It's not just in East Africa that these stories remain unheard. "There are certain things you just don't believe can happen to a man, you get me? But I know now that sexual violence against men is a huge problem. "That was hard for me to take," Owiny tells me today. The wounds of one were so grievous that he died in the cell in front of him. He watched as man after man was taken and raped. His captors raped him, three times a day, every day for three years. During his escape from the civil war in neighbouring Congo, he had been separated from his wife and taken by rebels. Laying the pus-covered pad on the desk in front of him, he gave up his secret. He reached into his pocket and pulled out an old sanitary pad. The man then murmured cryptically: "It happened to me." Owiny frowned. I'm sure there's something he's keeping from me." "My husband can't have sex," she complained. A female client was having marital difficulties. This particular case, though, was a puzzle.
For four years Eunice Owiny had been employed by Makerere University's Refugee Law Project (RLP) to help displaced people from all over Africa work through their traumas. This is just what happened on an ordinary afternoon in the office of a kind and careful counsellor in Kampala, Uganda.
Yet every now and then someone gathers the courage to tell of it. Governments, aid agencies and human rights defenders at the UN barely acknowledge its possibility. It is usually denied by the perpetrator and his victim. Their Kickstarter campaign to build will remain live until Wednesday, April 16.O f all the secrets of war, there is one that is so well kept that it exists mostly as a rumour. Along with Alysia Abbott, author of Fairyland: A Memoir of My Father, she is launching The Recollectors, a storytelling forum and digital community for people who have lost parents to AIDS. Whitney Joiner is a senior editor at Marie Claire magazine. And all he would’ve had to say in return was: I am. “I asked Mom once if you were gay,” I would have said. I wish I could have known that some part of him accepted-and was proud of-who he was. I’m not angry about it I just wish it had gone differently. It was probably one of the hardest conversations he’d had in his 38 years. He sent me a starstruck postcard from London exclaiming, “Guess what? You know Jimmy Somerville from Erasure? I met him at a club here!!” (Never mind that Somerville was actually in Bronski Beat, another of Dad’s favorites.) But to actually let me in-to sit on that blue blanket, look me in the eye and tell me he was gay-was something he couldn’t do.
When he went to see Truth or Dare with his hairdresser, Mickey, he told me about it. In some ways I think Dad was on the verge of coming out to me back then. “Something like that,” he answered.Įvery once in a while, my brother and I talk about the what-ifs: What if Dad had held out a little longer, if the drugs had been approved a little earlier, if time and the eventual softening of our culture would have softened him? Would he be meeting me for dinner in New York? Would I be flying to visit him in Louisville or Lexington with his middle-aged partner? “Like leukemia?” I once asked, as we drove away from the doctor’s office, thinking of the hokey Lurlene McDaniels books scattered around my middle school classrooms, in which innocent cheerleaders bravely fought some sort of cancer or another, hoping to get one kiss before they died. I knew he’d had some kind of “blood problem” for a while he’d explained that much when we accompanied him to get his blood drawn during our summers together. Since my brother and I spent most of our time with my mother and stepfather, two hours from Dad in a small town south of Louisville, his life seemed far away when we weren’t with him. Dad taught business law at Eastern Kentucky University and served as a deacon at our church. I didn’t want to know.įor the previous four months, my father had been in and out of the hospital in Lexington, Ky., half an hour from this rented duplex in Richmond, where he’d lived since he and my mother divorced three years earlier. I didn’t know what he was going to tell me. We sat on the itchy baby-blue blanket on my bed in the room I shared with my 8-year-old brother. On a Saturday afternoon in April 1992, when I was 13, my father told me we needed to talk.