We Are Here: LGBTI in Uganda

American-born gay photographer D. David Robinson collected portraits and first-person accounts from lesbian, gay, transgender, and intersex Ugandans, then turned to The Advocate to offer these brave activists a forum to tell their stories in their own words.

BY Sunnivie Brydum

January 02 2013 5:00 AM ET

Kevin Aine Dismus, 29, founder of Rainbow Health Foundation Mbarara

My Catholic background is strong, and it was my dream to become a priest. But I knew early that I had a secret. I didn’t discover it — it discovered me. Eventually I chose to confide in a close friend. He betrayed me. News spread quickly in my boarding school, and suddenly I had no one.

One evening, I returned from studies and found a small note from my classmates on my bed: “We don’t befriend gay people. It’s against our religion.” My dream instantly fell away. In tears, I tossed the note on a burning pile of rubbish, faked sick and asked to go home.

Along the way, I bought five packets of rat poison. When I woke, vomiting black poison and blood, my family took me to a clinic — that is how I managed to survive.

To this day, my family thinks it was nerves about my exams that brought on the “sickness” — I was such a perfectionist in my studies. It took years before I accepted myself and came out to them and others. In 2011, I founded a refuge for LGBTI people in my hometown in rural western Uganda. Rainbow Health Foundation Mbarara wasn’t around for me, but it is now here for others.