Over fried fish, I said goodbye to my wife—and to a version of myself.
The last thing I ate as a husband—and arguably, as a man—was a fried tilapia. The fish had been caught from a skiff on the shore of Lake Victoria and only an hour or two later dredged in flour, fried to a golden crisp in a vat of vegetable oil over a wood fire, and served to me with lime and piri-piri sauce. I could still taste the green flavor of algae in the flaky white flesh.
In 2009, urged on by members of the American evangelical movement, the Ugandan government considered a bill to strengthen laws against homosexuality . Proposed punishments included imprisonment or possibly even death. And yet, in the midst of this, a group of trans men and lesbians kept the bar open—packing it every night of the week despite harassment, police raids, and daily hateful screeds in the local tabloids.
In high school my friend’s dad caught him smoking and did that legendary dad thing where he then made my friend smoke an entire pack of Marlboro Reds. My time in Uganda was the masculinity equivalent of smoking an entire pack of cigarettes. I bought a 4x4 truck and drove it around dusty roads. Hot water was unreliable, so I rarely shaved and grew constant stubble. People told me T-shirts were disrespectful and slovenly, so I took to wearing button-down shirts and ties.
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 pouring into the accounts of right-wing politicians, and European NGOs and LGBTQ+ organizations were funding counteractions.
While she worked, I stayed home, read novels, failed to write my own novel, worried about my truck, and occasionally drove it out to the countryside. I bought enough 3G internet credit to browse faraway trans websites—extremely slowly—on my third-generation iPhone. Olive and I went days without seeing each other.
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