Homophobic Ugandan Police raid shuts down Uganda’s only gay film festival
Homosexuality is illegal in the socially conservative East African country and violence against lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people is common
Uganda‘s only gay and lesbian film festival was forced to shut down at the weekend after police stormed the venue and film-goers fled, fearing arrest, its organisers said.
On Saturday afternoon, the second day of the festival, three policemen, including one armed with an AK-47 rifle, burst into the festival venue in the capital Kampala.
“We were very shocked,” said Kamoga Hassan, director of the Queer Kampala International Film Festival.
“In Uganda there’s this narrative that there are no gay people, that it’s a Western import. This is why we need this kind of festival,” he told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.
Photo By אנדר-ויק (Own work) [CC BY-SA 3.0 or GFDL], via Wikimedia Commons