this hits very close to home for me and reading it felt like the same copium that i had the displeasure of learning from:

The activists were particularly worried that Mushingi could undermine their efforts to put a stop to the anti-gay law through behind-the-scenes advocacy.

the queer liberation we have now in the global north and it’s periphery took root during the brief period when the ruling class hadn’t yet developed countermeasures against progressive protests of the 1960’s and 1970’s and it later became solidified by hollywood via popular culture in the following decades. now-a-days that the ruling class has significantly better countermeasures to any revolutionary or progressive movement.

in the united states, specifically, it came as a result of members of the ruling class pushing for it in episodes like lawrence vs texas in 2003 and obergfell vs hodges in 2015. and they had to do it through the courts because americans also took behind-the-scenes advocacy that culminated with bill clinton’s presidential campaign in 1992. every single grass roots organizations between act-up to the log-cabin-republicans expended their entire political capital and focused all their efforts to expend them on clinton and it ended up with clinton instigating don’t-ask-don’t-tell (which banned queers from the military) and defensive-of-marriage-act (which banned gay marriage as well as invalided all other behind-the-scenes efforts across the country up until then).

Despite the absence of legal sanctions in Burkina Faso, Brahima said many people in his country view homosexuality as “a sickness” or “a curse” and even believe gay people “need to be killed.”

Several incidents in the past few years have highlighted this hostility, delivering a clear message that gay people are unwelcome even though the country has refrained from formally taking action against them. In 2013, the imam at the Grande Mosquée in Ouagadougou used his sermon marking Eid Al-Adha, or Tabaski, one of the biggest Muslim holidays of the year, to stress that homosexuality, and gay marriage in particular, was against the country’s values. “Men who marry men, just like women who marry women under the pretext that it’s the law, we do not agree,” said the imam

The previous year, a case of anti-gay harassment caught the attention of the U.S. government. According to the State Department’s Human Rights Report for 2012, on March 18 of that year, hundreds of people from the Ouagadougou neighbourhood of Wemtenga “demonstrated to demand the departure of a gay couple within seven days,” claiming “the couple set a bad example for neighborhood children.” After two weeks, the couple left, and “no legal action was taken against the perpetrators.”

mexico, cuba and venezuela have confirmed what the united states has already proved true; that the liberation of any queer minority will not came as a result of behind-the-scene efforts nor the goodwill of the majority. clinton proved that no amount of meeting people where they’re at will change this fact and each of those countries share a similar colonial and homophobic background to burkina faso.

like it was in mexico or cuba; the government has to lay down policy via its courts to protect any minority and it MUST follow through with it or else you end with a venezuela or burkina faso; a place that already has a strong pro-revolutionary environment, but still homophobic AF and paying lip service to their ideals as much as the united states does to its own ideals while never fully living up to them.