[Editor's Note: This article was originally published at Exile in Happy Valley on June 11, 2023].
This June has been a dark month for the long embattled Queer folks of Uganda and no pinkwashed corporate Pride parade is coming to save them from the jaws of state sanctioned violence. While the paler people of my tribe celebrate another year of survival in the belly of Babylon, our darker comrades in Kampala are being fed to the dogs. This month the Ugandan government's long campaign to annihilate the Queer people within its borders has culminated in the final solution known as the Anti-Homosexuality Act which will undoubtably go down in history as one of the most heinously homophobic pieces of legislation ever written, putting Uganda in the proud company of Wahabi whack-job states like Saudi Arabia when it comes to persecuting those of us who fail to conform to puritanical zealotry.
Not only does the Anti-Homosexuality Act make all acts of same sex love a crime punishable by life imprisonment but it also sentences those found guilty of the ill-defined crime of "aggravated homosexuality" to death. Lumped into this largely subjective category with pederasts and date rapists is virtually anyone caught having sex with a member of the same gender while HIV positive regardless of whether or not they're transmittable. The law might also become an affective death sentence for all of the 1.2 million Ugandans who suffer from HIV thanks to another vaguely worded provision punishing the promotion of homosexuality with up to twenty years in prison, essentially putting anyone promoting safe sex between same sex partners in the crosshairs.
I won't deny for a second that this law and the American Christian jihadists who have actively sponsored it make sick to my very soul but our own dear leader Joe Biden's Pride-friendly virtue signaling response to this travesty actually makes me feel far worse. As word of Uganda's latest act of war on its own people hit the Queer blogosphere like a hammer, Biden quickly made himself available to play the role of our straight white knight in shining armor by calling on the government of Uganda to immediately repeal this law under the threat of international sanctions. I rabidly oppose this chauvinistic act of imperial posturing and the devastation that it promises to inflict if it proves to be anything more than just another idle threat during an election year, and I oppose it not in spite of my own Queerness but because of it and you should too.
All sanctions, regardless of their expressed goals, are acts of colonial terrorism that inflict the poorest subjects of the given nation they target first and foremost. In Uganda that means the Queer community that the Biden Administration supposedly cares so goddamn much about, especially those suffering from HIV. Regardless of what specific industries or individuals' sanctions target, they all have the impact of making the market those targets exist in toxic to foreign investment. The end result is the wholesale starvation of an entire population of its vital recourses, and I do believe that this is in fact the intent. After all, out of the scores of governments across the globe that America has and continues to sanction not one has ever corrected their wicked ways and agreed to toe the line and yet the sanctions continue. That is because economic sanctions have always been defined by a larger campaign to punish a government's civilian populace into conforming to outside influence while creating a level of instability that can be easily exploited to justify regime change.
This kind of brazenly inhumane behavior is immoral regardless of the target, but I have a hard time believing that the Biden regime would commit such a war crime purely out of a bottomless devotion to equality. If this were the case, then career imperialists like Joe and his handlers would have cut ties with Kampala decades ago. Uganda's so-called president, Yoweri Museveni, is currently serving in his sixth five-year term in office after another recent sham election marked by low voter turnout and violent crackdowns against his opposition. Museveni has run that tiny Central African nation like an organized crime outfit for 37 years since seizing power in a coup in 1986 and his continued rule is almost entirely dependent on a Washington slush fund of nearly $1 billion dollars a year in development and security assistance.
In return for being delivered the tools necessary to bash his own people, Museveni has been a stalwart asset in Washington's imperial campaign to subjugate the African continent beneath its will during the waning hours of the American Century. This includes the deployment of the Ugandan People's Defense Forces to aid AFRICOM in its bloody terrorist campaigns in South Sudan and Somalia, and this also includes providing the CIA with black sites in Kampala to torture those Africans that America accuses of fighting its own terrorism with terrorism. During all this time Uganda has continued to openly maintain a consistently homophobic regime which has penalized homosexuality going back to its time as a device of the British Empire, and they are far from an exception to the rule. America has a long and storied history of sponsoring despotic tyrants who slaughter Queer people like animals, and this tradition continues to this day.
In spite of the fact that the then freshly elected Biden-Harris administration released a feel-good memorandum in 2021 committing the US to promoting LGBTQ rights abroad, their regime has spent the last year alone forking over more than $12 billion dollars in foreign aid to nearly 50 nations that penalize consensual homosexuality, including $3 billion dollars to nations like Nigeria and Yemen who execute people convicted of being Queer and another $2 billion for regimes like Chad and Tanzania who merely punish our existence with a life sentence in one of their fabulous prisons.
This doesn't even include the trillions of dollars in supposedly private military contracts that the Biden administration has personally gone out of its way to secure for some of the most violently homophobic dictatorships in the Persian Gulf along with the downright genocidal jihadist proxies that they arm to the teeth with our weapons. All the while, the United States uses the hand not busy cutting checks to bigoted psychopaths to wag its boney finger at other bigoted psychopaths who just so happen to run countries who don't do our bidding. You see, the point here isn't that America hates fags or that America hates fag bashers. The point is that America genuinely doesn't give one solitary fuck whether people like me live or die. To them we are nothing more than disposable pawns to be played in order to justify their relevance on the world stage as a benevolent killing machine.
In recent years this has increasingly meant using Queer rights and really any kind of human rights to justify America's multiplying forever wars to the weary but increasingly socially liberal straight white vote in suburbia. However, the result of this Kalashnikov cabaret hasn't been the betterment of the plight of Queer people at home or abroad. The result has been to make Queer people look complicit in western imperialism which conveniently only serves to proliferate more bigotry in the nations we bomb, thus giving us more conveniently humanitarian flavored excuses to keep fucking bombing them. Just look at Iraq where in less than twenty years they went from merely imprisoning Queer people for a couple years to hurling us from the highest rooftops. Simply put, my people are being used and we are being used to justify an evil to which our resistance has defined our very existence.
Queer people have always been a colonized people. In fact, we were among the earliest victims of modern western colonialism. After Christianity was embraced and bastardized by the Roman Empire as a means of homogenizing all the world's tribes beneath the banner of a single monolithic religion, the first targets of their imperial conversion therapy were the European peasantry most resistant to centralized assimilation. These peasants, labeled Pagans from the Latin word Paganus, meaning rural, celebrated the existence of a wide variety of third gender people as spiritual leaders and often practiced acts of drag and homosexuality in their rituals and festivals to celebrate their stateless heritage.
Quite simply, these tribes were too proud to be governed so they were brutally subjugated beneath the cross of Christianity and ultimately forced to purge people like me from their ranks. Queer people are essentially the progeny of the last pagans. The peasant bastards too freaky to be assimilated. So we formed a new tribe in the shadows to survive with our pride intact. Even more beautiful freaks were added to our ranks when this heinous tradition of puritanical violence was continued long after Rome fell with the subjugation of the New World and the African continent, whose own diverse tribes similarly celebrated a wide variety of distinctive sexual and gender arrangements. This included the Langi tribe of Northern Uganda who recognized a third gender known as the Mujoko Dako who were biological males treated as females and aloud to marry men.
This is our tradition, and this is our jihad. Queer people are not defined by a single culture but by a commitment to a decentralized diversity of cultures, to gender and sexuality being a practice defined by a radical commitment to individual spirituality above state defined biological conformity. This tradition of a thousand traditions can never coexist with any form of colonialism or the various states that such a perversion against nature produces. This includes states like Uganda that only continue to exist at the behest of fickle colonial overlords like Joe Biden and his puppet masters in the deep state. But if we truly want to free these people from bondage, we must first free ourselves and destroy the new Rome in Washington. Regardless of whether they choose to drape their sins in crosses or rainbows, they are our true enemy and they must be destroyed in order to give colonized people across the globe the power to take back their own shattered cultures and stand proud in defiance to puritanical cultural hegemony.
Being a proud heathen outlaw has long meant being colonized but being Queer has always meant bashing back against the colonizers. Kampala cannot be liberated until Washington burns like Stonewall and that's the gift that just keeps on giving all year round.
