Month: May 2014

Categories
LGBTQ

Boost For LGBT Rights In Peru As Leading Politician Comes Out

“I’m gay, and proud to be so,” says Carlos Bruce.

Posted originally on Buzzfeed News on May 25, 2014, at 12:13 p.m. ET

The front page of one of Peru’s major newspapers blared the headline: “I’m gay, and proud to be so.”

It was a quote from an interview with Carlos Bruce, a former cabinet minister, one-time serious contender for the vice presidency, and now one of Peru’s most popular members of Congress. His sexual orientation had long been widely discussed, and for years he’d answered direct questions about it by saying: “I don’t discuss my personal life.”

Bruce’s abrupt change in strategy last week signals just how much the politics of LGBT rights are changing in Peru, which has lagged far behind while many other countries in South America have become world leaders on the issue. Argentina, Uruguay, and Brazil have all established marriage equality since 2010. This week, one of Brazil’s top bishops said that “same-sex couples need legal support” and endorsed civil unions. Meanwhile, Peru’s cardinal has denounced a civil union proposal Bruce introduced last September as a “caricature of marriage that will later destroy it.”

Bruce came out just as his civil union proposal has become one of the most fiercely debated subjects in Peruvian politics. The bill still seems likely to fail — recent polls show between 61 and 73 percent of Peruvians oppose it — but the fact that he no longer believes coming out is political suicide suggests a cultural shift may be taking place that is even more significant than a change in partnership law.

“Carlos Bruce is one of the most beloved members of Congress in Peru,” said George Liendo, of the Lima-based sexual rights organization Promsex, noting that Bruce won loyalty from many through his role in helping get Peruvians into homes when he was housing secretary. “The fact that a person like him says he is gay and is proud to be so, ultimately changes the negative connotation of homosexuality.”

Bruce hadn’t exactly gone to great lengths to hide being gay before coming out. His evasion of questions about his sexuality, he says, was a pretty obvious non-denial denial.

“That was a way of saying yes, but I don’t want to speak about it,” Bruce said in a phone interview with BuzzFeed. “Everybody knew.”

And he has mostly been unmoved when the media or his political opponents tried to make an issue of it. Politicians have called him the equivalent of “faggot” on the campaign trail, national comedy shows have mocked him as the “godfather” of effeminate homosexuals, and Cardinal Cipriani accused him of using his office to “justify” his sexual orientation when he introduced the civil union bill last year.

But until this week, he felt the cost of acknowledging it would be too high. “If I can imagine a politician saying he’s openly gay, for sure he [would lose] 80% of his voters,” Bruce told BuzzFeed in a 2012 interview. Even if he kept his seat in Congress, it would mean writing off another bid for national office, he said.

Now he believes it might even help him if he makes another run.

“Maybe it can be a good thing for higher public office,” Bruce said. “One thing that everybody is saying here — even the people who are against me — ‘I don’t like this guy but I have to say he has courage’.”

Such as the many tweets like this one that appeared after the story ran last Sunday:

“People are calling him a faggot, but they wish they had the balls to make such a confession in this very prejudiced country.”

He’s gotten praise from the press too, such as this editorial cartoon published the day after the news broke. “Is it a bird? Is it a plane?” “No, it’s Bruce.”

It isn’t all praise, of course. In the hours after the news broke, there was a flood of homophobic comments on social media, which Peruvian outlets rushed to
compile and republish. But for the most part, the attacks hurled at Bruce in the political arena have been noticeably oblique. Instead of suggesting he’s not fit to serve because he’s gay, his opponents have accused him of an unethical conflict of interest in promoting LGBT rights legislation without disclosing that he would benefit.

“We haven’t elected congressmen to legislate in their own interest, but rather for the good of the majority of the population,” said Congressman Julio Rosas, an evangelical pastor who is leading opposition to the civil union bill. Rosas, who believes that homosexuality is an illness that can be cured, also said Bruce would be welcome in his church.

“Every Christian church takes in all people without discrimination, whether they be homosexuals, lesbians, or transsexuals, and all are welcome because Jesus came to save the sinner,” Rosas said.

Others have suggested that his decision to come out was a “desperate” political move to save the civil union proposal from defeat, a charge Bruce laughed off in a television interview on the day the El Comercio interview was published.

“I’m not desperate about anything,” Bruce said on the news program Cuarto Poder, pointing out that given the majority opposition to the civil union proposal, the disclosure will probably hurt him at the polls. “What I wanted to do is open a little the debate on what it means to be gay or not. If this disqualifies someone from being a good public servant or not. … Someone’s sexual orientation doesn’t qualify them as a good person or a bad person.”

He also rebutted the conflict of interest charge, saying that is only a concern when a politician has a financial stake in a government decision. But, he said, “When we’re talking about human rights, there is no [such thing] as conflict of interest.”

Bruce leaves Peru at the end of this week for a two-week visit to Australia, where he may finally get a break from the media spotlight. “The worst thing about coming out is all the interviews you have to do,” he joked.

The debate over the civil union bill will largely be on hold until he returns. After several delays, the congressional committee with jurisdiction over the bill is expected to begin work on it sometime in June. But the organizers of the coalition supporting the bill, known as Unión Civil ¡Ya! (Civil Unions Now!) is concerned that committee leadership is still trying to duck the issue. They are rallying for a march on June 6 under the hashtag #DebateAhora (#DebateNow).

The coalition already brought more than 10,000 supporters to the streets in April, but opponents of the bill have marched in even larger numbers, and earlier this month presented more than one million signatures on a petition opposing the legislation.

Even if the bill does get a hearing, it could be threatened by a counter proposal endorsed by Rosas and other conservatives, which would essentially allow two unmarried people to establish contracts protecting shared property, but would exclude them from any family rights. This is not acceptable to LGBT rights activists, but it is another sign of how far the debate has moved — it is very similar to a proposal Bruce himself unsuccessfully put forward in 2012.

Though now out, Bruce continues to walk a fine line, going to great lengths to emphasize that the bill does not give same-sex couples completely equal rights. The full name of the proposal is “Non-Matrimonial Civil Unions,” and the proposal would not allow for same-sex couples to adopt. He says this is because the science is “inconclusive” as to whether it harms a child to be raised by two parents of the same sex, though he himself is a father.

“That’s what the studies are available right now said to us,” Bruce said. “If we include that gay parents can adopt kids, we have to justify it… If they’re conclusive in the coming year, maybe we will change this.”

Bruce said that when he decided to put forward the bill, his main goal was to get anti-LGBT politicians to show their true face. “If they’re going to be homophobic, let them be homophobic. I was not positive that it was going to have too much possibility [of passing],” he said.

But things are changing fast. “Now I think it could happen,” Bruce said. “All the conservatives are very afraid.”

Categories
Human Rights LGBTQ

Gay Rights Crusade Against Stoning in Brunei Began with a Los Angeles Labor Dispute

“Stories need a hook,” said a spokesperson for UNITE HERE Local 11. The union had been fighting the Beverly Hills Hotel and the Hotel Bel-Air for over a year, but it wasn’t until LGBT activists got on board that their efforts found traction.

Posted originally on Buzzfeed News on May 7, 2014, at 4:44 p.m. ET

For more than a year before the Beverly Hills Hotel became the target of a boycott, a Los Angeles labor union had been trying to draw attention to the fact that it is owned by the sultan of Brunei, a tiny Southeast Asian nation with laws criminalizing homosexuality. Almost no one cared.

How this went from a failed ploy in a labor dispute to an advocacy campaign involving celebrities including Ellen DeGeneres to Jay Leno is one that could only take place in the age of internet outrage, when relationships between American activists and social media go a long way in determining which human rights causes blow up and which ones go virtually unnoticed in the United States.

UNITE HERE Local 11 spokeswoman Leigh Shelton told BuzzFeed that the union began trying to shine the spotlight on Brunei’s LGBT rights record in February 2013, as part of an effort to drive business away from the Hotel Bel-Air and the Beverly Hills Hotel, both owned by Sultan Hassanal Bolkiah’s Dorchester Collection hotel company. The effort stemmed from a feud stretching back to the 1990s, when the union was shut out from representing the Beverly Hills Hotel after it went through renovations. The union was shut out in similar fashion from the Hotel Bel-Air in 2009. In researching the hotel’s ownership, UNITE HERE discovered that Brunei has actually long had a law criminalizing sodomy well before the new Sharia code, dating back to its days under British colonial rule.

The union produced a video urging people to “take a stand against homophobia” and “dump” the Beverly Hills Hotel. “The Beverly Hills Hotel is owned by the nation of Brunei, where it is illegal to be gay,” the video proclaimed.

That campaign went nowhere.

“Stories need a hook,” Shelton said. “I just don’t think it had a hook at the time.”

Last month, that changed: National organizations called for boycotts, and personalities including Sharon Osbourne and Richard Branson took to Twitter to urge their followers to join them in staying away from the hotel. On Monday, former Tonight Show host Jay Leno added fuel to the fire when he joined a rally outside the Beverly Hills Hotel, calling for the sultan to either change the law or sell the hotel. Organizations ranging from the Motion Picture & Television Fund to the International Women’s Media Foundation to The Hollywood Reporter have canceled events at the hotel as well. DeGeneres tweeted:

The “hook” was that the sultan was going to impose a new penal code based on Sharia law, which would punish homosexuality — as well as adultery — with death by stoning. The sultan had actually announced the new proposal in October, but few in the United States noticed nor made the connection to the hotel. Nor did it get much notice when a United Nations spokesperson made a statement on April 11 condemning the proposal, which was originally set to go into effect on April 22. But then, longtime LGBT and labor activist Cleve Jones — who had consulted for UNITE HERE in its fight with the Dorchester hotels — saw a mention of the U.N. statement on his Facebook feed.

“That caught my attention,” Jones said. “I knew who this guy was and I remember thinking to myself that maybe this will get people to pay attention. I started waiting two days, maybe three days, and see who would pick up on it. And nothing.”

So he posted about it on Facebook and tagged several major players in LGBT rights and Hollywood, including Human Rights Campaign President Chad Griffin, screenwriter and LGBT activist Dustin Lance Black, and film producer Bruce Cohen. His post was shared over 400 times.

The next day, the Gill Action — an organization set up by tech mogul Tim Gill to advance LGBT rights — issued a statement announcing it would move an upcoming conference connecting donors with state-level LGBT organizations to another venue. This was a rare public statement from the organization, which generally likes to keep its name out of the press. (A spokesperson declined to comment on when the organization learned about the Sharia proposal.)

“In light of the horrific anti-gay policy approved by the government of Brunei, Gill Action made the decision earlier today to relocate its conference from the Beverly Hills Hotel to another property,” Gill Action Executive Director Kirk Fordham said in a statement to the LGBT publications that first reported the move, including the The Washington Blade, which ran the story under the headline “Secret gay donor conference moved from Brunei-owned hotel.”

A week later, according to Feminist Majority spokeswoman Stephanie Hallett, it pulled an event scheduled for May 5 and instead organized a rally in front of the hotel joined by UNITE HERE, the California Women’s Law Center, and several LGBT organizations — including Human Rights Campaign and the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force.

The campaign against the hotel has largely focused on the Sharia code’s potential impact on LGBT people, but the policing of women’s sexual relationships has often been the major focus in other places where versions of Sharia law have been implemented. Indonesia’s Banda Aceh province — the only other place in Southeast Asia with a version of Sharia — originally stipulated a punishment of death by stoning for adultery but only 100 lashes for homosexuality. And because women are often expected to defend sexual honor, harsh punishments tend to be meted out disproportionately for sexual misconduct in other countries with Sharia-based systems, according to a report from the organization Women Living Under Muslim Laws.

The U.S.’s largest LGBT rights organization, the Human Rights Campaign, gave its imprimatur to the boycott on Friday, publicly calling on other organizations with events scheduled for the Dorchester hotels to stay away. On Tuesday, HRC took aim again, introducing a campaign under the hashtag #callitout highlighting the apparent hypocrisy of the Dorchester Collection’s same-sex wedding business.

All this organizing has taken place with virtually no consultation with activists in Brunei, in large part because U.S. organizations can’t find anyone to consult. Hallett said that they did not talk to anyone in Brunei before organizing Monday’s rally, and several LGBT organizations working internationally said they’ve been unable to find partners in the country of fewer than 500,000.

“Good luck getting a hold of someone over there,” said a staffer of an LGBT organization doing international work.

Focusing on international issues is relatively new for HRC, which made a high-profile announcement in late 2013 that it would launch a global program with a $3 million initial investment. This caused concern among some LGBT activists who have been working overseas, who feared HRC might not adequately consult with activists on the ground before getting involved abroad. During the fights over marriage equality in the U.S., many state-level activists complained that the group stepped on local activists when it launched state-based campaigns.

Although HRC is “incredibly concerned about [coordination with local activists] because we always want to show great sensitivity to the real-world impact on the ground,” said Vice President for Communications Fred Sainz, the group jumped in because the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights office had made public statements criticizing Brunei’s proposal earlier this month. “Our involvement has been driven by the U.N. action,” said Sainz.

Sainz also added, “Unlike a lot of LGBT international issues, the Brunei government has an indisputable presence here in the United States through their hotel holdings. It’s our mission and responsibility to ensure that LGBT Americans know what the owners of these hotels stand for.”

As the push against the hotel gathered steam in Los Angeles, the International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission held its fire. IGLHRC, one of the oldest U.S.-based groups working on LGBT rights abroad, had been working with a coalition of activists in Southeast Asia to try to develop a way to pressure Brunei to reverse the law. Brunei is part of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, a trade bloc including countries like the Philippines and Thailand, whose governments have at times been supportive of LGBT rights.

And the situation in Brunei was unclear — there were some hints that the sultan might already be looking for a way to back out, and forcing a confrontation over the issue might cause him to take a more hard-line position. The law was initially slated to go into effect on April 22, but the boycott began after the government announced it would delay implementation. And when the sultan set a new implementation date of May 1, the government also announced it would be implemented in three phases, with the capital punishment provisions not taking effect until next year.

“I felt that it would be counterproductive to attack Brunei, when there was a decision to put things on hold,” said Grace Poore, IGHRC’s Regional Program Coordinator for Asia and Pacific Islands. She also stressed that framing this issue primarily through the lens of LGBT rights could backfire.

“It’s important not to just focus on the LGBT issue,” said Poore. “That is counterproductive. It’s divisive, it gives the impression [to] other people who suffer under these penalties that we’re only focusing on our issues instead of focusing on how they’re all interrelated.”

But it’s also an issue that grabs Americans’ attention in the way that other human rights issues often do not. “It’s a measure of our success in the United States that gay is the bright, shiny object that catches the attention of some people,” said a source with an LGBT organization doing international work.

It’s unclear whether this boycott is having any impact on the sultan, who is one of the world’s richest men and presides over a nation whose wealth is built on its oil exports. But it could have a lasting impact on the hotels, whose CEO says its employees are being “totally unfairly picked on” and that protesters are only “hurting a local business.”

This doesn’t seem to bother Cleve Jones, if that’s what it takes to get the message across.

“The way this boycott has taken off, it looks like you’ll be able to soon play polo inside the [Beverly Hills Hotel’s] Polo Lounge, because there won’t be any people in it,” Jones said.

Categories
Human Rights LGBTQ Refugee Rights

The LGBT Refugees Who Are Seeking Asylum In the World’s Most Notoriously Anti-Gay Country

If they’re seeking sanctuary in Uganda, just imagine what they must be running from.

Posted originally on Buzzfeed News on May 5, 2014, at 8:51 a.m. ET

KAMPALA, Uganda — With one of the world’s most infamous anti-gay laws, Uganda seems like the last place on Earth an LGBTI person would go seeking safety. But almost 100 LGBTI refugees have sought help from an NGO in Uganda’s capital to seek asylum in the country, and there may be many more in the country illegally without seeking formal permission to stay.

Many of them have come during the five years Uganda have been debating its Anti-Homosexuality Act, which originally proposed a death sentence for homosexuality. If they’re crossing the border, you can be sure the situations in their home countries are “quite worse than Uganda,” said David, who works for an NGO in Kampala that assists LGBTI asylum-seekers. David asked that his real name not be used out of fear for his safety; one of his colleagues was beaten in a supermarket last year over his LGBTI work. He also asked that the organization he works for not be identified out of concern that it could be shut down by the Ugandan government, since the version of the law enacted in February essentially bans LGBTI advocacy as well as imposing up to a lifetime prison sentence for homosexuality.

“There is a common saying, ‘If you see a rat running from a bush into a hut that is burning, that means it could be hotter in the bush,'” David said. Some people in neighboring countries like the Democratic Republic of Congo or Burundi are fleeing situations that are so bad that they make Uganda seem safe.

One of these asylum-seekers is a trans man from Rwanda who asked to be identified as Green, because of his love of trees. “I like to be near trees,” he said during an interview in Kampala. “They don’t have hate, they don’t reject me, and if I tell them [secrets], they won’t tell everybody.”

Green arrived in Kampala four years ago, still recovering from a police beating at his home in the Rwandan capital, Kigali, that was so severe he walks with a crutch to this day. Green grew up largely on the streets after his father turned his back on him when he was a very small child, but he managed to continue his education all the way through university, determined to be an activist for children’s rights and the rights of the disabled.

According to Green’s account, police showed up at his house a few months after he graduated, accompanied by a neighborhood official, who accused him of recruiting girls into homosexuality even though Rwanda has no law against same-sex intercourse.

“You’re a lesbian,” Green said the police asserted. “You are teaching people [lesbianism] since your childhood.”

When Green denied the accusation, the police officers beat him until he lost consciousness. He ultimately escaped that day, but they hunted him down a few days later and brought him to jail. By twist of fate, one of his former schoolmates was a police officer at the jail, and she arranged for him to escape when he was let out of his cell to go to the bathroom. If he did not flee, the schoolmate warned, he would be sent to the main prison or, more likely, killed.

Green’s relatives helped him sneak across the Ugandan border without papers. He made it to the capital, Kampala, and found a place to live. But then, in 2012, his neighbor began threatening to rape and kill him, he said. Green said he managed to fight off the neighbor the first few times he tried to deliver on his threat, but late one November night the neighbor forced his way into the apartment and raped him. As the neighbor left, he described his plan to to kill Green: The next time he would cover himself with HIV-infected blood before raping Green again so that he would contract the virus.

Going to the police was out of the question. Green’s short-term asylum status had expired, and he had given up on seeking permanent refugee status because the process was too humiliating and risky — his masculine appearance was in conflict with his female legal name. He couldn’t flee to another country because he had no papers and little money. He thought about killing himself.

“I was here in Uganda, but I was in a prison. … I was not able to open my door at any time,” Green said.

After a period of homelessness, he eventually managed to find a new place to stay, far from the rapist neighbor. But now, it is becoming less safe by the day. When he walks down the street, Green says people call him “Obama” — Obama has become a derogatory word for people who support LGBTI rights.

“I think every [day] I can be arrested again or killed,” Green said. “There is no life” for him in Uganda, he said.

Surprisingly, LGBTI people could easily register as asylum-seekers with the Ugandan government before the law became law in February. David, the NGO employee, said he knew of at least four cases in the past year in which his clients had even declared they were seeking asylum because of sexual orientation-based persecution and had their petitions granted by the office of the prime minister’s office, which reviews asylum claims.

Most of David’s clients come from Congo, but also countries like Rwanda and Burundi. Many come from places where homosexuality isn’t technically criminalized, but where they still sometimes face assault and police abuse under the authority of “morality” or “decency” laws. Before the end of 2013, David’s organization handling 60 cases of LGBTI asylum-seekers and it added 30 more in the first months of 2014, mostly people who were already in the country but were now seeking legal help fearing the Anti-Homosexuality Act.

The new law has made the formal asylum process extremely risky for LGBTI people, even those who are applying for refugee status for other reasons. Under Ugandan law, asylum-seekers must begin the process of applying for permission to stay in the country by reporting to the Ugandan police. Walking into a police station “is like going into the lion’s den” for LGBTI people, said David, because the Anti-Homosexuality Act seems to have given police carte blanche to arrest people suspected of being gay or “promoting homosexuality.”

In March, police showed just how far they are prepared to take this authority. They raided an HIV center run by the United States Military HIV Program in partnership with Uganda’s Makerere Univeristy, after an undercover investigation lasting several weeks into allegations that the initiative was “carrying out recruitment and training of young males in unnatural sexual acts.” The undercover officers filed a report saying the center was collecting “sperms” from participants, and that men and boys between the ages of 15-25 were “a pornographic film as a teaching package for homosexual[s].” One staff member was arrested, and several patients in the clinic at the time of the raid reportedly were photographed by police.

Gay men and lesbians who feel they could conceal their sexual orientation might decide to chance it, David said, but it’s a risk that’s completely out of the question for transgender or intersex people whose status is harder to hide. “With the new law, it’s something you just can’t try,” David said.

Most of the asylum-seekers who seek help from David’s organization have gone underground since the law passed. A support group for the community has stopped meeting out of fear for participants’ safety. At least one client was killed by a mob, David said, and others have been beaten. Some have just disappeared — they’ve stopped coming to the organization’s office and their phones have stopped working. They now live with very little legal protection and almost no support network, leaving them especially vulnerable to anti-LGBTI harassment in daily life, which has increased for all LGBTI people in Uganda.

Not being able to safely petition for refugee status makes it very hard for LGBTI asylum-seekers to get somewhere safer. The United States, Australia, and some other Western countries will accept some refugees who can’t safely stay in the country where they first take refuge, but only after they have been granted refugee status there. The office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees can sometimes use its powers to grant refugee status to individuals even if the country where they seek asylum doesn’t accept their claims, but it ordinarily doesn’t do that until after an asylum-seeker has been formally rejected by the government.

This leaves people like Green, the Rwandan trans man, feeling trapped.

Green was with a friend who had fled the Democratic Republic of Congo in February when he learned that Museveni had signed the Anti-Homosexuality Act. He turned to his friend and said, “Now we are going to die.”