Uganda may be a homohobic country, but their men rank high in Googling gay porn

Uganda may be a homohobic
country, but their men rank high in
Googling gay porn
Uganda is 3rd on the list of countries where "man
f**king man" is most searched for, behind Kenya
and Pakistan according to a new article by the UK
Guardian. Check on it below...
The anti-homosexuality bill in Uganda is
more than simply a bill about homosexuality,
and it is more than a pernicious piece of
local legislation that affects Uganda alone. Of
course, the bill itself is bad enough.
Originally conceived back in 2009, it was
introduced with the aim of ridding Uganda of
homosexuality and, to begin with, contained
the death penalty. An international outcry
forced the Ugandans to drop that section of
the bill, but the form in which it passed
through the legislature just before Christmas
is dreadful enough, with homosexuality now
leading to life imprisonment and a prison
sentence for those who do not report gay
people to the authorities within 24 hours.
Homosexuality is here understood as not just anal
sex between men (yes, it's worth pointing out to
some people that straight couples can just as
easily do that sort of thing too), but also as same-
sex snogging and heavy petting. On Wednesday, a
gathering of 50 or so people outside the Ugandan
embassy in London called on the president not to
sign the bill, but there is little sign that he will
listen. Described by its supporters as a
"Christmas present", Peter Tatchell has it rather
differently: "The bill is in some respects even
more draconian than the extreme homophobic
laws of countries like Saudi Arabia and Iran."
Uganda is set to become the anti-gay capital of
the world.
Last year, Google published statistics about the
places in the world where their search engine was
most used to find gay porn sites. The results were
extraordinary. According to its figures, Uganda is
third on the list of counties where "man fucking
man" is most searched for , behind Kenya and
Pakistan, both of which are countries where
homosexuality is illegal. These figures also
demonstrate a high degree of correlation between
places of conservative religious practice and
internet searches for gay porn.
Is there a connection, then, between homophobia
and suppressed homosexuality, along the lines of
"me thinks he protesteth too much"? Is it that
homosexual desires, when shut out because of
some sense of shame, can easily express
themselves as a form of homophobia? When the
US conservative evangelical pastor Ted Haggard,
well known for his anti-gay preaching, was
discovered to have been paying a masseuse for
gay sex , he explained that "I think I was partially
so vehement because of my own war". Freud
coined the description "reaction-formation", in
which anxiety-generating feelings are masked by
an exaggerated reaction in the opposite direction.
There is some experimental evidence to back this
up, with one study showing that 20% of those who
self-described as "highly straight" indicated some
level of same-sex attraction. This discrepancy is
often put down to highly controlling parents who do
not allow their children room to explore their
sexual identity.
Yes, of course, there are many people who do not
experience same-sex attraction who are anti-gay.
But one of the features of reaction-formation is its
paranoia and lack of proportion. And this is
precisely what the scaremongering nonsense
about gay people being out to get our children – a
common line in the Ugandan debate – clearly
demonstrates. In conservative religious
environments where God is depicted as a powerful
all-controlling parent, it makes sense to me that
this reaction-formation will be particularly strong.
Which is why so much homophobia is rooted in
religion or, as I would argue, in a form of bad
religion that has a misplaced understanding of the
divine. And I suspect also that this "bad God" is
not unconnected with having been introduced as
part of western colonialism with all the control and
domination that this involved. For my part, if God is
love, then the so-called "kill the gays" bill is not of
his doing. And so the battle to overcome the
instinct behind this cruel legislation has to include
some element of theological deprogramming.