Peter Tatchell says the President of Zimbabwe is a freedom fighter turned human rights abuser.
Lesbians and gays are “sexual perverts” who are “lower than dogs and pigs”, according the President of Zimbabwe, Robert Mugabe. Arriving in Britain to attend this weekend’s Commonwealth Conference, Mugabe has rejected calls for gay human rights. “We don’t believe they (gays) have any rights at all”, he said.
In 1995, Mugabe ordered the Zimbabwe International Book Fair to ban an exhibit by the civil rights group, Gays & Lesbians of Zimbabwe (GALZ). He followed this ban with warnings that homosexuals should leave the country “voluntarily” or face “dire consequences”. Soon afterwards, Mugabe urged the public to track down and arrest lesbians and gays. Since these incitements, homosexuals have been beaten up, fire-bombed, arrested, interrogated and threatened with death. Most Zimbabwean churches are backing Mugabe’s hate campaign.
The President’s anti-gay crusade is seen by many as a diversionary tactic, designed to create a bogey that will deflect public attention from government corruption, economic mismanagement, faltering land reform, and human rights abuses. Ignoring these crises, Mugabe has focused on GALZ’s campaign for homosexual equality. He says: “It cannot be right for human rights groups to dehumanise us to the status of beasts”.
The homophobic turn taken by Mugabe and his ruling ZANU-PF party is surprising. During the 1970s, I campaigned in support of ZANU’s War of Liberation to free Zimbabwe from white minority rule. I was openly gay. None of ZANU’s representatives ever objected to my homosexuality. They were grateful for the help I gave them. Having gladly accepted assistance from gay people like myself in the past, it is hypocritical for Mugabe to now witch-hunt homosexuals.
The President justifies his intolerance with the claim that homosexuality is “un-African”, describing it as “coming from so-called developed nations”. But anthropologists say that same-sex behaviour existed in Zimbabwe long before the arrival of white settlers. What the colonists bought to Zimbabwe was homophobia, not homosexuality. It is Mugabe’s anti-gay prejudice that is the “imported western disease”.
Male homosexuality is still illegal in Zimbabwe and punishable by up to 10 years’ jail, under laws originally introduced by the British during colonial rule. This imposition of the western cultural value of homophobia is endorsed by Mugabe. A hard-line Catholic, he vows that the British anti-gay laws will never be repealed.
Coinciding with his arrival in Britain, the queer rights group, OutRage! has written to the President pointing out that “research by Prof Henry Adams of the University of Georgia in the USA suggests that 80 percent of homophobes get sexually aroused by gay erotic imagery, lending support to the theory that overt homophobia is often evidence of repressed homosexual feelings”.
In Prof. Adams’s test, homophobic men who said they were exclusively heterosexual were shown gay sex videos. Eighty percent got erections. The finding was published in the US Journal of Abnormal Psychology in 1996, backed by the American Psychological Association.
Prof. Adams says his research shows that most homophobes “demonstrate significant sexual arousal to homosexual erotic stimuli”, suggesting that homophobia is frequently a form of “latent homosexuality”.
This data supports the theory that homophobia is often indicative of repressed, self-loathing homosexual feelings; and that many homophobes use anti-gay rhetoric as a smoke screen to disguise their own homosexuality.
The OutRage! letter to Mugabe concludes: “In view of this research and your homophobic attitudes, there is now bound to be speculation about your sexuality. We are sure this speculation is without foundation but to end the innuendo that you might harbour repressed homosexual feelings, we invite you to take Prof. Adams’s test. Under medical supervision, OutRage! is offering to wire you to a penile circumference measuring device and show you gay sex videos. If you are not gay, there will be no penile enlargement and you will have strong scientific evidence to dispel any queries about your sexual orientation”. Curiously, OutRage! has not received a reply. I wonder why?
Published as “Not tickling Mugabe’s fancy”, Tribune, 24 October 1997
© Copyright Peter Tatchell, 1997. All rights reserved.