Porn in church: moral geographies of homosexuality in Uganda

‘Eat da poo-poo’

The Ugandan pastor Martin Ssempa – leader of the Interfaith Rainbow Coalition against Homosexuality and successful campaigner for the Anti-Homosexuality Bill that became law in Uganda in February 2014¹ – has become internationally known because of his infamous presentation at a press conference in his church where he screened graphic gay porn material (Figure 1). The film fragments,² depicting practices such as fisting and what Ssempa calls ‘anal licking’, were presented as an illustration of ‘what homosexuals do in the privacy of their bedroom’ and of what ‘Barack Obama … wants to bring to Africa as a human right’. Widely circulated on YouTube under the title ‘Eat da poo-poo’, the video of Ssempa's presentation has become an example of the moral and religious politics of homosexuality in Uganda generating worldwide controversy. Much has been written recently about anti-homosexual rhetoric and politics in Uganda (Cheney 2012; Sadgrove et al. 2012), and the name of Ssempa is often mentioned here. However, the specific significance of the use of pornographic images by this prominent religious leader has not yet been analyzed in depth.

Figure 1. Pastor Martin Ssempa cautions ‘the African world’ about the perils of homosexuality at a press conference in Kampala, Uganda, 16 February 2010.

Photograph courtesy of Bénédicte Desrus.

Seeing porn as the product of a neoliberal culture, emphasizing personal freedom and autonomy as the basis of sexual pleasure, the gay porn video fragments are completely alien in the context of the Ugandan church and its anti-modern campaign against homosexuality. Ssempa appropriates the images of (not necessarily representative) homosexual practices to visually frame homosexuality as an inherently perverse practice that is threatening the moral order of society and therefore should be outlawed. Sexual minority organizations in Uganda and more widely in Africa have tried to normalize homosexuality in recent years – that is, to present homosexual relationships as an expression of the human capacity for love and the desire for intimacy and hence as an issue of human rights and dignity. Ssempa, however, uses porn images to ‘otherize’ and ‘exceptionalize’ homosexuality as an excessive, perverse and inhumane sexual practice. His selection of the material not only reflects his preoccupation with anal sex but also, and more critically, exemplifies what Bersani (1987, 222) called ‘the heterosexual association of anal sex with … self-annihilation’. The depiction of homosexuality as socially dysfunctional and non-productive – reflecting what in queer studies is called ‘queer social negativity’ – is strategic because it appeals to deeply-rooted Ugandan understandings in which sexuality is embedded in the socio-moral order of family and kinship.

Anti-homonationalism

Since it was tabled in Parliament in 2009, the Anti-Homosexuality Bill in Uganda has generated much international controversy. Ssempa, by equating the recognition of ‘gay rights’ with accepting people ‘eating poo-poo’, ridicules the call from international political leaders and human rights organizations to recognize the human rights of sexual minorities, and dismisses the pressure from the international community on Uganda to drop the Anti-Homosexuality Bill. Protests in western countries can be argued to reflect a dynamics of homonationalism (Puar 2007) – with a monolithic image of ‘homophobic Africa’ being used to reinforce the self-image of the West as tolerant, modern and enlightened. Ssempa, on his part, exemplifies an emerging heteronationalism, and in fact an explicitly anti-homonationalism, in which Ugandan and African identity is constructed vis-à-vis a secular and morally degraded West. Ironically, this form of postcolonial Ugandan and wider African identity politics often appears in an explicitly Christian guise (although Christianity arguably is a colonial import to Uganda), with homosexuality being considered a threat both to the African and the Christian identity of the nation. Ssempa is a representative of the fast-growing strands of Evangelical and Pentecostal Christianity that are coming to dominate the public and political sphere in Uganda and many other African countries. This so-called ‘born-again’ Christianity is concerned with conversion, not just at an individual level but also at a political level, subjecting the nation as a whole to a discourse of renewal through dedication to Christ. Its inherent form of Christian nationalism considers homosexuality as a direct threat to the purity of the nation, associating this threat with the Devil (Van Klinken 2013). Insofar as this type of Christianity is democratic, it uses democracy to realize its own political ideal of a heteronormative society respecting ‘family values’ while suppressing sexual minorities. Against this background it is significant that Uganda, since February 2014, not only has an Anti-Homosexuality Bill but also an Anti-Pornography Bill (which, ironically, retrospectively criminalizes Ssempa's screening of porn in church). The latter Bill correlates pornography with sexual crimes against women and children in particular. Accordingly, it outlaws any sexually explicit clothing and behaviour as well as representations of sexual activity.

Everyday life

The Anti-Homosexuality and Anti-Pornography Bills equate homosexuality and pornography, with both being considered to pose serious dangers to individuals, families and communities and to threaten the moral ‘purity’ of the nation. Using pornographic metaphors and imagery, the bills and ensuing campaigns produce a legally grounded physical abhorrence of homosexuals. That is to say, in Ugandan authoritative-legislative discourse, homosexuals have become unnatural and illegal bodies that should be made placeless in the projected ideal image of a Christian nation. A particularly poignant area of tension exists between the coercive formal-institutional scale at which homosexuality is banned in its entirety and the scale of the practices of everyday life. In Uganda today, homosexuals’ insecure coping strategies are aimed at not disclosing their ‘deviant’ sexual orientation for obvious reasons. Their deeply hidden lives are in coexistence with the far-reaching anti-homosexuality legislation that, in its attempt to purify and thus to ‘deporn’ and ‘dehomosexualize’ society, claims the absolute right to forcefully enter the domestic sphere, including the bedroom. A striking example of such privatization of homosexuality is that parents – at the risk of prosecution – are called on to report their children if they display any typical ‘homosexual behaviour’.

We discern a visual turn in Ugandan counter-homosexual discourse. The activities of Ssempa and his followers have increasingly put homosexuals on display, involving an ongoing and widespread excessive visualized outrage against them, which can be conceptualized as ‘media porn’. A notorious example of this is the ‘200 top homosexuals’ list, accompanied by portraits of key figures and chanting slogans. Ugandan newspaper The Red Pepper published this list immediately after the introduction of the Anti-Homosexuality Bill, conveying that homosexuals are uninvited beings in the gaze of the Christian nation. The existence of homosexuals might be religiously, legally and perhaps naively denied in Uganda, but it does not change their de facto presence in everyday life. Ssempa's pornographic visualizations of the alleged evil of homosexuality produce repulsive moral geographies thereof. These impose serious restrictions on sexual citizenship defined as the embodied interplay of sexual rights, duties, values and norms. These are critically negotiated and responsibilized in politics, economy and culture in multi-temporal as well as multi-scalar contexts, ranging from the level of the body and the home space to local communities, regions, states and the global society (Zebracki 2014). The Ugandan anti-homosexual crackdown profoundly affects homosexuals (both Ugandan citizens and visitors from abroad) in regard to social and physical mobility, psychological well-being, health care and citizenship education at various temporal and spatial scales of quotidian encounters; for example, in streets, schools, hospitals, government buildings and venues for leisure activities.

Window on the world

The scandalous Ugandan case of homosexuality is not an isolated one considering the position of homosexuals in states throughout Africa and the wider world. Russia enacted an anti-LGBT law in mid-2013 (Zebracki 2014) and Saudi Arabia and Iran are regimes where homosexuality is a capital offence. Tolerance and acceptance of sexual ‘dissidents’ – including LGBT people – seem to perceptibly deteriorate at the intersections of politics and religion across societies in the world and beyond the western/non-western divide. The distinctive feature about the Ugandan anti-homosexual campaign is the appropriation of pornography to make out a case for its credibility, and this deserves critical follow-on research. We would find the use of porn in the setting of anti-homosexual activism incited by Ssempa and the kind of Christianity he and his adherents represent deeply comic, if it was not so tragic because of its overpowering impact on the precarious human rights and lives of homosexuals and other sexual minority and non-conforming groups. The modern witch-hunt for homosexuals in Uganda urges us to think about the deep-seated socio-political dynamics in Evangelical and Pentecostal Christianity and in the broader transnational context. As such, the Ugandan case serves as a critical window onto the fundamental challenges to the sexual citizenship of LGBT people in the world today.

ORCID

Martin Zebracki http://orcid.org/0000-0003-0053-2093

Notes

1. On 1 August 2014, the Ugandan High Court ruled that the Bill had been passed through Parliament without the requisite quorum and was therefore invalid. It is yet to be seen whether a new Bill will be tabled and adopted by Parliament.

2. YouTube. 2010. ‘Eat da poo-poo [Africa do [sic] not want this sickness].’ Posted by KratosCSS, July 15. Accessed August 31, 2015. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jjnrLt3VuSM.