WHEN THE PRESIDENT of Uganda finally signed the new repressive laws aimed directly at gay people, the country turned its back on decency and human rights. That much is clear. The World Bank suspended new loans for the health service and Denmark, Norway and the Netherlands halted aid. But the point which was so often ignored in the aftermath was that around the world there are many Ugandas. What has shocked me most in my travels has been the degree of prejudice which I have found. Of course I knew it existed but to my discredit I had never realised the depth of it. I had not realised that drug users would be left to die in Russia or that the Americans would support their callous policies. I had not realised that sex workers would be so gravely exploited in India or suffer so many murders in Britain. And I certainly had not realised the depth of feeling that exists against gay men, lesbian women and transgender people around the world, leading to some of the worst persecution that has taken place since the end of the Second World War.
Today, same-sex relations are criminal in the majority of African countries. The only feature which sets Uganda apart is the severity of the repression – although even in that they are run close by Nigeria. But the prejudice is not remotely confined to Africa. In almost eighty countries of the world homosexuality remains a criminal offence, including in India, the largest democracy in the world. In Russia new laws have been passed to counter an invented threat to children but which the opinion polls show are supported by the public. In other countries gay men are imprisoned and in Iran they have been hanged. Even when the law has been changed it has not always transformed attitudes. In Ukraine and much of Eastern Europe the hostility persists, to the extent that the hero of the Polish uprising, Lech Walesa, said in March 2013 that gays had no right to sit on the front benches in Parliament and should sit at the back – ‘even behind a wall’.
In West Europe the prejudice is usually not so extreme but in its own way it is just as pernicious. London is meant to be the gay capital of Europe, but a gay friend of mine told me that if he went down any street in Britain hand-in-hand with his long-term partner he would be met by abuse and possibly worse. The House of Bishops in the Church of England have banned their own clergy from entering into same-sex marriage, even though it is now the law of the land. Or take the football terraces. One footballer complained that he was barracked because a part of the crowd thought wrongly that he was gay. If he had been we assume that the abuse would have been even more heartfelt and it certainly explains why virtually no professional footballer has come out.
From the point of view of this book this prejudice has a disastrous impact upon the fight against HIV. Where there are criminal laws against homosexuality, gay people are not going to come forward for testing and treatment if they believe they risk prosecution. If they do come forward it may be at a very late stage of the disease when treatment is most difficult and when their life expectancy has been reduced – if not snuffed out. The reason is quite clear. They fear that news about their sexual orientation will leak into the local community and make their own position untenable. Time and time again in different countries I have been told how young men have been forced out of their family homes in the face of community hostility.
And of course it is not only gay people who suffer. I remember too well the transgender people in India hoping against hope for acceptance. I remember also the discrimination against people who have contracted HIV. So often the woman is blamed even when she has been infected by her husband or partner. Women living with HIV fear that knowledge of their illness will doom them to a life of isolation; men fear they will be shunned at work or lose their jobs altogether. In 2012 I went to Skopje, the capital of Macedonia (one of the smallest countries in the world), to encourage the formation of a parliamentary group like the one at Westminster. After a series of media interviews our small party made our way to dinner past the outsize statue of Alexander the Great. As we walked I said to one of the local organisers that he must appear regularly on radio and television. He had been diagnosed with HIV eighteen months previously. ‘No,’ he replied, ‘I am not that brave.’
The position with HIV points to a much wider issue. The basic human rights of millions of men and women around the world are now under sustained attack. Surely people of good will must combat this in a much more powerful way than we have managed up to now. So how can we begin to change the prejudice and the discrimination? I made some proposals in the last chapter and some of the opportunities are available immediately. India has the opportunity of scrapping at long last the 150-year-old laws which criminalise homosexuality and were made by the British colonial government in a different age. Australia has the opportunity of passing a federal law to allow equal marriage which not only would do good for many gay couples but would also burnish their reputation for sensible policy making. And the United States should lift the federal ban on clean-needle schemes which would not only do good but also save lives. Each one of those actions requires the decision of politicians and, if taken, would send a message around the world. Above all, they would be a check on the wave of repression which is currently sweeping too much before it.
Disgracefully, the position of the minorities that I write about in this book has, if anything, become worse over the last eighteen months. If I was a gay man living in many countries today I would compare my position to that of being black and living under apartheid in South Africa, or being a Jew living under the Nazis in Germany. That really is the shame of the world. It is time for those of us who believe that this is an international scandal on a par with race and religious hatred to combat the bigots and to find a way forward. An international convention to protect their rights would self-evidently not win the approval of all nations but many would support it. An international conference in London could explore this and other options. The importance of London as a venue would be to demonstrate once and for all that the world has moved on. It is no longer a defence to say that many of the laws against homosexuality were introduced by Britain. That was in the nineteenth century, and today we have new and better values. Our aim in the twenty-first century should be to support people who by any standard are oppressed and to encourage those who are discriminated against to claim their rights. If we could achieve this it would also be, in the terms of this book, an enormous step forward in defeating HIV and Aids.