Unequal rights, unequal access: Police brutality and medical discrimination

By day, George trawls online chat rooms and dating sites, brainstorming new ways to contact and perhaps meet up with gay men in Ghana’s capital city of Accra. At night, he frequents the city’s underground gay hangouts, visiting the beaches and nightclubs popular with Ghana’s gay community.

But he isn’t merely looking for a good time. As an HIV/AIDS educator working with the Canadian-funded West Africa AIDS Foundation (WAAF), George is on a mission to reach out to those most vulnerable to the virus: Ghana’s roughly two million gays and lesbians.

With over 80 percent of Ghanaians having regular access to the internet, George has found online networking a discreet means of organizing meeting places for Accra’s gay population, where he distributes condoms and lubricant and talks with men who have sex with men (MSM) about safer sex practices and their medical options.

In a country where anti-gay sentiment is pervasive among the general public and homosexuality is a criminal offense according to the books, many queer Ghanaians find it difficult—or downright dangerous—to access medical services or seek treatment for HIV/AIDS.

“Most gay people in Ghana don’t even like approaching hospitals or even laboratories for testing,” George said of the widespread discrimination against the gay community by medical service organizations.

“Sometimes I educate them just to be like straight, when you go in for the AIDS test. I let them know that they can pretend they are straight and then at least they can go and get the test done.”

The non-discriminatory policies of the WAAF are unique in a country where other larger organizations like the Christian Council of Ghana routinely deny their HIV/AIDS services to gays and lesbians.

Joyce Larko Steiner, senior programmes officer for the Council, designs and implements a range of HIV/AIDS prevention and sex education programs for various target populations. However, the Council does not offer its services to gays and lesbians.

“We as a Council don’t have any program for them,” she said.

“We have mandates, and whatever we do will fall in our mandates. So if we have programs [for gays and lesbians], we are saying they are right. It is against our culture and I don’t see how the Church will accept it. Culturally, it is not right for us,” she added.

The WAAF works to meet the needs of gays and lesbians by offering services other organizations deny them because of their sexual orientation. In the past, the WAAF established a safe space for MSM to meet and talk though the challenges faced by Ghana’s gay community and learn about the services available through NGOs like WAAF, which offers counseling and testing difficult to receive elsewhere. At the program’s height, about thirty to forty MSM attended meetings, George recalls.

However, lack of interest and funding forced WAAF to dismantle the program three years ago. Yet despite the program’s initial flop, George hopes to get a similar program up and running within the next few months, and is currently networking through the internet to raise awareness and interest in the new club. He estimates that eighty percent of Ghana’s gay population uses the internet for networking and hookups, and said that responding to online personal ads is the most effective and anonymous means of connecting with the city’s gay community. Currently George is corresponding with over 200 gay men online and through phone conversations.

But even if George manages to raise interest in the MSM club, lack of funding threatens to stymie this second attempt at bringing together Ghana’s gay men.

“Right now we don’t have any funding from any organization. It’s not legalized here so the Ghana AIDS Commission won’t pay. So we are trying to get funding from outside and maybe we can get transportation costs together,” he said.

Prince MacDonald, president and founder of the Gay and Lesbian Association of Ghana (GALAG), also said that in the past, the state-run Ghana AIDS Commission has responded negatively toward requests by the gay community for services and funding.

“They have never helped. They just make comments that don’t explain what’s really happening,” MacDonald said.

According to the Ghana AIDS Commission, of those people living with HIV/AIDS in Ghana, 80 percent were infected through heterosexual sex, another 15 percent from their HIV-positive mothers through childbirth, and the final five percent from contact with blood or injecting drug use (IDU). But because of the illegality of homosexuality in this country, the Commission does not keep tabs on the percentage of the gay population infected or at risk for HIV/AIDS.

“Oh yes. It fits in. It factors in,” said Eric Pwadura, the Commission’s communications officer, of the infections incurred through homosexual sex, despite the silence of the statistics on the risks for gays and lesbians. “But our culture frowns on it, so we don’t really have these kinds of figures. We don’t have figures on MSM.”

Pwadura said that the Commission does not currently have a program or even a study underway to address the needs of Ghana’s gay population, and attributed this to the national lack of interest queer issues.

“As a commission, we run a national response. We call for proposals, we evaluate these proposals, and we provide funding for them,” he said.

“We coordinate the national response. If we have a proposal [for MSM outreach], we will deal with it. We will be ready. But because the movement is underground, we haven’t had anything, not that I know of so far. If we have to deal with in the future, we will deal with it.”

Director Eddie Donton of the WAAF said that collecting numbers on MSM living with HIV/AIDS is difficult for the additional reason that most gay men themselves do not wish to reveal their sexual orientation or lifestyles.

“They come in for treatment and services and we don’t know their history,” Donton said.

“It’s difficult to discuss the issue openly, which is why we can’t quantify anything for you. Right now we’re not interested in the numbers as much as we are in making sure they are receiving treatment,” he added.

Help from abroad and from home

The national government and local human rights organizations have given scant attention and even outright resisted spearheading HIV/AIDS prevention programs targeting Ghana’s gay and lesbian community, despite the group’s particularly high risk for contacting the virus. MacDonald’s organization, the Gay and Lesbian Association of Ghana, receives most of its funding from organizations abroad.

“Most human rights organizations in Ghana don’t believe gay and lesbian rights is an issue. There is cultural silence on the issue,” he said.

MacDonald also said that several organizations that have offices within Ghana collaborate with GALAG, but nevertheless remain hesitant to associate themselves publicly with gay issues for fear that they will lose their political and financial backing. Lack of finances, coupled with the already hostile environment in which Ghana’s gays and lesbians live and work, make the challenges faced GALAG and advocates like George that much more difficult.

“Locally there isn’t much support. But internationally, I feel we can build more friendships, do more talking and become more visible,” MacDonald added, and said that international community offered the best prospective for enhancing capacities within Ghana’s gay community.

While MacDonald speaks favorably of the possibility of accruing funding and logistical support from abroad, so far international organizations like UNAIDS, the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS, have remained largely silent on the issue.

Lord Dartey, social mobilization adviser for the UNAIDS office in Ghana, explained that the UN is unable to move forward to address the HIV/AIDS threat to the country’s gay population because of the reticence surrounding the topic.

"Now MSM is a little sensitive in this country, so you have to be careful when you discuss the issue," he said. "We have to support the country in whatever they want to do. IDU [injection drug use] and MSM are not being proactively looked at."

However, Dartey said he expected that the Ghana AIDS Commission would integrate programs targeting the country's gay population within the upcoming years, but could not provide a date by which these programs would be launched. He said that the Commission had attempted to study the risks of HIV/AIDS for MSM in the past, but the lack of interest suspended the process. The Commission has tentative plans to seek out researchers for the study a second time.

"[The Commission] advertised the study, but the response was not good. But there are plans to re-advertise, so I expect [MSM] to become a part of the national response," Dartey said.

Although it is unclear whether, when and where activists like MacDonald and George will acquire support in the years to come, segments of Ghana’s gay community have nevertheless been able make progress even without aid from the national government or the UN.

The Centre for Popular Education and Human Rights Ghana (CEPEHRG) is an Accra-based organization that distributes condoms and lubricant, and provides information and counseling for both gay and straight people. CEPEHRG director Mac-Darling Cobbinah said that a recent grant of $30,000 issued by the Astraea Lesbian Foundation for Justice, a New York City-based organization which raises and distributes funds to LGBTQ organizations in the US and elsewhere, has helped his organization build its existing capacities and extend the services it offers for Ghana’s queer community.

“[The grant] is being used to educate young people to accept and tolerate people with differences—honor diversity, as we should say,” Cobbinah said. “It's also strengthened existing [queer support] groups in Ghana. We distribute condoms, lubricant in regions throughout Ghana. [Astraea] paid for the office space and we created a safe space for people to meet and talk about these issues."

“We held discussion to improve these facilities and got people involved in advocacy and new policies to improve services [targeting the gay community]. We got information to people to get access to services. You can go to the service center and demand your rights to be treated," he said.

A portion of the grant money also enabled CEPEHRG to establish a support group for marginalized and lesbian women called Sisters of the Heart, which has helped to increase the visibility of lesbian and bisexual women within Ghana’s queer community.

Although Ghana’s gay community is generally ignored, the needs of lesbian and bisexual women are particularly overlooked. The silence on issues pertaining to lesbian sexual health stems in part from the social pressure on Ghanaian women in general to remain in the home. Lesbian and bisexual women must often deal with the additional stigma attached to a lifestyle many Ghanaians consider unconventional.

Donton, of the West Africa AIDS Foundation, said that most of the sexual minorities who come in for services are MSM, and that very few queer women seek out treatment and counseling.

“The lesbians don’t come out as much as the gays,” he said. “But they are around and I see them sometimes. There’s such a huge stigma to it. If you think about the stigma attached to MSM, you can only imagine the stigma over lesbianism.”

But for peer-educators like George, the stigma both lesbians and gays face is no deterrent from the work he knows must be done. Braving the challenges and risks that come with his job description, he continues to visit Accra’s beaches and gay-friendly meeting spots to network and distribute condoms.

George usually organizes informal meetings through online venues beforehand, and then brings condoms and lubricants to the men when they meet face-to-face. The net provides anonymity for those seeking the services and information George offers, and also weeds out those that are only passing as gay.

“No, you can’t do it that way,” George laughs, explaining why he does not indiscriminately distribute condoms without planning a meeting spot ahead of time. “Or a lot of straights will just come and grab them too.”

There is always the risk of imposters posing as gay men who network within the gay community only to take advantage of the law by blackmailing unsuspecting men who agree to meet up in person. But George says the benefits of his work far outweigh those risks.

And while many of the men George contacts online choose not to meet in person for further support and counseling, fearing backlash from family and friends, there are always a few that do attend the meetings.

“Before we hook up, I know a lot of them won’t even show up to the meetings,” George reflects. “But the ones that do, you see from their eyes and the way they dress and act that they’re real. That’s how you tell.”

Gay in Ghana today and tomorrow

Efforts to raise awareness of gay issues in Ghana, spearheaded by organizations like GALAG and CEPEHRG and individuals like George, have propelled the gay rights movement into the limelight in recent years. But despite the attention the media, government, and public interest have channeled toward the issue, and the subsequent successes in health care and education following the coverage of the alleged conference last year, the fight for acceptance of same-sex loving people in Ghana is far from over.

While ultimate success of the movement will depend largely on the willingness of international queer and human rights organizations to offer infrastructural and financial assistance, local efforts will equally determine the future of Ghana’s gay rights movement. The gay community needs a responsive support base within Ghana to act in collaboration with the international queer community, said MacDonald.

“If everyone decides to remain underground and not reach out, and if there are only a few people making noise, when those people get tired, there’ll be no one to sing the songs, no one to dance the dance,” he said. “They’ll be no one left to fight for gay and lesbian rights.”

Abraham Akrong, a senior researcher at the University of Ghana’s Institute of Africa Studies, predicts that the process of secularization will eventually create a niche for gays and lesbians within Ghanaian society.

“This is my own speculation, that the level of secularization will help to give space to homosexuals in society,” Akrong postulates. “Homosexuality will just be seen as another sexuality. But to predict the future for gays and lesbians will be tough, it’s difficult to say right now. Our changes come in bits and pieces.”

“Homosexuality is a human phenomenon. The issue is whether society will give them space to express themselves. And in our case, we are not yet there.”

“It all comes down to education,” observes Derek, a gay man from Teshie in western Accra. “People hate gays because they just don’t have the education to know we’re okay. Or even if they do have education, the knowledge just isn’t there yet. In the future that’s going to change.”

For MacDonald, speaking both as a gay activist and a gay man, his goal for the Ghana’s human rights movement is a simple one: to gain the right for queer Ghanaians to be themselves.

“What I most hope for the future? The freedom to express ourselves, the freedom to associate, and the freedom to do what makes us us, to not have to dance to someone else’s tune rather than our own,” he reflects.

“We just want the freedom to remain who we are.”

© 2007 Rhema Hokama