In 2009 Uganda became associated with deep-seated homophobia in the popular imagination of the Global North. This fraught relationship grew in part from the international mainstream media's coverage of Uganda's 2009 and 2014 Anti-Homosexuality bills, evidenced by Rachel Maddow's 2010 interview with David Bahati, the bill's author, and the 2011 BBC documentary “The World's Worst Place to Be Gay,” which Kwame Otu theorized as a neoliberal “homophobic safari.” Videos of Ugandan parliamentarians slapping their hands on their chamber seats chanting “Our Bill! Our Bill” (Martin Ssempa explicitly shouting “eat da poo poo” to his congregation) and the nondescript images of Kampala urban youth in graphically homophobic soundbites, all circulated to the metropoles. Scholars have simultaneously refuted the depiction of Africa as inherently homophobic, while criticizing the depiction of the Global North as a space of “safe,” “liberal,” so-called democracies for sexual and gender minorities, pointing out that this notion is particularly untrue for black sexual and gender minorities. Nonetheless, these popular depictions in global mainstream media, framed as evidence of Africa's deep-seated homophobia, helped craft the most important aspect of the Global North's image of a homophobic Uganda, hence inaugurating the social figure of the destitute queer Ugandan in need of saving.

In February 2014, the Anti-Homosexuality Bill was signed into law by Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni, a man who, at the time, had been in power for twenty-eight years. Despite many prominent Ugandan LGBTI activists’ disapproval, in March 2014 the United States imposed $118 million sanctions in addition to several other international organizations who cut aid to Uganda, hitting HIV/AIDS services particularly hard. Not long after, in May 2014, I found myself in Kampala responding to an acutely pointed question from an intern at an HIV clinic where I was doing fieldwork: “Why does Obama support the gays?” The question was not invoked because of my positionality as a gay man doing fieldwork in a country where it was criminalized to “aid and abet homosexuality” but in my status as a US citizen. Throughout my three months of fieldwork at the HIV clinic I found that for many of my fellow twenty-something interns, my status as a US citizen meant I had explaining to do on behalf of my “neo-colonial government,” as one young-person put it.