On the afternoon of January 26, 2011, a few hours after David Kato was on a call with his friend Julien Pepe Onziema, his phone went off. At 1 pm on the same day, witnesses said, a man entered Kato’s house and struck him with a hammer twice on the head before fleeing in a vehicle. Kato, a prominent gay rights activist in Uganda, died on his way to a hospital in Kampala, Uganda.

News of Kato’s murder was received with both dismay and shock. “David Kato’s death is a tragic loss to the human rights community,” Maria Burnett, senior Africa researcher at Human Rights Watch said. Hillary Clinton, the then US secretary of state, in her statement called it “a reminder of the heroic generosity of the people who advocate for and defend human rights on behalf of the rest of us—and the sacrifices they make.”

Shortly after the murder, Sydney Nsubuga, then 22, was arrested and charged. In November of the same year, Nsubuga was sentenced to 30 years in prison. Nsubuga’s sentencing was welcomed around the globe by human rights defenders. The celebrated activist Peter Tatchell called it “justice served” adding that “It sends a signal that sometimes in Uganda, LGBT people get justice. Of course, many times they don’t.”

Queer life in Uganda and much of Africa is dire. Kato’s murder was not an isolated act of homophobia. It was not an aberration. It was a consequence. A culmination. A final step in a process of destruction that began long before the hammer came down on his skull. Indeed, Kato’s murder could be described as the final solution for queer existence in a society that is deeply heteronormative.

Three months before his murder, on October 2, 2010, the Ugandan tabloid newspaper, Rolling Stone, published photographs of Kato and 99 others under the headline “100 Pictures of Uganda’s top homos leak.” The article accused them and the larger Ugandan queer community of “recruiting” young kids and brainwashing them into bisexual orientation and called for their execution. “Hang them,” it declared while publishing details of where they lived.

Kato fought back. He, alongside three others, took the publication to court, seeking an injunction against further incitement of violence. There were no urgent press conferences from straight people who had the power to end the publication and call out public violence against queer Ugandans. There were no statements of outrage. No global calls to action—not even from the African Union that ought to protect the rights of citizens on the continent. Except for a few invitations to conferences and residencies, the world did not notice Kato until he was dead. They seemingly never saw the slow erosion of his humanity but only the final, brutal act.

More than a decade after Kato’s murder, on February 15 this year, Muhsin Hendrix, a South African gay Imam, was murdered on his way, it is speculated, to officiate a same-sex marriage. Nearly three decades after Hendrix came out in 1996, and in a brazen act that proves the patience of homophobes, the 57-year-old was gunned down in Bethelsdorp, a suburb of Gqeberha, a city on South Africa’s southern coast.

In a similar response to those issued after Kato’s murder, the South African Department of Justice and Constitutional Development said it was “saddened” by Hendrick’s murder and pledged to “track and monitor that justice is dispensed” if his death was indeed confirmed as a hate crime. 

The Muslim Judicial Council (MJC) of South Africa issued its statement calling the murder “shocking” and expressed “deep concern” about it. It added that while the MJC had consistently maintained that Muhsin’s position was incompatible with Islamic teachings, it unequivocally condemned his murder and any acts of violence targeting members of the LGBTQ community or any other community.

The statement by the MJC South Africa comes just three years after it issued a Fatwa against same-sex marriage. In 2022, according to the South African media Mambaonline, the MJC issued the religious ruling stating that Islamic laws unequivocally prohibited same-sex actions and, by extension, same-sex marriages. It asserted, in a statement that pointed directly to Muhsin’s more than two-decade crusade on queer religious inclusion, that any Muslim in a same-sex relationship or engaging in same-sex sexuality should take themselves out of the fold of Islam. 

The murder of Hendrix was no isolated event, nor was the response. Like Kato before him, he had for some time been a target of homophobic vitriol. After 2022, Muhsin and his family issued a statement sharing concerns for his safety. Neither the MJC nor the South African government took enough caution and action to protect him. Like Kato, his death was met with carefully worded statements of sorrow from one institution that had issued public statements against him and another that had not acted to protect him.

For too long, the world has understood homophobia only in its most grotesque manifestations—murder, imprisonment, and public violence. Straight people have only acknowledged homophobia when it spills blood or fills prison cells. But queer people know better. The destruction of queer lives does not begin with a hammer, a bullet, or a judge’s gavel … It begins with silence. With isolation. With erasure.

This is what straight people do not see. They do not see the quiet, grinding destruction of queer people long before they are murdered. They do not see the exhaustion of carrying an identity that is always at risk of being debated, isolated, criminalized, or erased. 

I spent most of my life shaped by heteronormativity—by othering, by isolation. I began coming out at 20. By then I had already spent two decades being told, in every way possible, that my existence was unnatural, an abomination. Somehow, I made it into adulthood and became resistant to the world that had shaped me. That resistance was only short-lived. Adulthood came with the realization that my escape from the erasure and isolation of queer childhood was only the beginning. In adulthood, the law was there to ensure I did not exist in the public sphere. Some queer people do not even get this far. They do not get to 20. They do not get to come out. They fall off the radar. They commit suicide. Statistics show that LGBTQ+ teens consider suicide and make suicide attempts at about four times the rate for all adolescents. If they make it past the societal childhood destruction, they exist in the shadows, meeting men and women in dark alleys and clubs where they can never be seen. That is how the Down Low (DL) exists. That is how so many queer people are made—destroyed until their very existence is only in the shadows. 

Heteronormativity—the very idea that heterosexuality is the normal sexuality and therefore should inform and shape the world that queer people exist in is a destructive institution. And straight people will always find, without provocation, ways to justify this destruction. During his inauguration, US President Donald Trump declared that America would only recognize two genders: male and female. A few days later, in a break from existing policy, which included intersex as a third gender, Kenyan President William Ruto echoed the same sentiments: “… Boys should remain boys, men should remain men, girls should remain girls, and women should remain women.”

To date, a total of 64 countries criminalize homosexuality and even more are regressing into the dark ages. They declare queer existence unhealthy, unfathomable, a thing that children ought to be protected from—as if gay people only exist as adults, as if they had no childhood. As if I did not exist.

I was seven years old when I first felt something I did not have the words for. There was a boy in my class, a Bajun boy with the darkest skin I had ever seen, a round face and pointed nose, and a talent for football. I spent time watching him play football, mesmerized by his existence. He fascinated me. I did not know why. There was no language for it—no television character, no radio program, no family member to explain it to me. There was only the feeling. 

At eight or nine, I finally heard the words. My Christian Religious Education (CRE) teacher declared it with authority: “Homosexuality is an abomination, a sin that cannot be forgiven.”

I sat there, silent, something inside me collapsing. The first language of my existence became my first destruction. From then on, I was sad and silent. In high school, my English teacher described me as shy. “He is the most shy student I have,” my teacher once told my guardian.

My experience of childhood is not isolated. The Kenyan writer Binyavanga Wainaina had a similar experience. At five, he knew he was different. By seven, he understood that difference more clearly. In his strikingly personal essay “I am Homosexual, Mum” he wrote of a moment when a boy shook his hand, and the overwhelming feeling that followed sent him running to the bathroom to cry: “Then I am crying alone in the toilet because the repetition of this feeling has made me suddenly ripped apart and lonely.”

Queer childhood is defined by this loneliness. By this ripping. By silence. By the slow erasure of self. By the giving of language that demonizes you. By the weight of a world that does not see you, except as something to be corrected, hidden, or punished.

Perhaps, if Kato had been my teacher, my experience would have been different. Perhaps I would not have had to endure years of internal war, of self-hate carefully planted and cultivated by school, church, and society. Perhaps I would have had an example to follow, a hand to hold. But Kato is dead. And now, when I speak of the destruction that is caused by institutionalized homophobia, straight people do not listen. They do not believe it is worth talking about it until the destruction is final—until there is a body. And then, in their performative sadness, they can issue their statements from whatever capitals. “It is horrifying.” “We are saddened.” “We are shocked.”

Two years ago, I lost my friend and former partner to murder. On Twitter, I posted that society, the straight heteronormative world, was to blame for his death. Like clockwork, my words were met with defensiveness and deniability. “You are killing each other and accusing the rest of normal us.” one comment read.

For two or three days, I thought of how to respond, whether I should be angry or horrified by the lack of understanding. As more comments streamed in, I looked back at them and deleted each of them. I had no words, no need to explain. I sat back and cried.

Today I am 28 and I am exhausted. Exhausted from speaking to straight people who refuse to understand. Exhausted from explaining that homophobia is not just about the final act of violence—it is the entire system that makes that violence possible. Exhausted from knowing that, as a queer person who is a citizen of a country with antigay law, if I am imprisoned or killed tomorrow, that will be the moment straight people from all over the world finally issue statements. These statements will be issued as if I did not exist before my final breath.

This is why I am no longer talking to straight people about homophobia. They do not see the insidious, commonplace destruction. They do not see the years of silence, of fear, of being taught to despise yourself before you even have the words to understand who you are. They do not see the exhaustion of surviving in a world that insists your existence is a debate. They only see us when it is too late.

But I am still here.

Like every queer adult, I am a legend of survival.