Frank Mugisha (born 17 June 1979) [1] [2] is a Ugandan LGBT advocate and Executive Director of Sexual Minorities Uganda (SMUG), who has won the Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights Award and Thorolf Rafto Memorial Prize 2011 for his activism. Mugisha is one of the most prominent advocates for LGBT rights in Uganda.
Mugisha was born in a suburb of Kampala, Uganda. Raised in a strict Catholic family, he came out to his brother at age 14. [3] Although his coming out estranged him from some family members, other friends and family have continued to support him. [4]
While still at university in 2004, he founded Icebreakers Uganda, an organization created as a support network for LGBT Ugandans who are out or in the process of coming out to family and friends. [5] Mugisha is now the executive director of SMUG, an umbrella organization that consists of eighteen groups, including Icebreakers Uganda. [6]
Mugisha has been honored by the UN - Secretary General. Listed in the Advocate Magazine, The Independent, honored by Black Entertainment Television - BET and Mugisha was named by #POWER10: among most Influential Black LGBTQ people in 2014. [7]
Mugisha was close friends with fellow advocate and SMUG founder David Kato, who was murdered in January 2011 after successfully suing a tabloid named Rolling Stone for publishing the names of 100 LGBT Ugandans with an encouragement to "hang them". [8] Mugisha is one of the plaintiffs from SMUG represented by the Center for Constitutional Rights using the Alien Tort Statute to sue American evangelist Scott Lively for crimes against humanity for his work on the Uganda's Anti-Homosexuality Bill, [9] work described as inciting the persecution of gay men and lesbians [10] and as "conduct ... actively trying to harm and deprive other people of their rights [which] is the definition of persecution". [11] [12] In August 2013, Federal U.S. District Court Judge Michael A. Ponsor ruled that the plaintiffs were on solid ground under international and federal law in rejecting a jurisdictional challenge to the suit; he also ruled that First Amendment defenses for Lively's conduct were premature. [13]
Writing in The Guardian in 2014, Mugisha argued that homophobia and the hatred behind the Anti-Homosexuality Bill were from western influences: "I am a gay man. I am also Ugandan. There is nothing un-African about me. Uganda is where I was born, grew up and call my home. It is also a country in which I have become little more than an unapprehended criminal because of whom I love. I want my fellow Ugandans to understand that homosexuality is not a western import and our friends in the developed world to recognise that the current trend of homophobia is." [9]
Mugisha was awarded the 2011 Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights Award and the 2011 Rafto Prize [14] for his work pursuing LGBT rights in Uganda. [15] [16] He also received an honorary doctorate of the University of Ghent. [17] Mugisha was a 2014 nominee for the Nobel Peace Prize. [18] In 2017, Mugisha was included in Fortune Magazine's list of world's greatest leaders. [19]
"Gay agenda" or "homosexual agenda" is a term used by sectors of the Christian religious right as a disparaging way to describe the advocacy of cultural acceptance and normalization of non-heterosexual sexual orientations and relationships. The term originated among social conservatives in the United States and has been adopted in nations with active anti-LGBT movements such as Hungary and Uganda.
Homophobia encompasses a range of negative attitudes and feelings toward homosexuality or people who identify or are perceived as being lesbian, gay or bisexual. It has been defined as contempt, prejudice, aversion, hatred or antipathy, may be based on irrational fear and may sometimes be attributed to religious beliefs.
Lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) people in Uganda face severe challenges not experienced by non-LGBT residents. Both male and female forms of same-sex sexual activity are illegal in Uganda. Originally criminalised by British colonial laws introduced when Uganda became a British protectorate, these have been retained since the country gained its independence.
Lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) rights in Africa are in most countries very poor in comparison to the Americas, Western Europe and Oceania.
Scott Douglas Lively is an American activist, author, and attorney, who is the president of Abiding Truth Ministries, an anti-LGBT group based in Temecula, California. He was also a cofounder of Latvia-based group Watchmen on the Walls, state director of the California branch of the American Family Association, and a spokesman for the Oregon Citizens Alliance. He unsuccessfully attempted to be elected as the governor of Massachusetts in both 2014 and 2018.
The Anti-Homosexuality Act, 2014 was an act passed by the Parliament of Uganda on 20 December 2013, which prohibited sexual relations between persons of the same sex. The act was previously called the "Kill the Gays bill" in the western mainstream media due to death penalty clauses proposed in the original version, but the penalty was later amended to life imprisonment. The bill was signed into law by the President of Uganda Yoweri Museveni on 24 February 2014. On 1 August 2014, however, the Constitutional Court of Uganda ruled the act invalid on procedural grounds.
Abiding Truth Ministries (ATM) is a United States 501(c)(3) non-profit organization founded by Scott Lively in Temecula, California in 1997. The ministry has been based in Springfield, Massachusetts, since 2008. Lively, an American author, attorney and activist, is noted for his opposition to LGBT rights and his involvement in the ex-gay movement. Lively has called for the criminalization of "the public advocacy of homosexuality" as far back as 2007. Along with Kevin E. Abrams, Lively co-authored the 1995 book The Pink Swastika, which states in the preface that "homosexuals [are] the true inventors of Nazism and the guiding force behind many Nazi atrocities." He is also directly linked to pending anti-gay legislation in Uganda, which would, if passed, make homosexual conduct punishable by a lengthy prison sentence or death. The Southern Poverty Law Center regards Abiding Truth Ministries as a hate group.
Sexual Minorities Uganda (SMUG) is an umbrella non-governmental organization based in Kampala, Uganda. It has been described as the country's leading gay rights advocacy group.
David Kato Kisule was a Ugandan teacher and LGBT rights activist, considered a father of Uganda's gay rights movement and described as "Uganda's first openly gay man". He served as advocacy officer for Sexual Minorities Uganda (SMUG).
Kasha Jacqueline Nabagesera is a Ugandan LGBT rights activist and the founder and executive director of the LGBT rights organization Freedom & Roam Uganda (FARUG). She received the Martin Ennals Award for Human Rights Defenders in 2011 and the Right Livelihood Award in 2015.
Freedom and Roam Uganda (FARUG) is a human rights organization that addresses discrimination against lesbian, bisexual, transgender and intersex (LBTIQ) people in Uganda.
Call Me Kuchu is a 2012 American documentary film directed by Malika Zouhali-Worrall and Katherine Fairfax Wright. The film explores the struggles of the LGBT community in Uganda, focusing in part on the 2011 murder of LGBT activist David Kato.
Uganda has a very long and, quite permissive, and sometimes violent history regarding the LGBT community, stretching back from the pre-colonial period, through British colonial control, and even after independence.
Pepe Julian Onziema is a Ugandan LGBT rights and human rights defender. He began his human rights work in 2003.
Igor Viktorovich Kochetkov is a Russian gay rights activist who heads the Russian LGBT Network.
John "Longjones" Abdallah Wambere is a Ugandan gay rights activist and co-founder of Spectrum Uganda Initiatives, a Kampala-based LGBTI rights advocacy organization with a focus on health education. Because of the threat of violence and persecution he faces in Uganda, Wambere was approved for asylum in the United States by the U.S. Citizen and Immigration Services on September 11, 2014. He currently resides in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Richard Lusimbo is a Ugandan LGBT activist, documentary filmmaker, and public speaker who gained international attention when he was outed in a Ugandan tabloid newspaper for being gay.
Kapya John Kaoma is a Zambian, US-educated scholar, pastor and human rights activist who is most noted for his pro-LGBTQ+ activism, particularly regarding Africa.
Val Kalende is a former LGBT activist from Uganda. After coming out as a lesbian in 2003, she became involved in Ugandan LGBT activism. In 2018, she stated she was no longer a lesbian, having been "transformed by God's love".