alienating gays, lesbians will spark backfire

By Val Kalende (The Monitor)

September 21, 2007: Ugandan moralist and pastor, Martin Ssempa, argued while being hosted on KFM's Hard Talk that it is untrue that gays and lesbians face discrimination when seeking HIV/Aids treatment, care and counselling at public and private health clinics.

While I found this argument absolutely under-researched, it proved to me just how much our local HIV/Aids care organisations and leaders are failing to understand the links between hetero and homosexual HIV transmission.

Uganda's ABC strategy to lower HIV/Aids prevalence rates handed us a success story. President Yoweri Museveni, for his efforts in spearheading this campaign, won considerable international acclaim and awards. But according to a report released by the Uganda AIDS Commission (UAC), the overall HIV prevalence rates shot up in 2006 from 6.2% to 6.4%. Of this percentage, new infection rates were higher among married couples.

These facts are paradoxical especially of a well respected and 'socially accepted' institution that has now become a victim of moral degeneration. If HIV prevention is failing in a well-respected institution like marriage (that is only legal to heterosexual people), then that should tell us something about our national HIV/Aids programming.

Once I talked to an official from UAC. I expressed my interest in Sexual Minorities Uganda holding dialogue with her office on HIV/Aids among gay people in Uganda. On e-mail she replied, "are gays ready to change their behavioural patterns?"

While behavioural change is important in the reduction of HIV infection rates, the local Aids care providers, by denying sexual minorities the right to HIV/Aids treatment, care, and counselling, are failing the overall national HIV/Aids prevention campaign.

For many years, there has been an immense silence about African same-sex practising people. This silence has cost lives, for the muteness about same-sex practice has extended devastatingly to muteness about prevention, care and treatment.

It is an appalling rebuke to the design and execution of HIV prevention programmes which, despite the prevalence of homosexuality, same-sex transmission of HIV has remained stubbornly outside the focus of government. With slightly more than 10 percent of the world's population, Africa is home to 60 per cent of those living with HIV-- more than 25 million people. But nearly a quarter of a century into the epidemic, there remains a wall of silence that surrounds Aids and same-sex practices in Uganda.

The vulnerability of same-sex practising men and women is not due to any biological predisposition, but is the result of an interlocking set of human rights violations and social inequalities that heighten HIV risk. When gay HIV positive people go to HIV health care units they are given counselling on the basis that their partners are of the opposite sex.

Even when they disclose their sexual orientation, very few doctors either understand gay or lesbian sex or are interested in handling patients who practise 'illegal sex'.

Social vulnerability to HIV is not an innate condition, but the result of legal, political and economic inequalities that lead to inability of people to protect themselves from exposure to HIV, or to control its impact on their lives. We cannot continue to find pride in our past successes in HIV/Aids prevention when a certain group of citizens are being left out of the national AIDS policy. A successful HIV/Aids fight is that which embraces all groups of people without discrimination.

Our local Aids care organisations should develop policies that promote equality and respect for same-sex practicing people.

The government too is obligated to provide and ensure equal access to services necessary to people's health without discrimination based on HIV status or sexual orientation. The silence about sexuality-related HIV/Aids status must end.

To deal effectively with the Aids epidemic we must be informed, alert and truthful in our analyses and responses.