When Uganda passed its Anti-Homosexuality Act (AHA) in 2023, countless headlines around the world denigrated the archaic law for its extreme punishment — including the death penalty — for same-sex relationships.
But for many queer Ugandans inside the country, a less obvious impact was nearly as devastating: the law meant that safety required silence. That people would be forced to, as LGBTQI+ rights activist Pepe Onziema says, “self-censor into invisibility.”
Against all odds — and risking their own freedom — some LGBTQI+ people have boldly refused to cower or hide themselves.
Pepe is among them. In 2025, Pepe partnered with AJWS grantee Kuchu Times to create Legacy Pulse, a podcast where “each episode is a living archive: conversations that document how we endure, how we organize, how we grieve, and how we imagine futures that feel almost impossible,” he says. “It’s about preserving our testimony while we’re still here to tell it.”
Legacy Pulse is available on all major podcast platforms, allowing anyone around the world to hear these testimonies, with Pepe interviewing key members of Uganda’s LGBTQI+ movement. But the core goal of the podcast isn’t global awareness. It’s local connection.
As the AHA, and threats of violence and persecution, push many queer Ugandans into the shadows, “our conversations become resistance. Storytelling becomes sanctuary,” says Pepe. “Each episode pushes back against the social and psychological isolation that this law creates.”
This is far from the first time Pepe, a trans man, has bravely stepped into the public eye. In 2012, a year before Uganda passed its first anti-homosexuality legislation, Pepe appeared as a guest on a nationally-broadcast Ugandan television program, Morning Breeze. The host opened the segment asking, more an accusation than a question: “Why are you gay?” The interview went viral, still made into memes nearly 15 years later.
The interview left no space for Pepe to speak; it flattened his life into a soundbite. The AHA is similarly reductive, but far more dangerous.
“In the shadow of the AHA, queer life in Uganda is reduced to a headline, a debate, a controversy,” says Pepe. “But our lives are not legislation. They are layered, intimate, political, spiritual, messy, joyful, frightened, brilliant.”
Kuchu Times is a natural platform for Legacy Pulse — maybe the only possible one in Uganda, at that.
Kuchu Times was founded during the same era when Pepe’s infamous interview aired. It was 2013, and proponents of Uganda’s first anti-homosexuality bill were calling it a ‘Christmas present’ to the country; a vote was set for December 20. A group of queer journalists and activists banded together to counter the propaganda — they published a magazine of queer testimonials, stories to humanize the experience of their community. On the eve of parliament’s vote, they delivered the magazine to towns across Uganda.
Kuchu Times team lead Ruth Muganza remembers that Christmas vividly.
“Media spaces were owned by churches and faith groups, spreading these narratives about who we were,” she says. “We needed a way to respond, to let people hear our stories. We knew we wouldn’t change their beliefs, but maybe we’d help them realize there are real human beings behind these narratives.”
That one-off magazine evolved into Kuchu Times — Uganda’s only queer-focused media group, publishing stories about queer life across Africa, news that affects pan-African LGBTQI+ communities, and providing critical information and resources. Today, Kuchu Times videos have been viewed over 100,000 times; thousands of people follow their social media channels. And with Legacy Pulse, they’re breaking into podcasting.
This work is done with great caution, however. Under the AHA, anyone ‘promoting homosexuality’ can face up to 20 years in prison.
Ruth looks at the threat this way: “If I speak on my lived realities as Ruth, a Ugandan lesbian woman, how am I promoting homosexuality? I write about how I wake up in the morning, go to work, how my mental health suffers due to the negativity and abuse in my email inbox, the violations I hear at the taxi stand, when men heckle me and say ‘Is this a man or a woman? We should rape her to show her what a man is like.’ If I write about this experience, I am not promoting homosexuality. This story is simply the fact of my life.”
Thus far, none of Kuchu Times’ staff or contributors have been charged under the AHA, even as their website is constantly hacked, and online abuse is common.
“We can’t escape the threat of prison; we must engage with it. It’s an unavoidable threat, but we don’t have an alternative,” says Ruth. “We refuse to be erased from our own stories because society tells us not to speak.”
For Pepe, queer storytelling in Uganda goes beyond resistance.
“It’s a historical record,” he says. “I want there to be proof that even at the height of repression, we were thinking, loving, organizing and imagining freedom.”
