Johannesburg, Africa is generally not a safe place to have a same-sex relationship, you can be shunned by society,. beaten up, thrown in jail, or worse. In Malawi you can get 14 years in prison with hard labor. In a bold move, Malawi's Centre for the Development of People (CEDEP) and South Africa's Gay and Lesbian Memory in Action (GALA) have collected the stories of 12 lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) women and men and published them in a book, Queer Malawi. Two of the 12 writers recall that their first sexual experience was with a family member.
Fear is a theme that runs through the stories in Queer Malawi - fear of not being accepted by family and community, of violence and arrest. Human rights activists noted that the trial heightened anxiety in Malawai's underground LGBT community and compromised HIV prevention efforts among men who have sex with men (MSM). Many African countries, including Nigeria, Uganda, Zambia and Malawi, have banned same sex relationships, with the legislation sometimes being interpreted so as to leave individuals without adequate protection by the law and open to beatings and arrests. In the case of lesbians, such legislation has sometimes led to "corrective rape", in which men rape lesbians in the violently mistaken belief that this will "turn them strainght:.
http://allafrica.com/stories/201105111062.html
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