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Tucked away in a neighborhood of Accra, off Aflao Road, a group of Ghanaian gay activists use the house to gather in secret and provide shelter to LGBTQ people in need.
Sitting on the corner of a couch in the gloomy interior, Joe holds a small clutch in both hands and speaks with a quiet defiance.
“I can’t change the way I am. I can’t change who I am,” he says. “This is natural, and it is how I feel. But we are dead. We are all now dead. We can’t go out again and we can’t mingle with our friends again.”
It wasn’t supposed to be like this in Ghana.
For years, Ghanaian LGBTQ activists felt they had made progress. They witnessed a quiet tolerance, especially in larger cities, and believed that their rights would continue to evolve.
But within weeks, Ghana’s parliament is set to debate a draft bill — framed in the guise of “family values” — which seeks to introduce some of the harshest anti-LGBTQ laws on the African continent.
The prospect of it passing is pushing the country’s LGBTQ community into the shadows.
LGBTQ Ghanaians have been left asking how things got so bad, so quickly, and Western diplomats say they have been caught by surprise.
But what one Ghanaian activist calls a “homophobe’s dream bill” has deep roots in Ghana’s religious community. It also found key inspiration from a US ultra-conservative group with Russian ties.
Humiliated on camera
Joe’s path to the safe house began in his hometown, several hours drive from the capital. CNN agreed to identify him only by his assumed first name, because he fears for his safety.
One evening several months ago, Joe says he was accosted on the street by a group of men who accused him of approaching one of their male relatives.
“I was shaking when they took me to that room and they took out their cameras. I was shaking and I was crying,” he told CNN.
He says the men took him to an abandoned construction site for interrogation.
In a grainy video, seen by CNN, they bark at him in Fante dialect: “Is it…
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Source : cnn
