Gay-themed play creates legal drama
British producer charged after ignoring warning from government regulator
KAMPALA, UGANDA— When British producer David Cecil told his Ugandan cellmates he had been arrested for staging a play about homosexuality, he was met by a few wary looks at first.
But just as soon, his fellow prisoners were asking if his next play would be about jails.
“Leave alone whether I was gay or not, people very quickly picked up on the fact that I was representing a minority-rights issue,” Cecil said Monday, shortly after being released on about $200 bail.
“There was a feeling that anyone who stands up against the powers that be is on their side.”
Cecil is charged with “disobeying lawful orders” after ignoring a warning from the government’s regulatory media council the day before the play was scheduled to go on in August. The work, called The River and the Mountain, is a comedy-drama about the trials faced by a young businessman coming out in the religiously and politically charged climate in Uganda.
Cecil will appear in court again next month, and could face up to two years in jail.
Apart from the Vagina Monologues, which was banned in 2005 by the media council for themes of homosexuality, plays in Uganda are typically free to explore societal issues and often deal with other taboos such as adultery.
But this latest arrest has come at the end of a string of others in recent months, led by Minister of Ethics and Integrity Simon Lokodo. The former Catholic priest leads a monitoring force that has worked with police to interrupt gay activist workshops, meetings and Uganda’s first pride parade — all under the charge “promotion of homosexuality.”
“We don’t like to allow them to expand,” he said in an interview.
“It’s already bad enough we have homosexuals here, but we wouldn’t like it to reach far.”
Lokodo has become the country’s new poster child against homosexuality in Uganda, replacing David Bahati, author of its notorious Anti-Homosexuality Bill.
The so-called “Kill the Gays” bill calls for the death penalty in certain cases, such as for “aggravated homosexuality” — having HIV, or a being a “serial offender.”
Though Lokodo would not say if he supports the bill, he is enforcing the promotion of homosexuality clause straight from its unfinished pages.
“That’s exactly why the new bill has been encouraged — because in other laws, the promotion is not there; it is only the act which is condemned,” Lokodo said.
Uganda has come under intense international pressure over the bill, which has even led to cuts in foreign aid — but that debate has hinged on the death-penalty clause, which even Bahati has said will be removed.
In June, Lokodo attempted to have 38 NGOs deregistered for promoting homosexuality. An umbrella gay-rights group, the Ugandan Civil Society Coalition on Human Rights and Constitutional Law, was one of them, and says the order has only stalled because Lokodo cannot ban them under current laws.
“But if the anti-homosexuality bill were to pass, the ban would definitely happen,” said the coalition’s co-ordinator, Clare Byarugaba.
Although the penal code already criminalizes homosexuality, as in the majority of African countries, the pending bill would ban talking about it in public.
Uganda is an overwhelmingly Christian society, with most unwilling to outright condone homosexuality, adopting a “don’t ask, don’t tell” approach that doesn’t offend their religion.
But it is also a society heavily fuelled by Western interests.
While U.S. evangelical Christians are believed to have heavily influenced the anti-gay movement here, the U.S. State Department announced last year it would give $3 million to groups promoting gay rights across the world and would push the governments it aids to protect gay citizens.
A few months earlier, British Prime Minister David Cameron said the U.K. would start making its aid dependent on gay-rights protections.
Byarugaba says her group, which won the U.S. State Department’s 2011 Human Rights Defender Award, is used to government intimidation — but that Cecil’s arrest marks a “worrying” shift.
“We’re not promoting any kind of gay-rights agenda . . . We’re simply making a comedy-drama with a homosexual character in it.” DAVID CECIL PRODUCER OF THE RIVER AND THE MOUNTAIN
“It is moving from the NGO world doing gay rights activism, onto the arts,” she said.
Freedom of expression is already on shaky ground in Uganda — journalists regularly appear in court to defend positions critical of the state, and when opposition politicians led anti-government demonstrations last year they were charged with inciting violence.
If enacted, the promotion clause would mean up to seven years in prison for those found guilty of “funding and sponsoring of homosexuality and related activities.” Activists say it would extend to artists, lawyers and even health workers who treat gays with HIV.
The new bill was introduced in 2009, and has not yet been put to a vote. International pressure will likely see the death penalty amended out of the bill in a parliamentary committee, where it now sits after being reintroduced in the current House session.
Bahati has said that with the death penalty gone, he expects international pressure to waver, and that the bill has the majority support in Parliament it needs to pass.
Until then, Cecil is confident that the courts will be forced to take his side, protected by what he called “his innocence as a creative artist.”
“We’re not promoting any kind of gay-rights agenda, not advocating for more homosexuality in Uganda,” he said. “We’re simply making a comedy-drama with a homosexual character in it.”