CarnalNation

What the fuck is going on with Africa?

There's a tsunami of homphobia deluging the lands south of the Sahara. Zimbabwe's dictatorial headman, Robert Mugabe, has spent the last half-decade in an antigay snit, calling queers "lower than pigs and dogs." The president of The Gambia has threatened to behead gays unless they leave the country. A Cameroon court ordered that eleven men already jailed for seven months be subjected to anal exams to, absurdly, determine if they were gay. In Malawi, where a same-sex engagement ceremony had already led to arrests, another man was busted for possessing posters that read "Gay Rights Are Human Rights."

And then there's the sad story that's been hitting the headlines and provoking responses, from Obama on down: Uganda's proposed death penalty for some gay "crimes."

But lest all this scary stuff depress you, there's also the rather risible news that antigay Ugandan pastor Martin Ssempa recently showed queer fuck films to his flock. Yea, verily, the preacher unspooled Kenny Does Kampala for 300 lucky parishioners, and he did it—yes—right there in his church. Reports indicate that the porn pics in question dated from the 1970s and featured white men; at least the Manic Christian had the good taste to include images of Al Parker and his magnificent dick rather than the current crop of interchangeable "actors" with shaved pubes. When challenged about his tactic of showing Christian children pictures of naked men with stiffies—precisely the tactic we're told that pedophiles use to seduce the innocent—Ssempa declared: "In Africa, what you do in your bedroom affects our clan, it affects our tribe, it affects our nation."  He didn't explain exactly how it does, though; perhaps he's worried about a potential shortage of AstroGlide in Entebbe.

"We have to educate ourselves about what homosexuals do," Ssempa said. Well, maybe the good pastor was in the audiovisual club at school, and he simply adored multimedia presentations. Or perhaps he just wanted to graphically illustrate the fact that everything that homos do, hets—at least those with well-rounded sex lives—do too. Okay, maybe gay men do engage in more anal fisting, but then, we're less likely than straight Africans to perform clitorodectomies and sew up women's vaginas to protect their virginity.

Now usually there's nothing even faintly amusing about sub-Saharan homohatred. It seems a murderously perfect storm of monotheist bloodthirstiness, postcolonial resentment, shameless scapegoating, and…well, as a white guy, I would never have the guts to mention tribalism, but Ssempa brought it up, so I'll run with that, too.

One major motif, in fact, of African homophobia is that homosexuality is a self-indulgent Caucasian invention, and all those damn Western human rights activists should just butt out and let Rwanda be Rwanda. An anti-gay task force that Ssempa chaired psychotically stated, "This institutional takeover by homosexuals has been systematic and planned, to the extent that other bodies like the UN, national governments, financial institutions, private companies, NGOs, etc. have become spokespersons of the gay movement and daily use official resources to promote the gay agenda." Shades of The Protocols of the Elders of West Hollywood! This bullshit, of course, ignores the inconvenient historical fact that it seems homosex and gender play were both fairly common and accepted in pre-colonial Africa. Homophobia—like Christianity itself—was an import from the West. Which is to say that Ssempe is acting a lot like some very white Victorian prude with a rifle in one hand and a Bible in the other, more pukka than the sahib himself.

All of this is old, if distressing, news. But a moralistic preacher high-mindedly showing shots of cocksucking to children in church? Not even Ted Haggard at this most amphetaminized would have come up with that.

What's next? The Pope illustrating the Evils of Sodomy by projecting Boys in the Sand in the Sistine Chapel? (Probably redundant, that, since lots of hunky nude dudes are already there, painted on the ceiling by a talented fellow who, when not slinging gesso, was writing love poems to younger guys.)

The "show male-male sex to evoke visceral reactions" tactic has been used by American homophobes, too. It's likely that anyone who's ever shown up at the Folsom Street Fair is pictured in some Focus on the Family exposé or other. But projecting gay porn in an actual house of worship takes things to a whole new holy level. One might, of course, argue that when your faith features a handsome, near-naked man being flogged by hunky dudes in gladiator drag, we're already talking kinky. And given the demographics of sexual orientation, it's a safe bet that at least a couple of closeted Christians in the congregation popped stiffies during Ssempa's show. (One of the pornwatchers, in fact, reportedly was the author of the death penalty bill—and you know how they say that hardcore homophobes have something to hide.) But Reverend Ssempa remains utterly unrepentant, and the sub-Saharan sex panic marches on.

Ah well, at least prurient Protestant porn shows—a perfect way to have your cock and condemn it, too—could serve as a nice recruiting tool. Who knows? I might still be going to Rosh Hashanah services if my shul had shown Diddler on the Roof.