Leo Africanus / Africa is a Country

South Africa’s 1996 Constitution outlaws anti-gay discrimination, new laws legalized gay marriage in December 2006, one of the judges on the country Supreme Court of Appeal is an openly gay man, and the country’s leading AIDS campaigner married his partner last month (AIDS, incidentally, largely affects heterosexuals in South Africa). Of course South Africa is not perfect, but the same kind of story can’t be written about most other African countries. (Although he later apologized, two years ago Jacob Zuma, the leader of South Africa’s ruling party — and the front runner to be the country’s third democratically elected President since the end of its racial dictatorship in 1994 — publicly criticized gay marriage and told a crowd at a political rally that ‘When I was growing up, a homosexual would not have stood in front of me. I would knock him out.’) So what happens elsewhere. Here’s a story about gay people elsewhere in Africa and the Middle East do: they go forced underground and now it seems, if they have access, onto the internet. The full story in the Boston Globe.