With the recent attention and international backlash aimed at Uganda over the last few months, more and more Ugandan ex-patriots have come forward to fight against their government’s hateful policies. One such activist goes by the name Moses and you may recognize his voice from a clip like the one that played during an episode of The Rachel Maddow Show, which features a young man appearing at a press conference for an event protesting the National Prayer Breakfast with a bag over his head to protect his identity. Below, Moses shares more of his personal story with TNG.

“Man, there’s a lot of white people here!” was my greeting when I first arrived at the UCSB’s Resource Center for Sexual and Gender Diversity, a supposed safe place for all students. “Okay.” I replied, really not knowing what to say. Was I supposed to say “I’m sorry?” My race isn’t anymore my fault than the sex I was born into. Later, the speaker of my greeting would turn me down for a dance because I was white. That was the beginning of my experience of racism in the queer scene, that is dividing the movement.

While, in general, it’s not particularly revelatory or noteworthy for an individual to be openly gay in the fashion industry in the U.S. and other Western countries, in other parts of the world, especially regions currently negotiating sensitive issues like the acceptance of LGBT peoples and an influx of Western culture, an out homosexual living his or her life openly in any industry can become a force for change.

This has been the experience of Khalid, a young model and writer who is making his mark in the fashion industry while also challenging perceptions about homosexuality in and around the Middle East.

As a person who writes pretty much all the time – for work, for fun, for no reason whatsoever – it’s not really surprising that I choose to surround myself with words. In addition to collecting my favorite quotes I like to cover my walls with words art. For my money, I’d much rather be surrounded by inspiring words than striking images.

The two absolutely need not be mutually exclusive, however. And this is exactly what award-winning author, photographer, poet and graphic artist Ron L. Zheng is proving to the world via an art form he calls Poetography.

The queer community has had a long and storied past with the HIV/AIDS epidemic, which is, of course, unsurprising for a disease once known as the gay disease or gay cancer. In recent years, however, as other sections of the population have replaced gay men as the group with the highest rate of infection and the disease has spread across the world, many LGBT people in my generation bristle at the tendency for the media to consider all stories involving HIV/AIDS as also being queer. While this may not be the case and demographics may have shifted in the past few decades, it’s still a fact that LGBT groups remain amongst the most proactive, visible and effective organizations fighting the disease worldwide. For this reason, it would be a disservice to let another World AIDS Day pass without checking in around the international community to see the major trends and stories regarding the struggle to rid the world of HIV/AIDS.

This summer I discovered a really great fannish resource that I have since spent quite a bit of time weeding through. The Multi-Fandom Transfic Master List is hosted on delicious.com and maintained by Kyuuketsukirui. The goal is to maintain a central clearing house for links to various works of fanfiction taking transgender identity as a central theme.

In browsing through the stories tagged ‘mtf’ on the list, I encountered several authors who were seeing the possibility of trans maleness in a number of existing stories about female warriors. The idea had crossed my mind occasionally before. Eowyn from Lord of the Rings cries out to Sauron’s army that she is no man, but it’s not hard to see where her circumstantial crossdressing and non-normative gender behavior might feel like a space amenable to a trans male narrative.

I wrote a post a few weeks ago about how sometimes in the international community the gay rights movement can move simultaneously forward and back. It can also move along another axis as well: up and down. Occasionally, two different events will occur in tandem in different parts of the world that simultaneously highlight the highs and lows of the global queer experience. Over the past week, those who follow the international press have seen just such a situation unfold, as Argentina’s granting of Latin America’s first same-sex marriage license and the brutal slaying of a Puerto Rican teen have shared top headline billing.

Gay culture has been radically transformed by the Internet in ways it seems no one could have ever predicted during the early years of the World Wide Web. Overall, the integration of the Internet into gay culture has been positive. It has allowed gay people across the globe, who previously might have lived in isolation – due to either anti-gay laws or social pressure to remain in the closet – to connect and interact with each other, and it has connected gay people with critical resources for their health and well-being that they may not have been able to access otherwise.

Usually, when putting together a Global Gaze post, I tend to find a theme and then collect several different examples of the phenomenon from around the world. This week, however, I found myself with a story that touched on many different themes and offered many more questions than answers. So if you, loyal Global Gaze readers, will indulge me this week, I’d like for us to explore some of these issues together.

The event in question is one that links the United States and Jamaica, involves questions of politics and pop culture, and asks activists to look to the past for precedents and to the future for new innovations in terms of methods for combatting homophobia around the world.

I’m referring to the much-publicized decision by concert promoters Live Nation and AEG to cancel American concert dates for Jamaican reggae singer Buju Banton’s tour due to protests launched by LGBT activists who have decried the violently homophobic lyrics that are at the heart of many of Banton’s songs.