EXCLUSIVE: USAID LGBTQ coordinator visits Uganda
U.S. Agency for International Development Senior LGBTQI+ Coordinator Jay Gilliam last month traveled to Uganda. Gilliam was in the country from Feb.
19-27. He visited Kampala, the Ugandan capital, and the nearby city of Jinja. Gilliam met with LGBTQ activists who discussed the impact of the Anti-Homosexuality Act, a law with a death penalty provision for “aggravated homosexuality” that President Yoweri Museveni signed last May.
Gilliam also sat down with USAID staffers. Gilliam on Wednesday during an exclusive interview with the Washington Blade did not identify the specific activists and organizations with whom he met “out of protection.” “I really wanted to meet with community members and understand the impacts on them,” he said.
Consensual same-sex sexual relations in Uganda were already criminalized before Museveni signed the Anti-Homosexuality Act. Gilliam told the Blade he spoke with a person who said authorities arrested them at a community meeting for mental health and psychosocial support “under false pretenses of engaging in same-sex relations and caught in a video that purportedly showed him.” The person, according to Gilliam, said authorities outed them and drove them around the town in which they were arrested in order to humiliate them.
