All day long Olive spoke with queer activists—everyone wanted to tell the American ethnographer of furtive hookups made hotter by danger, of the dish-shattering drama of breakups and cheating, of clothing and bodies pressed close to late-night beats, of slipping away with your crush to the back of a broken-down ’80s Corolla imported from Dubai. Olive and I would laugh along and perform that same open exuberance—but alone, under the mosquito net in our rented room, we suffocated on humid air and unsaid words.
By the winter of 2010, it became clear that a proxy culture war was being waged by the West in Uganda. The religious right—especially the Americans—were losing the battle of gay marriage at home, so they turned to the global South in search of new fronts and alit on Uganda, a country with policies unusually open to foreign organizations. Money from U.S. churches was…
