanton frivolity and the professions of being 'gay' in such environments are often likewise perceived to be the final acts of capitulation of determined foot-draggers who are wont to spit in the eye of everything their family has hitherto struggled under - though the examples I have in mind are admittedly more circumscribed to the African context where economic matters in the form of basic bread & butter subsistence tend to over-ride all other concerns.

Families just don't have the patience to be dealing with what is essentially to them a life-sucking & counter-productive pre-occupation; sexuality in short is an unimportant side issue which most folks who are irretrievably bound towards the expression of their 'inverted' sexuality tend in all respect to keep to themselves and so spare their kin the unwanted headache of having to digest it.

If it must happen, keep it private seems to be the rule.