ENTEBBE HAS SEVERAL faces. The best remembered dates back to 1976 when the airport was the scene of one of the most daring hostage release operations of the twentieth century. Israeli commandos stormed the airport’s terminal building, freeing over 100 hostages but in the process killing over twenty Ugandan troops who, on the orders of President Idi Amin, were backing the kidnappers rather than the kidnapped. On the Israeli side there was one casualty – the leader of the raid, Colonel Yonatan Netanyahu – the elder brother of Israel’s future Prime Minister. Today, the traveller to Entebbe is welcomed (yes, welcomed) by smiling immigration staff. When he moves to one of the hotels that line the shores of Lake Victoria (the second largest lake in the world and about the size of Ireland) he looks out on an immense, apparently gentle blue expanse of softly undulating water. Palm trees grow in well-tended green gardens and Marabou storks glide gracefully in the sky above. All seems well with the world.

At Entebbe hospital a few miles down the road the picture is rather different. The hospital is a straggle of low buildings with red corrugated iron roofs. As the temperature begins to rise in the wards, patients stretch out or sit listlessly on beds which have been moved close together. It is the only way of ensuring that a hospital built at the time of the First World War can, a century later, meet the vastly increased demand. The maternity unit alone delivers 400 to 500 babies a month in a country where the majority of the population is under eighteen. But it is HIV which causes the greatest pressure on the overworked and brave staff.

The coolest place in the hospital is the room where blood samples are stored, but even so achieving testing results is not easy. Testing kits can run out as the financial year progresses and many who should be tested either ignore the calls to come in or simply find the journey too difficult or too expensive. Others who do test leave it dangerously late. They may be wives who have kept their HIV secret from their husbands in fear of the violence and ostracism that awaits them. Or they may be business people who fear the consequences if their condition becomes known. When I visited there in January 2013, one of the hospital staff told me: ‘The more educated they are, the less willing they are to come forward.’ In one case a doctor presented himself when his illness was so advanced that he might just as well have gone straight to the undertaker.

In Entebbe hospital money is short. The hospital has not received a budget increase from the health ministry for over a decade – partly as a result of the endemic corruption which has seen too much outside aid intended for health care siphoned off. Nevertheless the hospital dispenses antiretroviral drugs for free – although it is estimated that nationwide only about half of those who need drug treatment receive it, which explains why the death toll from Aids is still around 65,000 a year. The further prevention measure of male circumcision is now making some progress in spite of critics who say that it simply encourages promiscuity. A poster outside the small operating room shows a wife saying, ‘I am proud I have a circumcised husband because we have less chance of getting HIV.’ Advocates of circumcision like Timberg and Halperin say that their case is established in a range of African countries. The reason is simple enough. The skin on the shaft of a man’s penis is relatively thick and tough allowing it to serve as a natural barrier against infection but the foreskin of an uncircumcised man is unusually vulnerable because it is soft, thin and a bit moist, making it easier for pathogens to penetrate. The only difficulty is persuading those who have been circumcised that it is not a guarantee against contracting HIV – just a help. But help of any kind is desperately needed in Uganda.

About an hour’s drive from Entebbe, the last miles down a rutted unmade road, is one of the fishing villages of Lake Victoria. Here fishermen land their catches and the people from the islands which dot Lake Victoria come in to buy their stores. It might sound like another tourist destination but it is anything but that. It is a shanty town where life is brutal and only the fittest survive. The shacks are cheek by jowl with each other and narrow unmade paths lead through the jumble. From inside one of the hovels there is the noise of men drinking. Outside, a naked baby sits unattended in the dirt. It is all reminiscent of an eighteenth-century Hogarth cartoon. On the shore men wade into the water to carry in the islanders who have made their way over in long, roughly built canoe-like boats with outboards. The porters spend their days in the water to scratch a living with goodness knows what consequences to their own health. In the background a giant rubbish dump smoulders slowly. As for the fishermen themselves, life is difficult and can be dangerous. They fish at night, the lake can become dangerously rough, safety measures are virtually non-existent and many of the fishermen cannot swim. Their earnings are low but the sale of the fish gives them cash in hand. They spend their days drinking, gambling and, of course, having sex.

To meet the demand this small, sad outpost of humanity has its own distinct red-light district with incongruous lines of washing drying in the hot sun. Prostitution may be illegal in Uganda but up to fifty sex workers ply their trade here, largely unmolested by the police. Their two hopes are that men will use condoms and are circumcised – but their poverty does not put them in a strong position to insist. Not surprisingly messages on HIV prevention in the fishing villages often fall on deaf ears. The fishermen live with danger; HIV is just one more risk. The consequence is that about a quarter of the population in the villages lives with HIV and among sex workers the figure is over a third.

The bleak message from Uganda is that in 2012 there were 140,000 new infections, which has propelled the overall total of people living with HIV to over 1.5 million. What makes this position doubly tragic is that a decade ago the country and President Museveni, who has been in power since 1986 when he overthrew the regime of Milton Obote, were being lauded for the way they were explicitly tackling the problem with the country’s ‘ABC’ campaign – Abstain, Be faithful, use a Condom. In fact, Museveni’s first campaign was rather different and even more challenging. It had the slogan of ‘zero grazing’ and was directed with some success at both men and women to persuade them to cut back on their number of sexual partners.

Officially the ABC campaign still continues, but with widely different views on its constituent parts. From the President’s palace the message is that there has been far too much emphasis on the use of condoms and not enough on the A and B. In a speech (ironically on World Aids Day in 2012) Museveni criticised his own country’s National Aids Commission for putting too much emphasis on condoms and circumcision, which he claimed did more harm than good. In an effort to shore up support among religious leaders in this church-going country he added, ‘I think the only way to prevent Aids is through abstinence and being faithful to each other for those who are married.’

The difficulty with this argument is that, although abstinence may postpone the start of a sex life, the rest depends upon the partner. All too often the man brings infection to the relationship; a point graphically made by Canon Gideon Byamugisha, the first priest in Africa to declare himself HIV positive. ‘Sixty-one per cent of all women in Africa who are HIV positive have never had sex with more than one man’, he says. ‘Have they waited? Yes. Have they been faithful? Yes. Are they positive? Yes.’ The United States may boast about the number that have been reached with their pleas for abstinence through the President’s Fund but the truth is that generalised messages of that kind are not effective and never have been.

Uganda today suffers from an agonisingly wide range of human problems. Babies are born with HIV not because the treatment does not exist to prevent an infected mother passing on her condition, but because the struggling and often inadequate health service cannot provide the prenatal care that is required. Entebbe hospital may provide a maternity unit but many other babies are born outside hospital on concrete floors covered by a blanket. Mothers get neither the advice nor the care they require and the victims are the children, who either die or inherit a lifetime illness. If the mother later dies from Aids then the unfortunate child joins the army of HIV orphans that already number over a million.

And even this is not the sum total of the avoidable misery that exists in present day Uganda. As in every country in the world there are gay men. Yet here men having sex with men is genuinely a love that dare not speak its name. Homosexuality is illegal and, unlike the law on prostitution, it is strongly enforced with enthusiastic public and media support. A few examples make the point. A writer in a Kampala Sunday newspaper, who clearly regarded himself as a moderate on the issue, agreed that gay men should be granted the basic rights of citizenship that ‘ordinary people’ enjoy but then added:

It is always difficult to find the genuine voice of the ‘man in the street’ but I felt we came nearest when talking with a practising Christian called Ismail. His view was that homosexuality was an illness, and that if gay people were locked up then it would prevent it from spreading. He saw it as something that could be controlled, and thought that people needed help to be ‘retrained’ in how to appreciate women. He added that homosexuality posed a much greater threat to the country than al Qaeda because of its perversion of people, and that Uganda should be putting more resources into tackling homosexuality than into fighting terrorism.

A much more extreme message of prejudice and hate came from a newspaper which called itself Rolling Stone. (It had no connection with the American magazine of that name and even less with Mick Jagger and co.) The tabloid specialised in targeting homosexuals and flourished for a few years. It published photographs of gay people, gave their addresses and incited action against them using headlines like ‘MORE HOMOS’ FACES EXPOSED’ and ‘HOMO GENERALS PLOTTED TERROR ATTACK’. It was eventually closed down after a long legal struggle – although even then the managing editor proclaimed, ‘I did my job – I fought homosexuality.’

Such public and press responses reached their natural expression in a parliamentary Bill tabled in 2009 by a backbencher, David Bahati, a member of the President’s NRM party, which has a large majority in the Ugandan Parliament. The bill proposed to expand the scope of the law and invented a new crime called ‘aggravated homosexuality’. It set out harsher penalties upon conviction including at one stage capital punishment, although later Mr Bahati generously indicated that he was prepared to compromise with life imprisonment. Another provision was to put a duty on any citizen to report anyone they knew or suspected of being a homosexual – including family members – or face the prospect of three years’ gaol in a country which does not put penal reform at the top of its priorities. It is all reminiscent of the Nazi measures against the Jews in pre-war Germany.

For several years the bill did not make its way to the floor of the House for debate thanks to the delaying tactics of the President, but no one was in any doubt of what would happen if it did. When I was in Kampala I was told by a human rights worker that if the bill was ever put to the vote ‘it would be passed in ten minutes. The public are anti-gay and the politicians follow the public.’ And so it proved. A few days before Christmas in 2013 the legislation was passed and two months later, in spite of all his previous hesitation, it was signed by President Museveni. A government spokesman welcomed the development ‘as a measure to protect Ugandans from social deviants’.

This all leaves gay people desperately weak and wide open to exploitation. In one case (well before the latest developments) the police tipped off the media that a perfectly harmless meeting of gay and lesbian people was to take place and they intended to close ‘the workshop’ down. The result was that no fewer than seventy-five representatives (I will not call them journalists) of the press, radio and television turned up in force and the worst happened – pictures appeared of some of those who were attending. In another case a businessman lived with a younger man. The police applied pressure on the younger man and persuaded him to join them in a blackmail attempt. Unless the businessman paid up the threat was that he would be taken to court on the charge that he had ‘sodomised’ the younger man. Knowing that the publicity would be immensely damaging, the businessman paid over the equivalent of $10,000.

Gay men, together with lesbians and transsexuals, live under constant threat of exposure. There is the risk of attack and homes being trashed. ‘If they find you,’ one gay activist told me, ‘you will be chucked out not just from your job but also from your family home. Your mother will know that if you stay she will be ostracised and the whole household will be rejected.’ Those who publicly stand up for the rights of gay people take a serious risk. In February 2013 David Cecil, a British theatre producer who had lived in Uganda for a number of years with his partner and two young children, was arrested, thrown into prison, and then put on a plane to London as ‘an undesirable immigrant’. His offence was to have written and briefly staged a play which depicted a gay boss killed by his employees.

The David Kato case in 2011 showed that risk to life is not a far-fetched fear. David Kato had come out publicly and bravely as gay back in 1998. He had been one of the first members of a new group called SMUG (Sexual Minorities Uganda) and in 2010 was targeted along with other members of the group by Rolling Stone, which published a hundred pictures of ‘Uganda’s Top Homos’ under the headline ‘Hang them’. The magazine also included the addresses of the group. Kato and three others filed a petition to stop distribution of the magazine and this was upheld by the Supreme Court but, three months later, in the early afternoon of 26 January 2011, he was murdered in his home. There are some in Kampala who will say that this was not a homophobic crime but the kind of murder that happens too often in this poor part of the city. It is an unlikely explanation and what no one can deny is the extraordinary scene at Kato’s funeral. At a service attended by family and fellow activists the preacher turned on the gays and lesbians who were present, warning of Sodom and Gomorrah. The microphone was seized by a number of activists but the villagers took the side of the preacher. Poor David Kato was only laid to rest after the former Anglican Bishop Christopher Senyonjo took over the burial. As we shall see Bishop Christopher is today a target of prejudice himself.

One inevitable result of the discrimination is that medical treatment and advice for gay men is woefully inadequate. They meet prejudice from doctors. ‘Some put their religious view in front of medical ethics’ said one gay man. But in constructing a health policy there is an even more basic issue. No one knows the scale of HIV among men having sex with men. Systematic research in this area has been minimal. Officials are in denial and even workers trying to reduce the spread of HIV in other areas tend to avoid the subject. As for gays and lesbians themselves, very few are going to agree to a self-reporting survey if the result is prosecution and for the same reason they are reluctant to come forward for testing. The justified fear is that the news will spread.

Yet, worldwide, men who have sex with men is one of the major at-risk populations. The one report that has been successfully completed – the Crane survey which reported in 2012 – had to contend with the arrests of some of those taking part in the survey but in the end produced results from almost 300 men. These showed that HIV prevalence at 13.4 per cent was over double the national average – and that prevalence in the over-25 age group was over 22 per cent. The survey also showed that four out of ten men had suffered homophobic abuse including exclusion, threats, insults and physical and sexual violence. A large proportion of the sample in Kampala reported buying or selling sex; many were married or cohabited and thus only too able to spread the virus further. The report warned that a lack of HIV services together with homophobia put everyone in Uganda at risk. It is a warning which has fallen on deaf ears.

So how has it come to this? Why is Uganda’s antipathy to homosexuals as deeply ingrained and long established as it is? Some say that the colonial British are to blame. It was they who made homosexuality illegal and doubtless in their time were also openly contemptuous of gays and lesbians. (It needs to be repeated that it was only in 1967 that the legal ban against homosexuality was lifted in Britain itself.) But such an explanation seems heavily dated when in 2013 a Conservative-led British government can introduce equal marriage rights for gay and lesbian people. The better explanation is that in the last fifty years almost no one of real mass influence in Uganda has been courageous enough to challenge the prejudice. The President has not, Parliament has not, the press have not and, perhaps worst of all, nor have the churches.

The churches have generally played a discreditable part. Worst of all have been the American evangelists who preach as if their President did not exist, and Obama’s words at his inauguration in 2013 on building an inclusive society with gays and lesbians playing an equal part had never been uttered. Their main influence dates back to March 2009 when three American evangelical Christians arrived in Kampala to plead their case, given that in the United States itself it had been widely rejected. According to the New York Times, their three days of meetings attracted thousands of Ugandans including police officers, teachers and national politicians. The purpose of the meetings, said their Ugandan organiser, was to show that ‘the gay movement is an evil institution’ whose goal is ‘to defeat the marriage based society and to replace it with a culture of sexual promiscuity’.

The leader of the group was an activist called Scott Lively who was already noted for his opposition to lesbian and gay rights. Years before, in 1995, he had co-authored a book called The Pink Swastika. In the preface to the fourth edition in 2001 he alleged that homosexuals were ‘the true inventors of Nazism and the guiding force behind many Nazi atrocities’. In March 2010 he was allowed to address members of the Ugandan Parliament and, according to his own account, urged them to fashion any new anti-homosexuality law on American laws regarding alcoholism and drug abuse.

‘I cited my own pre-Christian experience being arrested for drunk driving,’ he said.

In other words, Lively believes homosexuality is a condition which should be medically treated and that the use of the criminal law prevents further young men being led into ‘sin’. The only dispute between people who feel this way is how far the criminal law should go. Another prominent evangelical Christian is a Ugandan-born pastor called Martin Ssempa, who opposes the use of condoms to combat HIV and is a solid supporter of abstinence and fidelity; a support which earned him, at one stage, the backing of official United States aid agencies. His claim is that he leads a crusade to ‘kick sodomy out of Uganda’.

Not everything, however, can be laid at the feet of the evangelists. Uganda is a church-going country and one that is also predominantly Christian – but neither the Anglicans nor the Catholics have done anything serious to defend the rights of gay men or lesbians. The basic attitude of the nine million-strong Anglican Church to homosexuality is best summarised by the former Archbishop Orombi who was leader of the Church of Uganda from 2004 to the very end of 2012. His view is that ‘the younger churches of Anglican Christianity will shape what it means to be Anglican. The long season of British hegemony is over.’ Among those beliefs is that homosexual practice is ‘incompatible with Holy Scripture’ – a view he says which is shared by the vast majority of bishops from the Global South. His reaction to the 2009 anti-homosexuality bill was that in ‘streamlining’ existing legislation Parliament should ensure ‘proportionality’ in sentencing but they should ‘ensure that homosexual practice or the promotion of homosexual relations is not adopted as a human right’.

Nothing that his successor Archbishop Ntagali has said since has challenged that view – nor is he likely to do so. At the beginning of 2013, commenting on the lifting of the ban on gay clergy becoming bishops, he said, ‘Our grief and sense of betrayal are beyond words.’ None of this is to say that the Church (at least at the archbishop level) deliberately attacks gays and lesbians. The official attitude is that they are ‘committed at all levels to offer counselling, healing and prayer for people with homosexual disorientation … The Church is a safe place for individuals who are confused about their sexuality or struggling with sexual brokenness to seek help and healing.’ Again, as so often in Uganda and other African countries, we find the assumption that gay people can be ‘cured’ of their affliction.

In this bleak church landscape a few figures stand out prepared to defend their fellow human beings. One of the few is Bishop Christopher Senyonjo who was expelled from the Church of Uganda for his stand on equal rights. It was an expulsion that revealed as much about those doing the expelling as it did about the man who was expelled. In a statement Archbishop Orombi said that ‘the Bible is very clear that sexual intimacy is reserved for a husband and wife in lifelong heterosexual, monogamous marriage’. He added, ‘For us in Uganda, pastoral care means leading people into the fully transformed life – including a transformed sexuality.’ In February 2011 Bishop Christopher wrote a letter to the then Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, in which he set out this warning.

The Church of Uganda is a long way from Archbishop Desmond Tutu who, writing in The Lancet in 2012, called for an end to laws which criminalised homosexual acts. He said, ‘I have no doubt in the future the laws that criminalise so many forms of human love and commitment will look the way the apartheid laws do to us now – so obviously wrong.’ Equally distant from the attitudes of the Church of Uganda is the Bishop of Leicester, Tim Stevens, who spoke in a rare Westminster debate on homosexuality in 2012. His view was clear – ‘interference in the private sexual conduct of consenting adults is an affront to Christian values of human dignity, tolerance and equality’. Anglicanism takes pride in being a broad church, but you just wonder how even a broad church can contain such radically opposite views on such a basic question.

As for the Roman Catholic Church in Uganda (which has an estimated fourteen million members) their position is, to put it generously, equivocal. Initially it was thought that Archbishop Lwanga was alone among the different religions in opposing the 2009 anti-homosexuality bill – although when you read his words you rather wonder. The Archbishop said that the proposed law ‘was not necessary considering that acts of sodomy are already condemned in the penal code’. He added, ‘The Church has always asked its followers to hate the sin but love the sinner.’ However, in 2012 he joined the other Ugandan bishops in a statement which said that the proposed bill was necessary as a response to ‘an attack on the Bible and the institution of marriage’.

I suspect the authentic voice of the Catholic community is that of Simon Lokodo, the Minister of State for Ethics and Integrity, and a former Catholic priest. His work should be focused on anti-corruption (and goodness knows that is needed) but he told Human Rights Watch that he was someone ‘empowered to uphold moral values’ and that therefore he needed to address the issue of homosexuality. His view was very clear. Fighting homosexuality, he said, was a ‘national priority’ and those who argued for gay rights and the like were ‘on a mission to destroy this country’.

It remains of course the position that the Catholic Church has a different and equally serious charge to answer: condoms. They refuse to treat condoms as either a way of birth control or, more importantly in the context of this book, as a public health provision – a way to preserve life. How many lives have been lost in Uganda and around the world by Catholic men and women following the advice of their Church?

Back in the 1980s I went to see the then Archbishop of Canterbury, Robert Runcie, and Cardinal Hume of Westminster. They were, as you can imagine, both courteous and concerned. Runcie had been dean of my college in my university days and (with substantial exaggeration) referred to me as an old pupil when we occasionally appeared on the same platform. Both promised in effect not to interfere in our campaign back in the late 1980s. That was undeniably useful at the time; an intervention from either at that moment would have seriously undermined our efforts. The trouble is that neither church seems to have moved on very far since then. The Catholic Church retains its dangerous opposition to condom use, the Anglican Church fumbles about for a position on gay people – although perhaps Archbishop Welby may just be able to lead at least one part of the Anglican community out of their present cul-de-sac.

If the churches in Uganda will not give a lead, what about the persuasive power of overseas governments and civil society organisations that finance so much of the HIV work in Uganda? They help massively in combating HIV generally and the tragic impact of it – and it is just as well they do. The contribution of the Ugandan government to fighting HIV is minuscule. The lion’s share of HIV aid going to Uganda comes from the United States and the President’s Fund. But even with these resources help cannot be targeted directly for the benefit of gay men and lesbians. Civil society organisations know only too well their vulnerable position and that if they become closely involved in giving help to a population that is stigmatised as criminal then the consequences for their other work could be severe. Instead, help goes into less controversial areas like the major Sunrise Scheme funded by USAID and which brings invaluable assistance and protection to around 250,000 orphans – out of a total of over a million who have been orphaned by Aids.

Most of the effort that is made directly to combat the prejudice surrounding HIV comes from groups inside the country who have defied the persecution and the risk. The outstanding example is Sexual Minorities Uganda under the leadership of Frank Mugisha, which campaigns from a small (and deliberately anonymous) compound on the outskirts of Kampala. It is a brave attempt to blunt some of the impact of official and public reaction but it reaches only a fraction of the sexual minorities they represent. Nevertheless, it shows what brave people with determination can achieve.

Of course Uganda is not remotely the only country in Africa to have laws against homosexuality. The situation varies, from countries like Nigeria where the law is enforced strictly, to countries like Kenya where the law remains on the statute book but so far is not enforced – although it still of course leaves people open to exploitation. It all poses a massive dilemma for policy makers overseas in giving aid. The United States, European governments, the foundations of Gates, Soros, Elton John and many others may be devoting massive resources to fighting HIV but they come up against policies and attitudes with which they profoundly disagree. So, what next? It is easy enough for them to stamp their feet and threaten to stop aid unless policies change. Britain has stopped direct aid to Uganda – as it happens for corruption reasons – and the direct result is that £6 million has been withdrawn from Uganda’s inadequate health budget. So who do such demonstrations help? Certainly not the thousands of poor people in desperate need of help.

Nor when it comes to changing attitudes is outside influence always productive. In early 2012, the Speaker of the Ugandan Parliament went to Ottawa for an international conference, where she was roundly attacked for the policies of her country. She robustly defended them and when she returned home she was met by crowds lining the streets to give her a hero’s welcome. The public reacted against what they saw as foreign efforts from outside telling them what to do. International criticism had an entirely counter-productive effect. It breathed new life into the campaign to introduce new laws on homosexuality.

The uncomfortable conclusion is that if there is to be a revolution in attitude it must be led from within. Apartheid was overcome in South Africa by the actions of brave men and women inside South Africa. The hope must be that the same will happen in countries like Uganda and that eventually it will be recognised that all that gay people are asking for is the ability to live ordinary lives not beset by stigma and discrimination. Of course, the rest of the world can help – by continuing to provide finance to treat disease, by repeating the unanswerable human rights arguments, and by their own example. There is no point in preaching equality if that just means equality for people in far off countries.

Optimistically, in time the churches will change their attitude. It seems a distant prospect but there must be men of courage who can see clearly enough the injustice of what is happening. Back in 1977 the Anglican Archbishop of Uganda, Janani Luwum, did not lack courage when he delivered a note to President Amin protesting at the regime’s acts of violence. Together with the other religious leaders, he was summoned to the presidential palace. After being harangued by Amin, the other leaders were allowed to go, leaving only Archbishop Luwum – who was never seen again. The next day an announcement was made that he had been killed in a car accident. In fact he had been shot. It was a different cause but the need today is for more men like Archbishop Luwum and Bishop Christopher who are prepared to stand out for human rights. No one, however, should doubt the extent of the challenge.

I left Uganda at the end of January 2013. At the time, everyone was waiting to see whether the country would crack down even more severely on gay people. The newspaper Rolling Stone, which had published the names and photographs of homosexuals inciting their readers to action against them, had been closed down. But the men propounding prejudice and discrimination had not gone away. David Bahiti still lurked in the Parliament building with his anti-gay bill; the minister for ethics and integrity, Simon Lokodo, still believed that fighting homosexuality was a national priority; and the American evangelists still told gay people that they had a curable condition. As for President Museveni, he still wavered about which way to jump. Would he opt for even more repression and sign the Bill already passed by Parliament or would he try to stand out against the tide?

Twelve months later, on 25 February 2014, we received our reply. In the incongruously large state house in Entebbe and before a crowded press conference, the President signed the Bill. The result was that the promotion of homosexuality was outlawed; citizens were required to denounce to the police anyone suspected of being gay and those found guilty of repeat homosexuality could be jailed for life. Bahiti called the President’s decision ‘a victory for the future of our children’ and Lokodo said, ‘I feel very fulfilled, very elated.’ Just to underline that Uganda was now intent on a new path of persecuting minorities, a national newspaper called Red Pepper took over where Rolling Stone had left off and next day published a front page story under the headline ‘Exposed. Uganda’s 200 top Homos’.