I’ve spent a couple of months this year working on a story about gay rights here, as an Alicia Patterson Foundation fellow, and was surprised to see that the narrative had made yet another unexpected turn. The air was thick with confetti, paint fumes, and anticipation. But Nabagesera was also sincerely pleased: a crowd of nearly a hundred people had come out, fears of arrest notwithstanding, to celebrate their existence. Ugandans were tired of hearing a story that ignored their nuanced experiences of both joy and hardship. A barrage of media coverage has painted the country as a hell for gays-a place where they are suffering and being attacked constantly-and, despite the need to combat such threats, L.G.B.T. Nabagesera, a lesbian activist covered, for the occasion, in glitter and neon spray paint, with homemade angel wings, was being half-sarcastic. activists had decided to stage the country’s first Pride Parade. It was Saturday afternoon, and we were on the shores of the giant, cloudy Lake Victoria in the Ugandan city of Entebbe, where L.G.B.T.
“Can you imagine that the worst place in the world to be gay is having Gay Pride?” Kasha Jacqueline Nabagesera asked a crowd of cheering gay men, lesbians, transgendered men and women, and queers somewhere in between.