Two new resources on homosexuality in Africa

Hoad, Neville. African intimacies : Race, homosexuality, and globalization
Mineapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 2007
C 510 HOA 2007
"There have been few book-length engagements with the question of sexuality in Africa, let alone African homosexuality. African Intimacies simultaneously responds to the public debate on the “Africanness” of homosexuality and interrogates the meaningfulness of the terms “sexuality” and “homosexuality” outside Euro-American discourse.

Speculating on cultural practices interpreted by missionaries as sodomy and resistance to colonialism, Neville Hoad begins by analyzing the 1886 Bugandan martyrs incident—the execution of thirty men in the royal court. Then, in a series of close readings, he addresses questions of race, sex, and globalization in the 1965 Wole Soyinka novel The Interpreters, examines the emblematic 1998 Lambeth conference of Anglican bishops, considers the imperial legacy in depictions of the HIV/AIDS crisis, and reveals how South African writer Phaswane Mpe’s contemporary novel Welcome to Our Hillbrow problematizes notions of African identity and cosmopolitanism.

Hoad’s assessment of the historical valence of homosexuality in Africa shows how the
category has served a key role in a larger story, one in which sexuality has been made in line with a vision of white Western truth, limiting an understanding of intimacy that could imagine an African universalism."

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Johnson, Cary Alan. Off the map : How HIV/AIDS programming is failing same-sex practicing people in Africa.
New York, NY, International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission (IGLHRC), 2007
C 510 JOH 2007
Online access: http://www.iglhrc.org/files/iglhrc/otm/Off%20The%20Map.pdf

"Off the Map explores the ways in which HIV/AIDS stakeholders are potentially jeopardizing overall efforts to combat the AIDS epidemic. The report examines the ways in which same-sex desire and behavior have been simultaneously erased and criminalized in Africa and looks at the small, but important body of knowledge regarding same-sex transmission of HIV on the continent. Same-sex practicing men and women are at increased risk of contracting HIV, not solely because of bio-sexual vulnerabilities, but as a result of an interlocking set of human rights violations that prevent access to effective HIV prevention, voluntary counseling and testing, treatment, and care."