At the moment, I am in Provincetown acting in a play set in a men’s bathhouse. I’m away from my partner and the apartment we share in Greenwich Village. Last week I was lucky enough to see porn starGus Maddox perform a Kander & Ebb classic on accordion.

My life is so gay.

Which you probably assumed by the first sentence of this blog entry. Even this city’s Portuguese Folk Festival, celebrated last night with a parade, has a certain queer bent. I overheard a couple of twentysomethings discussing it:

“What’s all this Portugal stuff about?”
“They just legalized gay marriage. They’re only like the seventh country in the world.”
“Oh yay Portugal!”

No doubt Gay Pride - Portuguese or otherwise - is worth a celebration. Having the freedom to live as openly as I do is something for which I am very grateful. It’s extraordinary if you think about it. Forty-one years since the Stonewall Riots, which happened just a few blocks from where I live, gay and lesbian Americans have achieved tremendous visibility. We are out at work and to our families. We share homes and raise children. Today we will take to the streets on fabulous floats and shake our jock-strapped asses to Lady Gaga without fear of imprisonment or execution because we don’t live in Uganda.

Yeah. I’m that guy.

I’m the guy that reminds anyone who’ll listen that it was a march before it was a parade. All you wanted to do was enjoy the party and I had to show up and point out that, for all our progress, most of the world’s LGBT population still live in constant fear. For gay folk in the developing world, marching for their rights is dangerous. And a parade is pure fantasy.

And yes I am well aware that we are still second-class citizens here in the States. Of course you wouldn’t know it to look around Provincetown. Married gay couples sport rings, share homes, hold hands and push strollers along Commercial Street, their unions fully recognized by the state of Massachusetts. In a place like P’town, it is easy to forget that one’s federal government still hasn’t caught up with the cottage industry that is destination gay weddings on old Cape Cod. It’s easy to forget that most gay folk don’t have it so easy.

But in other parts of the world, life is not quite as lavender:

In Uganda, a bill has been tabled that prescribes the death penalty for gays and lesbians deemed ‘serial offenders.’ The law would also criminalize the ‘aiding, abetting and promotion’ (read: condom distribution, psycho-social care, etc) of homosexuality, as well as punishing anyone who fails to report homosexual activity to the authorities. It is easy to giggle at the YouTube video of Pastor Martin Ssemba explaining the devious plan by Western homosexuals to coerce Ugandan boys to ‘eat da poo-poo’ – complete with visual aids and scat porn! But it’s also terrifying to know how many poor and uneducated people take him quite seriously.

Iran’s Mahmoud Ahmadinejad famous assertion there were no gays in his country may one day be true: gay teens there are hanged for ‘homosexual acts.’ And Iraqi militias are torturing and killing gay men by super-gluing their rectums shut and force-feeding them laxatives until their insides explode.

Arrests are on the rise in Senegal, not only of LGBT citizens but also of AIDS service organizations who minister to gay folks. Charges of ‘inciting debauchery’ and ‘creating a network of homosexuals’ will land you five years in prison.

Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe blames many of his nation’s ills on homosexuals, who he characterizes as “sexual perverts lower than dogs and pigs.”

The beating, slashing and murder of Jamaican gays continues to go unpunished, perhaps because such atrocities are often committed by the very officials meant to prevent them.

And then there is Malawi and the curious case of Steven Monjeza and Tiwonge Chimablanga.

In December 2009, following their chinkhoswe, or engagement, ceremony, Monjeza and Chimbalanga were arrested and eventually charged with gross indecency. For six months they were repeatedly denied bail, suffered beatings and fell ill in Blantyre’s notoriously overcrowded Chichiri prison, and were subjected to humiliating anal examinations meant to determine whether the men had, in fact, had sex. (I know. As if.)

I took great interest in Malawi years ago, and have been fortunate enough to do some writing for the Raising Malawi foundation. While working for RM, I learned a great deal about the challenges facing that nation: endemic poverty, chronic disease, a million plus orphan children desperate for health care, education, and a little love. Naturally I became curious about the gay male population there. It took me quite a while to find anyone who’d talk to me but eventually I hooked up with a tiny organization called CEDEP. They function primarily as a healthcare outreach group to Malawi’s sexual minorities, particularly MSM’s (Men who have Sex with Men). I helped them to launch a website just before Monjeza and Chimbalanga were arrested.

Then quite suddenly CEDEP was thrust into a spotlight. They were initially the only organization helping Chimbalanga and Monjeza with legal aid, supplemental foodstuffs, and moral support. ILGHRC came on board, as did Amnesty International (eventually). But most of the world had little to say until after the couple were found guilty of ‘buggery’ and ‘carnal acts against the order of nature’ and sentenced to fourteen years hard labour.

What happened next was extraordinary. Some credit the many activists working tirelessly for the men’s freedom. Some say it was Madonna. Most likely it was a visit by UN Secretary General Ban-Ki Moon and the round condemnations by donor nations like the US and UK that did it: President Bingu wu Mutharika pardoned the pair and ordered their immediate release.

Since then I’ve been asked why I hadn’t written anything about the case. Actually, I’ve written a great deal, just not in the form of a blog entry, until now. The truth is that I became rather involved with the whole drama, at least in a peripheral way, and I can tell those of you who haven’t kept up with recent episodes that this sad saga is still hardly resolved.

After the pardon it was quickly made abundantly clear that Steven and Tiwonge were not to see one another, on pain of re-arrest. In their separate villages, the men were hounded by reporters and ostracized by neighbors. Trans-identified Tiwonge was defiant. Steven was drunk. Both found solace in a CEDEP safe house in Lilongwe, and there were discussions about seeking political asylum in another country.

Then it all got really weird.

Steven Monjeza announced his plans to wed Dorothy Gulo, a biological woman and, typically, Tiwonge was among the last to know, reading it in the Nyasa Times with the rest of us. Businessman Sudi Sulaimana gave Steven 200,000 kwacha to get on his heterosexual feet, and Steven issued a statement that he’d been coerced into the ‘gay life’ by Western activists. (Now we hear that Steven’s engagement to prostitute Dorothy may not pan out any better than his betrothal to Tiwonge did.)

There has been, in some camps, a feeling of betrayal towards Monjeza. It is hard for those of us who have the luxury of living out gay lives to understand his abrupt about-face. But things are different in sub-Saharan Africa. It is impossible for us to fathom the kind of pressure and fear this very young man has been living with. Identity is a very complicated matter for African men. Most MSM’s marry women and raise children. They’ve every right to.

Or at least they should have. Gay rights is human rights. And everyone should give a damn about them.

But gay Westerners especially should take notice and, however they can, take action. It is our responsibility as relatively free queers to champion our brothers and sisters who do not have a voice of their own.

While many see Steven and Tiwonge as pioneers, the two never set out to be activists of any kind. They didn’t really have a clue what they were getting into. They were only trying to live true to themselves and do so in a way that hurt no one. This is something that many if not most of us take for granted. Of course there are people in my own country who don’t like how I live my life. They have the freedom to support things like Proposition 8. I have the freedom to very actively oppose it. In other countries, there is no discussion. There’s no vote. There is life in prison or death by hanging.

Why should we care? It’s a small world and getting smaller. We’ve done better than okay in the years since June 27, 1969. A lot has changed. For one thing, our village extends far beyond Christopher Street, or the Castro, or Soho. Ecology and economics are showing us everyday how we are all connected, globally, for better or worse. We cannot ignore the plight of LGBT people in the developing world. They are part of our not-so-far-flung family. If any one of us is not free, then none of is. Not really. Not yet.

There is nothing ‘complicated’ about my facebook relationship status. It’s all out there. I always say that when the neo-Conservative Right Wing fanatics take power, I will be in the very first boxcar off to the camps. I am only half-joking.

Because a wave of homophobia is sweeping across the continent of Africa with deadly effect. I believe that we are on the verge of seeing all-out genocide. You often hear people say of the Holocaust, “never again” without taking into account that there hasn’t been a moment since WW2 when a minority population wasn’t being persecuted somewhere. You hear people say of the Third Reich’s ‘Final Solution’ that “We didn’t know.”

Well now you know. If you are reading this, you have no longer have the excuse of ignorance.

So what can you do to prevent the extermination of gays and lesbians in the developing world? More than you think!

First, check out the International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission. Sign up for their newsletter and participate in their online actions. You don’t have to take to the streets – just click!

Write emails to your own social and political leaders and to those in other countries as well. Letters sent by post are even better. It is easy to get the addresses of elected officials via the web, but if you really need help doing it, contact me and I will hook you up. Added bonus: thank you letters from Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama!

Educate yourself and share what you learn with others. Set a Google alert for ‘gay Uganda’ and you’ll soon have the latest news on the status of the draconian Bahati Bill. Then repost articles via facebook.

And if you want to learn more about the situation in Malawi, visit CEDEP's website.

But at the very least, please take a moment out of Pride Month to consider homosexuals in places like Malawi, Uganda, Iraq and Iran. They are not as far away as you think.

Please don’t get me wrong. Rainbow flags and Cher impersonators are great. But the men and women at Stonewall stood up for a great deal more than that. The pioneers of the gay rights movement fought tirelessly, lived, and in too many cases died so that you and I could enjoy a modicum of human dignity. We must do the same for LGBT people in the developing world.

And we must do it now, before it is too late. Put down the glow stick and take up that torch.

Stonewall Baghdad. Stonewall Kingston. Stonewall Kampala. Stonewall Lilongwe.

Stonewall, still.