Rwandans fight to make their country the safest place in East Africa for LGBTI people

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    Tomorrow, they'll accept us
    by HEATHER DOCKRAY

    original article: Rwanda's LGBTI activists fight to make their country a tiny haven
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    Mailly walks into every room like she's auditioning for Next Top Model, even when it’s just her own kitchen.

    She passes by the oven like she's stepping onto the runway. Applies her make-up like she's about to step onto a TV set for the last damn interview of the week.

    Mailly wants a bigger, more glamorous world than the one she’s been given. But as a trans woman in Kigali, Rwanda's capital, her stage is limited: kitchen, bedroom, the occasional bar. She can't go to work because she can't apply for employment without producing identification and revealing the sex she was assigned at birth. She can't escape to America, even for a brief trip, because the country doesn’t readily grant visas to Rwandans like her, and likely won't for a long time.

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    Despite everything, this isn't a performance and Mailly isn't despairing. She chooses to behave like the world-famous fashion icon she knows she deserves to be. Unlike so many other trans women she knows, 24-year-old Mailly has a supportive biological family she comes home to every night and a chosen LGBTI* family she sees every morning. She's a fashion designer. She looks good. All of these factors bolster Mailly's optimism, as does her mission: to help improve the lives of her gay and trans friends who crowd into her small Kigali apartment every week, looking for community and a little piece of hope.

    "Sometimes trans [people] have this problem where you feel lonely, you are depressed, or you don't see a future for you. It's like you don’t want to live anymore," Mailly says. "If we face our fear and then show ourselves, maybe they can accept us someday."

    Mailly's vision is clearly utopian. Her day-to-day agenda is much more concrete. Along with a surreally positive group of activists, Mailly is working to make her tiny country, which is no bigger than Maryland, the safest place in East Africa for LGBTI people.

    They're confident they'll win and that they'll do it in their lifetimes. It can happen in Rwanda, Mailly believes, because it already happened in her own family.

    As a landlocked, religious country with a population just under 12 million, Rwanda probably isn't the first country people think of when it comes to LGBTI rights. The 20th poorest country on earth has become synonymous with the genocide that killed close to a million people in under a month in 1994. Even though stability has largely been restored and the country’s growth has been dramatic, the few stories that do make international headlines focus on the once promising president turned "benevolent dictator" Paul Kagame, who just won his third term in office with 99 percent of the vote. Human Rights Watch has accused his government of harassing, detaining, and torturing opposition leaders and journalists. The mostly peaceful country is considered "not free" according to Freedom House, an American NGO that studies democracy.

    But Rwanda also has another reputation, one that hasn’t attracted quite as much attention with the general public. Quietly, Rwanda has made noteworthy policy choices in the area of LGBTI rights, at least in comparison to its neighbors. Bordered by Tanzania to the east, Uganda and Kenya to the north, and Burundi to the south, Rwanda is the only country in the immediate region without anti-homosexuality laws.

    In 2011, Rwanda became the only country in Central East Africa, one of six in Africa, and one of 85 in the world to sponsor the United Nations' joint statement condemning violence against LGBTI people. Earlier this year, Rwanda signed onto a U.N. resolution condemning countries who use the death penalty as a punishment for consensual same-sex relations. The United States, notably, did not.

    These may seem like symbolic gestures, but to human right activists in the country working to protect LGBTI people from homelessness and unemployment, they provide a critical legal backdrop and communicate a profound message to Rwanda's LGBTI community: your government doesn’t want to hurt you.

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    Louis Busingye, who grew up the child of refugees in Kenya before moving to Rwanda, is a lawyer and the program coordinator for Human Rights First Rwanda Association. In 2009, his organization helped defeat a bill that would have criminalized same-sex relations. He believes his adoptive country has matured to become a de facto leader — at least when it comes to gender and sexuality — in this area of the world.

    "Look at the region. Uganda, for example, it's still conservative in the laws and people are being killed because of their sexual orientation," Busingye says. "There are those who are persecuted and who have sought refuge in Rwanda. The law [here] could be much more positive — we could allow gay marriage, and become a real role model."

    Busingye’s idealism is grounded in history. Rwandan homophobia and transphobia are, at least partially, colonial imports. Prior to the Belgian colonization of Rwanda, the native Tutsi population engaged in same-sex contacts for spiritual rearmament. Colonization and the work of the 19th century Belgian missionaries appear to have shifted that discourse significantly.

    Fifty years after independence, Rwanda now takes pride in its anti-discrimination laws, Busingye explains, even if it doesn't always execute them evenly.

    Not all Rwandan human rights organizations are on board with the LGBTI community, advocates stress. Busingye and his colleagues at Amahoro Human Respect Organization, which also serves the LGBTI community, report that other NGOs will often refuse to collaborate with them because of their organizations' work with the population.

    "Many [service providers] fear including LGBTI people in their services," says Mwesigye Geofrey, vice chairperson of Amahoro. "Because they fear them."

    When at human rights conferences, other nonprofits have even stepped out of photos with LGBTI advocates, Geofrey adds, for fear of becoming associated with the morally "sick" people they serve.

    "Last year we had a workshop. We invited so many people, so many human rights advocates to find that almost none of them attended," Busingye laments.

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    These cruel slights can have sizable impacts, according to activists, especially for Rwanda's disproportionately homeless LGBTI population and those who need these nonprofit services to survive. Organizations seeking to legally register with the government often won't highlight their work with the LGBTI community for fear of having their application rejected, advocates say. Those that do make their priorities explicit identify as human rights organizations that serve the LGBTI community, instead of principally LGBTI organizations.

    That seemingly nominal difference can be the key to an organization getting legal recognition or not.

    Advocates choose to remain upbeat, grounding so much of their faith in their controversial president. In 2016, while at a Rwandan Cultural Day celebration in San Francisco, President Kagame claimed that Rwanda "doesn't have a problem with the LGBTI community."

    "It hasn't been our problem," Kagame said before an audience of 1,000. "And we don't intend to make it a problem … We are struggling with all kinds of problems that we have. We want to have everybody involved at this table."

    Kagame's response wasn't exactly the stuff of activist dreams. Still, Busingye recites this quote like it's his favorite song lyric. He's memorized it because he wants it to speak so much louder than the other voices in the region: the Ugandan president who calls gay people "disgusting" and what they do "terrible," or the Tanzanian president who said that even "cows" disapprove of homosexuality.

    By contrast, Kagame's very ambivalence — his seeming unwillingness to discriminate, even as he displays discomfort — is what gives Busingye the strength he needs to reach out to an anti-gay pastor or convince a tentative journalist that LGBTI people deserve rights.

    "Rwanda is the best place [in the region] for me to work on this issue," Busingye argues.

    If LGBTI people aren't Rwanda's problem, then they can be the country's hope.

    Twenty-two-year-old Blessed Tyga is, without a doubt, the model of that idealism.

    “Bless” is one of those chronically positive activists who oozes good faith: if there's a car that's collapsing, he can fix it; if there's a country that's broken, he can repair that, too.

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    At a meeting for LGBTI nonprofits, Bless is introduced to me as a powerful community organizer and an inspiration for other gay youth in Rwanda.

    "I do not become hopeless after all these problems," Bless says. He says it like he means it.

    Growing up, Bless was, well, blessed. He lived in Nyamirambo, known locally as the most LGBTI-friendly part of Kigali, and had everything: parents who paid his school fees, a house he called home, and a church that gave him community.

    After his parents discovered he was gay during high school, he lost it all. His parents separated him from his siblings and stopped paying for his school, forcing him to drop out. Bless' pastor told him he "couldn't afford to teach people like you in my church," arguing that it was a "people's church" and that Bless, by extension, wasn't really a person.

    In a deeply religious country where over 57 percent of the population is Roman Catholic, Bless' church didn't just insult him. It left him almost completely alone.

    At one point, Bless' father tried to have him incarcerated because of his sexuality. He told the police he was concerned about his son's marijuana use, which Bless admits to using, but the drugs were just the pretext. Bless was detained for two days before Rwandan anti-discrimination laws kicked in.

    "The policeman finally said, 'This issue … is not a case for us,'" Bless says. "So he [Bless' father] said, 'Can you get him with something you can show in front of the lawyers?' But the commander on the job was trying to understand something about LGBTI people. He got what was going on. That's why he set me free."

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    It was a group of community organizers – not the Rwandan police – who ultimately came to Bless' aid. Bless spent nearly a year homeless after his parents “chased him out,” briefly moving into an apartment, only to be kicked out by his landlord upon discovering his sexuality. Soon after, Nizeyimana Seleman, the president of Hope and Care, a nonprofit that serves out-of-school youth, found Bless on the street and realized that he might be at risk. Out-of-school youth are often LGBTI, Seleman stresses. They need caring adults who can build relationships with them when all they want to do is hide.

    "He asked me what I was doing … I told him that I do nothing," Bless says. "He told me, 'But you are supposed to be going to school.' I told him that it was hard for me to go to school … Then he wanted to know the reason as to why … I tried to escape those issues but Seleman was smart enough to know he had to keep asking me, day after day."

    It wasn't long before Bless opened up, left his street corner, and started showing up regularly at Hope and Care. The help began to flow in. First, Seleman and a group of peer organizers met with Bless' family to mediate. Seleman, an evangelist preacher, former child soldier, and LGBTI advocate, knows how to speak to families like Bless'.

    "The first thing I tell them is: You should not be ashamed of him. You should be proud. It [his sexuality] is a gift from God," he says. While he wasn't able to get Bless' family to fully accept him, he did convince them to let him back in the house.

    Still, Bless says the relationships he made with the LGBTI community — his chosen "families" — made the greatest impact in his life. After meeting Seleman, Bless was introduced to Morgan N., a peer educator, mediator, and Seleman's "second-hand man" who soon became one of his best friends. Like Bless, Morgan, who grew up in Uganda, "where you can be burned alive for being gay," was thankful to be living and organizing for human rights in Rwanda. Morgan introduced Bless to advocacy work, and together, they started traveling across the city and the country as activists, making connections wherever they could.

    Even though he lives in a country where protest is banned, Morgan has no problem identifying loudly as an activist. "I'm a changemaker!" Morgan says, repeatedly.

    One of the most powerful alliances Morgan and Bless forged was with Bishop Joseph Tolton, a member of the Fellowship of Affirming Ministriesand an organizer from New York seeking to build a network of LGBTI-led, LGBTI-friendly churches throughout East Africa. Tolton, together with the two young men and Rwandan LGBTI advocates, holds church services in non-LGBTI-friendly neighborhoods all across Rwanda. Despite the risk it poses, the services are held — like many others throughout the country — at full volume. Tolton’s goal is two-fold. First, to create a space where LBGTI people and their allies, regardless of their religious backgrounds, can worship in peace. Second, to introduce Rwandans who are hostile to LGBTI rights to actual members of the LGBTI community, and do it in an inclusive setting.

    "Until last year we had no church in Rwanda that would accept LGBTI members into their congregation," Busingye says.

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    Even people like Mailly, who doesn’t identify as particularly religious, say they understand the social value these services hold. These services attract all kinds: cisgender gay men and lesbians, bisexual Rwandans, Muslims, Christians, trans women, trans men, and friendly allies.

    At a service in a Kigali neighborhood this July, locals who overheard Tolton preach from outside the building began to verbally abuse worshippers, accusing them of collaborating with the devil. A few went so far as to threaten to stone them to death. Morgan and Bless' response?

    They went outside to say hello.

    "I like it. I love it!" Morgan says of the experience. He explains that they were able to answer a few of the locals' outwardly insulting (though maybe just curious) questions. "I'm a changemaker," Morgan reminds me. "I can't wait to do this again."

    Bless agrees, and then comes up with another plan: Next time, "bring food."

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    When Hope and Care was nearly evicted from its building because neighbors suspected it had LGBTI members, Bless says his fellow organizers responded without retaliating and instead participated in Umuganda, a Rwandan monthly service day. The group went out and performed repairs for the neighbors who wanted to see them gone.

    Over time, the neighbors came to see "we are just like them," Bless says, and relented.

    If they have any chance of changing the Rwandan community, Bless argues, they'll need to invite people in. That includes the people who want to see activists like them disappear. Neither he nor Morgan seem particularly worried about the risks such open arms could pose.

    "When we organize a ceremony, we invite all of them," Bless says of the local leaders. "They will not all come. But one of them will come. And the next time, a second will come … One day, we will be at 100 percent."

    About a month ago, Bishop Tolton, together with the organizers from Hope and Care and other LGBTI-friendly nonprofits across the country, established the region's first formal LGBTI-inclusive church.

    It was a historic, painstakingly collaborative feat of community organizing.

    Everyone was invited to attend.

    It’s no secret that wherever you are on this planet, the LGBTI community is an imperfect coalition. Almost all cultures treat trans and queer people differently, and rarely for good reasons.

    Rwanda is no exception. Advocates stress that while all members of the LGBTI community suffer discrimination, the country's transgender population struggles disproportionately.

    Cedric, a 20-year-old transgender woman and aspiring professional model, knows these divisions well. On one hand, Cedric is deeply grateful for what she has. She’s a successful part-time model who recently appeared in Rwanda's Fashion Week. Unlike like so many other trans women she knows, Cedric, who maintains a traditionally masculine presentation in public and who appears to many as a man, has a job working in a bar with her mother. Bless befriended Cedric and introduced her to the community. On multiple levels, Cedric feels like she belongs.

    That doesn't mean things are easy. Her struggles are different from Bless'. Cedric isn’t out to many people, and lives a largely private life.

    "I don't like to show [my gender identity] in the public eye," Cedric says. She doesn't date anyone openly and hasn't come out to her mother, though she promises she will. She knows her silence protects her, even as it exacts painful costs.

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    Mailly gets it. Like Cedric, Mailly can’t fully emerge as the fashion icon she dreams of one day becoming. She refuses to resort to sex work, an industry that employs so many of her trans friends.

    "When you ask all of them [about sex work], it's because they can't find anything to do," Mailly says. Though there's no publicly available data on the Rwandan sex work industry, transgender women, lacking employment, are internationally overrepresented in the sex trade.

    She’s doing everything she can to prop herself up financially and emotionally. Mailly goes on dates with men she meets on various dating apps all while presenting as a cis straight woman. For now, she's ending these relationships before they start to get serious, fearful that she'll be outed and hurt in more ways than one.

    "I have an ex of mine, we spent two years together. He never knew anything [about my gender identity]. But I'm only myself when I'm with the people I know. For the rest I'm just Mailly, the sexy woman,” Mailly says.

    What makes Mailly and Cedric's lives particularly challenging is how little data they have about their own lives. The Rwandan government may not have a "problem" with the LGBTI community, but part of that attitude depends on pretending that people like Mailly and Cedric don’t exist. There is no publicly available data about the population. Much of the press isn't free. Trans women like Mailly and Cedric can only rely on their own stories and the stories of people they know. Any time they want to try something new, they step into the unknown and all of its attendant danger.

    "What do you think would happen if I told people I was a trans woman on this [dating app]?" Mailly asks a room full of friends. "Do you think they would kill me?"

    No one has an answer.

    If there's one thing that ties Busingye, Mailly, Bless, Geofrey, Cedric, and Morgan together, it's their impenetrable sense of hope. No one frames their story as a tragedy. Among these activists, optimism is its own kind of spiritual force.

    "Are you concerned that your country doesn’t have any LGBTI bars?" I ask Busingye.

    "We have parties," he tells me. "We'll have a parade!"

    "Are you worried that your government doesn't want to talk about LGBTI rights?" I ask Bless.

    "We have a president who is a very smart man," Bless says. "He's thinking of us."

    What gaps they do have they're rapidly trying to fill. Busingye has obtained private funding to conduct the first countrywide survey of Rwanda’s LGBTI people, hoping to use the data collected to press the Rwandan government for services.

    Geofrey is busy preaching at Rwanda's first LGBTI church. Morgan is traveling to California to speak about LGBTI rights and activism. Cedric plans to come out to her mother someday soon. She thinks she will be accepted.

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    Bless is confident he'll raise the funds he needs to go back to school one day. He takes pride in everything around him: the brand new computers in the Hope and Care office, the LGBTI families he's become a part of, and the Rwandan parents he's met who've finally accepted their children, even if their stories aren't his own.

    "No matter who they are, no matter what the neighbors say about their children, no matter what people are whispering around, they've all stayed with their children," Bless says.

    None of them think that the country’s homophobia is a permanent national fixture or an immovable part of its identity. It’s a historical stage they believe will one day pass.

    In the meantime, Mailly's keeping busy. In the kitchen at one of our interviews, Mailly stands over the stove like she’s posing for a Voguephotoshoot — all lipstick, no complaints. She's preparing a huge lunch for family and friends coming today. There’s so much that needs to be made — salad, chicken, crepes — and there’s so many expected to come: her sister, her nephew, her mother, two of her brothers, and her gay best friend Tonny. She doesn't want to make any mistakes.

    "It's very hard to have a family that can’t understand your condition," Mailly says. "But they're always with me. I am really grateful for that … to have a family that loves and supports you, it's a big thing to be proud of."

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    Mailly wasn't always so sure that would be true. She left her family as a teenager, terrified that they wouldn't accept her. Over time, most of them did. Things changed. Half of them moved in together. Now, her mother can't stop hugging her. Her nephew follows her from room to room. Her brothers and her sister look adoringly at her as she walks into the kitchen in a ball gown, smack dab in the middle of the day.

    Everyone is here.

    "We don't really know what's waiting for us," Mailly says of the LGBTI community later, surrounded by her designs. "But we have a big hope that it's everything."
     
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