THE family of a lesbian woman who was shot and killed believe her death was mostly influenced by her sexuality. Limakatso Puling, 29, was shot and killed in Avoca Hills on Tuesday night.
It is alleged Puling and a friend were walking home when they were approached by armed men who demanded their cellphones. It is believed that Puling refused to hand over her cellphone leading to one of the men shooting her in the head.
Thembeka Ngcengula, Puling’s girlfriend, said it would take her a very long time to come to terms with her loss. Not only had she lost a partner but a parent to her disabled daughter, Olwethu, she said.
Lineo Puling, Limakatso’s aunt, said the family were heartbroken. They were expecting to see her in the December holidays. She said Puling had called home a weekend before her death and told them to make arrangements for a family get-together.
“I don’t even know where to begin explaining the hurt our family, especially her grandmother, is going through. We haven’t seen her since 2018. Receiving her phone calls telling us she was coming home brought so much joy. Unfortunately, it was short-lived.”
Lineo said they were saddened that their daughter was robbed of her chance at life because of her sexuality.
“We contacted her friend who she was with when they were attacked. She told us that when Limakatso refused (to give) her phone, those men kept calling her names regarding her sexuality. The killers must be gloating that they killed a lesbian. Was she not a human being? She was a lesbian woman and didn’t deserve to be killed. I hope justice will be served one day.”
Editor’s note: We have been following this story since it first appeared. For personal reasons we were unable to post it until now. Hence why we have included all three stories.
Man “pretending to be woman” on trial for raping lesbian
A 30-year-old man is on trial for rape after he allegedly lured a lesbian to have sex with him while pretending to be a woman.
Tsang Tsz-ho, 30, is on trial in High Court today (Mon) as he appeared in front of a jury of six men and a woman.
Prosecution said Tsang got to know the victim on lesbian dating platforms Butterfly and Her. He called himself “Jan” and said he was a tomboy.
Tsang knew the victim wanted to engage in sadomasochism, and arranged to meet her on February 27, 2020 to a Kwun Tong hotel.The Standard Channel
The victim found out Tsang is a man during sex and questioned him. She repeatedly pushed him away.
She also asked him: “I don’t understand. Why do you go after lesbians?” But Tsang did not answer.
Prosecution said Tsang should know the victim wanted to leave immediately, and that she only promised to have sex because she thought Tsang was a woman.
The victim called the police on the night of incident. Prosecution alleged that Tsang knew full well that she was a lesbian but hid his own sex.
Man on trial for raping lesbian said he did not respond in time to clarify his gender
A 30-year-old man on trial for raping a lesbian while “pretending to be a woman” said he was not aware the dating platform he used is for homosexual women only.
He said he did not clarify about his gender after the lesbian called him “sister”, because he could not respond in time.
Tsang Tsz-ho, 30, pleaded not guilty to raping a woman referred as X in court when they engaged in sadomasochism on February 27, 2020 at a Kwun Tong hotel.
He called himself “Jan” and chose to describe himself as a “tomboy” on lesbian platform Butterfly. X told the court earlier that she would not have agreed to the sex if she knew he was a man.
Testifying in self defense on Monday, Tsang said he did not know Butterfly is for lesbians only.
He said he used different dating apps including Tinder, Skout and HeyMandi from 2014, which do not restrict sexual orientation.
He got to know X on Butterfly in November 2019. He said he was aware that lesbians use the app, but did not think men were banned.
As for why he chose his sexual orientation as “tomboy”, Tsang said he could not log in if he did not choose one of the options. He knew tomboy means a boyish girl.
During conversations with X, the woman called him “elder sister” but he did not clarify. Tsang said he did not respond to the message in time.
X also said she wanted to find “a girl who cares for me”. Tsang replied “I can”, and told the court that he meant he can be a person who cares for her.
Tsang also told the jury that he did not put on any make up nor got into a dress in order to pretend to be woman.
He testifed that when they were in the act, he asked X if she felt comfortable, and she said yes. He thought the answer means she agreed to the sex.
But then X asked him what was inside her body, and he found the question strange.
“I was thinking what could it be? I stopped the action,” he said.
When X started pushing him away, he thought the woman was upset because he did not wear a condom. X then told him: “You are a man? And you did not wear condom.”
Hong Kong man accused of concealing his sex to rape woman cleared of all charges
An unemployed Hong Kong man accused of concealing his sex in order to rape a woman he met on a lesbian forum has been cleared of all charges.
A High Court jury on Friday acquitted Tsang Tsz-ho, 30, after four hours of closed-door deliberations in the midst of a typhoon, which ultimately led to the postponement of all other hearings.
Tsang was found not guilty of rape by a vote of five to two, and cleared of indecent assault by a unanimous vote from the jury of six men and one woman, concluding a 10-day trial before Mr Justice Joseph Yau Chi-lap.
The NYPD is asking for help in its search for the man who attacked a young woman in the East Village because she was holding hands with her girlfriend.
On September 15, the 21-year-old woman was walking with her girlfriend near the corner of East 14th St. and 3rd avenue when the suspect began yelling anti-gay slurs at them, amNY reported.
The couple continued walking, but the suspect did not relent. Continuing to spout slurs, he approached the victim and punched her in the face before fleeing the scene. The victim was not seriously injured.
Nearly a month later, the attacker has still not been found. The NYPD Hate Crime Task Force continues to investigate the incident and on Sunday, released camera footage of the suspect walking down the street.
Back in May, when the streaming platform Twitch announced the release of more than 350 new “identity tags” that could be used to sort streams into distinctive categories, Jess Bolden was excited.
The 25-year-old FACEIT Games Esports analyst, who lives between France and Italy with her female partner, streams the game Rainbow Six Siege, a largely male-dominated pursuit. Bolden was once Samsung team head coach for the game, which she streams under the name JessGOAT.
She figured she could use the new “lesbian” tag to show other lesbian gamers that her stream was a safe space for them. But, Bolden says, she felt conflicted. “I would look at the tag for that extra second, to question myself, and I’m usually confident in everything that I do,” Bolden says. “So there’s obviously a problem.”
Bolden’s hesitancy was justifiable. Twitch has been widely criticized for an ongoing scandal involving “hate raids” aimed mostly at its BIPOC and LGBTQIA+ users. These attacks are carried out by bots programmed to spam streamers’ chats with offensive messages. The conditions became so bad that Twitch users started a campaign — #TwitchDoBetter — to push for change, and at one point arranged a digital “protest” where streamers boycotted the platform in solidarity with hate raid victims.
In response, Twitch last month filed a lawsuit against two users allegedly behind many hate raids and, more recently, introduced chat verification.
While hate against streamers is common, lesbians feel they are the subject of both sexism and a specific kind of sexualization. “We get multiple DMs, like ‘I could turn you straight’ or ‘You haven’t found the right guy,’” says Baeu, an 18-year-old lesbian streamer from Florida who broadcasts to followers under the name Spoink. Baeu is a member of Lilac Lesbians, a Minecraft Championship team hoping to increase lesbian representation in gaming. (Input is withholding the last names of most of the streamers in this piece out of concern for their safety.)
“Even when I was underage, they’d still message me inappropriate stuff,” Baeu adds. “Twitch’s solution was pretty much: ‘Oh, well you have your messages open.’” She adds that multiple reports she’s submitted to the company about harassment have not resulted in any action against offending users.
The “lesbian” tag has only increased harassment, according to Bolden. “‘I hate gays’ is probably the most common [comment],” she says. “Or people complaining that I’m a lesbian.” All of the streamers interviewed agreed that they had seen abuse aimed specifically at lesbians, ranging from statements like “of course you’re a lesbian — you’re fat” to assertions that the lesbian streamers were “going to hell” because of their sexuality.
A same-sex couple who were denied rental housing in Evansville because of their sexual orientation won their complaint this week against a company that says God, not government, is the final authority.
The Evansville-Vanderburgh County Human Relations Commission ruled in favor of Kimberly and Chasity Scott in their 2020 filing, while Myers Family Rentals, the subject of the Scotts’ complaint, was hit with $41,000 in civil penalties and damages.
While being shown the home in May 2020, the Scotts said they were asked by a Myers family member if they were “together, together” or “lesbian.”
“Yes, ma’am, we are. She (Chasity) is my wife,” Kimberly Scott responded.
After hearing this, Myers Family Rentals refused to make the home available to the Scotts, according to the couple’s complaint. It was filed a few days after the Scotts toured the home.
The Scotts said they moved to Henderson after being denied the rental property in Vanderburgh County.
According to the Human Relations Commission’s findings, Myers Family Rentals admitted that they “do not rent to people who choose to live as boyfriend and girlfriend, fiancés, male or female homosexuals, polygamous, polyamorous, or any other relationship that denies God’s requirement … that marriage be between one man and one woman.”
The Scotts said they were discriminated against based on Vanderburgh County’s Fair Housing Ordinance, which is a companion to federal and Indiana fair housing laws.
There’s a limit to what any one person can accomplish in her time on earth. Marcia Freedman managed to blow right past the limit and just kept going.
Pioneering feminist, LGBTQ activist, Knesset member, author and co-founder of an esteemed Middle East peace organization, Marcia Freedman died Sept. 21 in Berkeley. She was 83.
“She was quiet and wise,” said Janis Plotkin, who decades ago recruited Freedman to serve on the board of the S.F. Jewish Film Festival. “She was a little woman but a giant in terms of intellect, kindness, thoughtfulness and her strategic approach to problem-solving.”
Freedman’s social and political activism took many forms. Much of her work centered on Israeli politics and seeking to resolve the conflict with the Palestinians. She argued for a two-state solution long before it became a stated policy objective. As a young olah (immigrant) and member of Knesset, the state of Israel’s legislature, she also fostered groundbreaking women’s rights legislation, going toe to toe with her misogynist male colleagues.
A man in France is on trial for allegedly raping and torturing his lesbian sister and her girlfriends. Samy M reportedly lured his sister and her friends to the river Drôme, where he sexually abused and tortured the women. He is said to have used a razor to cut a ‘permanent smile’ on his sister’s girlfriend’s face. Her scars are still evident and will likely disfigure the victim for life.
Samy M has been on trial since Monday, September 27, at the Drôme Regional Court in Valence for the December 2018 crimes. As mentioned, he abducted and raped his then 24-year-old sister, who had left the family home in Bourg-de-Péage a month earlier, Les Observateurs reported. The man attacked his sibling after finding out she was having an intimate relationship with a woman, thereby going against the doctrine of Islam. Samy M was armed and hooded when he forced the victims to a deserted place, beat them, forced them to kneel down, and subsequently carved deep cuts on both cheeks of his sister’s girlfriend with a razor. “I will make you smile forever,” he allegedly told them, per the victims’ testimony in court.
Lesbian activist, Sisanda Gumede, 28 was the latest victim of homophobic murder in South Africa when she was stabbed at the weekend.
It is alleged that a 28-year-old lesbian activist, Sisanda Gumede, was stabbed on Sunday afternoon and was rushed to hospital bleeding profusely. She died en route to hospital.
“Although the information regarding the incident violently [sic] is still sketchy, it appears that the deceased and (the suspect) had an altercation while at home. Gumede’s murder is understood to be motivated by homophobia, as (the suspect) allegedly gloated after the incident that he had removed the curse from the family,” the Department of Social Development said in a statement released on Tuesday.
Two men have been arrested and charged in connection to the killing of out lesbian journalist Lyra McKee, who was shot to death while covering a riot in Northern Ireland two years ago.
“These arrests are the culmination of a detailed two-year investigation into Lyra’s murder and the events which preceded it,” Police Service of Northern Ireland Detective Superintendant Jason Murphy said in a written statement. “The local community have supported the Police Service of Northern Ireland throughout the course of this protracted investigation, and I wish to thank them for their continued support.”
Editor’s note: While the students at the centre of this story aren’t lesbians, accusing the students of being lesbian in this context demonstrates the social position of lesbians, with both the teacher and the students understanding the word alone to be derogatory. The media article did not challenge this framing.
Meerut: A teacher allegedly called two students lesbians as an insult, dragged them out by thweir hair and paraded them around the school after she spotted them having lunch together. She was “enraged” ar the violation of COVID protocol. Police have recorded the students statements and the school will initiate an inquiry.
The two Class X students were from different sections. One had come into the other’s classroom during lunch break. The teacher in charge, Amita Rastogi, lost her cool. “She used derogatory terms, said we were in a relationship and that we must be seeing each other outside school,” one of the girls said.
I am a butch lesbian. I live with gender dysphoria. This is the condition which, according to mental health professionals, means I am transgender. However, I do not define as transgender. I do not want to take hormones or have surgeries. I do not accept that it is possible to live “as a man”, without believing in old fashioned gender stereotypes. I do not believe my deep discomfort with my female body means that I should take steps to change it. This is my story. …
I still have difficulties with my sexed body. Periods are particularly difficult for me. But instead of seeking a hysterectomy, I tell myself, “Lauren, you’re a butch lesbian, are you really so afraid of a little blood?”, and then I get on with my day. My wife loves me, just how I am, with all my oddities. I’m very glad that I’m in a lesbian relationship. I would not want to be in a heterosexual relationship with a woman. That would wreck something important for me about who I am, and what I stand for and I could never have discovered that on my own if I had been transitioned young.
I stand for trashing the old fashioned, regressive stereotypes that say “if you can drive a forklift and operate a lathe, you must be a man.” No. I stand for a celebration of the amazing diversity that women are.
In the Tula region, the Khomyakov Home literary festival was canceled after complaints from Orthodox activists. They were outraged by one of the participants – the writer and open lesbian Oksana Vasyakina.
The festival was to take place in the Bogucharovo estate, which belonged to the founder of early Slavophilism, Alexei Khomyakov. The organizers said that the event had to be canceled due to the COVID epidemic in the region. Vasyakina’s friend, feminist Daria Serenko, believes that the reason is different. According to her, “Orthodox activists” and security officials tried to expel Vasyakina from the festival “because she is a lesbian.” The organizers did not agree to expel her, allegedly leading to the entire festival being canceled.
(Translated)
В Тульской области отменили литературный фестиваль «Хомяков home» после жалоб православных активистов. Их возмутила одна из участниц — писательница и открытая лесбиянка Оксана Васякина.
Фестиваль должен был пройти в усадьбе «Богучарово», принадлежавшей основоположнику раннего славянофильства Алексею Хомякову. Однако организаторы сообщили, что мероприятие пришлось отменить из-за эпидемиологической обстановки в регионе. Подруга Васякиной, феминистка Дарья Серенко, считает, что причина в другом. По ее словам, «православные активисты» и силовики пытались выгнать Васякину с фестиваля «за то, что она лесбиянка». Организаторы не согласились, и потому якобы был отменен весь фестиваль.
As reported by Il Mattino, during the night of 24-25 August, a 40-year-old man attacked and beat a lesbian couple, originally from Nocera Inferiore and living together in Castel San Giorgio. … The reason for the blind aggression? Pure and simple homophobia. The man brutally beat them solely because they are lesbians. The Nocera Inferiore Attourney and the deputy prosecutor Angelo Rubano are certain of this. The 40-year-old, already known to the police, went to the home of the two women, convinced them to go outside and attacked them, kicking and punching them.
(Translated)
Come riportato da Il Mattino, nella notte tra martedì e mercoledì un uomo di 40 anni ha aggredito e picchiato una coppia di donne, originarie di Nocera Inferiore e conviventi nel comune di Castel San Giorgio. … Il motivo della furia cieca? Pura e semplice omofobia. L’uomo le avrebbe brutalmente picchiate solo e soltanto perché lesbiche. Ne è certa la Procura di Nocera Inferiore, e il sostituto procuratore Angelo Rubano. Il 40enne, già noto alle forze dell’ordine, ha raggiunto l’abitazione delle due donne, le ha convinte ad uscire all’aperto e le ha aggredite, prendendole a calci e pugni.
Once again, lesbians at Kakuma camp in Kenya at Block 13, along with the other refugees, are in danger, as they have suffered a fourth arson attack this year.
On August 16, the block was awakened by what sounded like gunshots. When they arose, they were met with the smell of petrol fumes all over their compound and they noticed huge amounts of it all around the shelter where the children sleep.
Police were called. They refused to come out to investigate before daylight. Thankfully the children were moved.
The police told them to leave the petrol containers as they were evidence. It turns out the petrol wasn’t just around the children’s shelter.
An hour later, the entire block was alight. From the time this was all reported, it took two-and-a-half hours for the police to show up. The station is five minutes away.
Every single bit of shelter they had left there burned to the ground, as did everything inside them and near to them.
They, quite literally, have nothing left. Twenty-five children and their mothers are now without any shelter.
There is absolutely nothing to protect them from the burning African sun, or the torrential downpours when they come.
They have no food, clothing, shelter, toiletries, or any other essentials to survive even at night.
All of their documentation and IDs as well as any personal belongings are gone. They have been left with only the clothing on their backs.
The intent of these violent crimes is clearly to kill and injure the LGB&T community in Kakuma.
A new lesbophobic attack was recorded on August 24 in Castel San Giorgio, in the province of Salerno, where two 40 year old women in a relationship were kicked and punched by a contemporary already known to the police. He had gone to their home to punish them for their homosexual relationship.
During the struggle, one of the two women lost two teeth, while the other suffered bruises and abrasions. The violence continued even after the police arrived and found the two women on the ground bleeding….
(Translated)
Una nuova aggressione di matrice lesbofobica si è registrata lo scorso 24 agosto a Castel San Giorgio, in provincia di Salerno, dove una coppia di donne 40enni è stata vittima di calci e pugni da parte di un coetaneo già noto alle forze dell’ordine, che si è recato presso la loro abitazione proprio per punirle a causa della loro relazione omosessuale.
Durante la colluttazione, una delle due donne ha perso due denti, mentre l’altra ha riportato degli ematomi e delle escoriazioni. La violenza è andata avanti anche in seguito alle forze dell’ordine, che al loro arrivo hanno trovato le due donne a terra sanguinanti…
A young female gay [sic] couple was brutally attacked and beaten by two men in the Estonian capital, Tallinn, in the morning of 8 August.
The horrific attack took place in the borough of Mustamäe, at a food shack near the Szolnok bus stop.
According to Postimees, the women – 20 and 18 years old – had gone to buy French fries at the food shack in the morning of Sunday, 8 August, when they encountered three men, of whom one felt the necessity to call them “lesbians” and laughed at them.
One of the victims, whom Postimees calls Emma, but admits it’s not her real name, told the newspaper that she got angry at the men and told them to pipe down. According to the newspaper, one of the attackers started to strangle Emma after that.
“He held my neck firmly, my girlfriend tried to push the guy away. /…/ The men started to beat us with their hands and feet. Two of them were beating us and the third one was just looking,” Emma told Postimees. According to the victim, it later emerged that one of the men who attacked her had previously been involved in martial arts, and was over seven feet tall – “like a bear”.
Police in Utah have launched a homicide investigation in the deaths of a married female couple shot to death Wednesday at a campsite in Grand County.
The victims were Crystal Michelle Turner, 38, and Kylen Carrol Schulte, 24, who had lived in Moab, Utah, Salt Lake City TV station KSL reports.
The women were last seen at a tavern in Moab Saturday night, and they had called friends that night saying they were worried about “a weirdo camping near them that was freaking them out,” according to social media posts. They were planning to move to a different campsite.
Homophobia has become a rallying cause for Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan as it has for fellow populists Hungary’s Viktor Orban and Poland’s Andrzej Duda, who also rely on polarizing issues to whip up support. However, in a stunning rebuke of the Turkish strongman’s anti-gay rhetoric, Turks of all stripes came out in defense of Turkish Olympic volleyball star Ebrar Karakurt when she faced online abuse after posting intimate photos of herself with a woman on Instagram. …
Erdogan has taken to homophobic salvos of late and makes no secret of his disapproval for lesbians. “Let’s not dwell on what lesbians shmezbians say. Let us heed our mothers. The mother is the pillar of the family,” he said in February, at the height of mass protests over his appointment of a despised rector to Istanbul’s Bogazici University. Melih Bulu’s first order of business was to ban the university’s LGBT club.
Turkey’s interior minister has called gay people “perverts” and Gay Pride marches have been banned since 2016. Turkey’s withdrawal from the Istanbul Convention on combating violence against women, a document that was championed by Erdogan in his reformist days, was justified on the grounds that it somehow encouraged homosexuality. The anti-gay messaging is also being spread by the powerful State Religious Affairs Directorate. Its president, Ali Erbas, claimed in a sermon last year that homosexuality “brings disease in its wake and causes generational rot and decay.”
Yildiz Tar, media and communication program coordinator for Kaos GL, Turkey’s oldest LGBT+ advocacy group, said she wasn’t surprised by the sea of support for Karakurt. “We have made huge strides. Turkey’s society is far more accepting of the LGBT+ community but the government has fallen behind society and is persisting in anachronistic and homophobic policies,” Tar told Al-Monitor.
Albro McLean, the man who raped his lesbian neighbour in an attempt to “make her a women”, has received a life sentence in the Western Cape High Court.
He was convicted for “corrective rape”, despite pleading not guilty to charges of rape and assault with aggravating circumstances, in the Wynberg Regional Court. …
During his appeal, his lawyer argued that the sentence handed down was disproportionate to the offence and that the court overemphasised the seriousness of the offence, at the expense of personal circumstances of the accused.
State advocate, Liezel Scholzel dismissed the argument: “Rape is a very serious offences constituting, as it does, a humiliating, degrading and brutal invasion of privacy, dignity and the person of the victim. It is regarded as a cancer within the society. Not only did the appellant rape the complainant, but he did so with a further motive and out of prejudice that he had against her sexual orientation, causing further serious emotional trauma to the complainant.
“This type of rape has been informally termed as ’corrective’ rape. Corrective rape is not the same as ‘mere’ rape in that it is committed based on prejudice and intolerance. Hate crimes, by nature, cause greater harm than ordinary crimes because they increase the vulnerability of the victims as they are unable to change the characteristics which made them a target,” she said.
She asked that the courts send out a clear message that those types of attacks would not be tolerated.
A refugee because of homophobia and violence in Mozambique, Lara was assaulted and saw friends being killed and raped for their sexuality. Since 2013, she has lived with her wife and child in São Paulo. … “He punched me in the face, I’ll never forget it,” recalls 37-year-old businesswoman Lara Lopes, referring to one of her memories of life in Mozambique, Southeast Africa, when she was attacked by a man in the street for being a lesbian. Another vivid memory was the day her own family excluded her from dinner. “I never forget the day I went to dinner at my aunt’s house with my cousins. They excluded me, put me in a corner by myself and forbade their women to talk to me”. Both episodes were based on the same reason: homophobia. … Her father, who was very involved in sport, heard other people talking about Lara and left the family because of his daughter’s sexuality. “He always heard something, but he never came to talk about it. One day he left the house, he didn’t tell anyone and when my mother tried to find out why, he said that I was using drugs, but I never did that in my life. I soon understood what was happening”, she says.
In addition to her father’s abandonment, prejudice, according to her, is part of a society strongly influenced by Christian religions, predominantly evangelical ones. “They cursed and yelled in the street, I sometimes heard it, without even knowing where the person was. Sometimes the person would throw something from the top of a building on our heads – there were people who would throw water”.
Other than that, Lara saw even more violent forms of homophobia in the country where it was a crime to be gay until July 2015. “In the south they do a lot. Two friends of mine who couldn’t stand the verbal abuse were murdered. I sometimes ask myself: if I were still in Mozambique wouldn’t that be me?”, she asks.
One of the cases she remembers was the day when a man attacked her at the end of a football game. “It was in a public field in the center of the city, called Campo do Estrela. It’s normal for men to hint, but there are people who swallow it, my friends don’t. The guy wanted to start a fight with us, he went for it completely, cursed us with a lot of names, he punched me in the face. And I’m absolutely sure that if he sees me today, he’ll remember it very well”, she says, disgusted. “These are things you can’t forget, they’re kept there in a little drawer”, she laments.
State violence Homophobia is a legacy of colonialism that prevails to this day in at least 30 African countries which retain the criminalisation of same-sex relationships, or otherwise restrict non-heteronormative sexual practices, according to information from the 2019 State-Sponsored Homophobia report, produced by International Lesbian and Gay Association (ILGA).
Mozambique, which was a Portuguese colony, broke away from its Penal Code that penalised LGBT people in 2015, but no protection was granted in relation to sexual orientation or gender identity, says the report, which also pointed to the Mozambican state’s refusal to register the NGO Lambda Moçambique, which deals with LGBT rights”.
Lambda has been in a legal battle for more than 10 years to be legally recognized by the Mozambican government, despite being the first association for the defense of sexual minorities in the country. The entity’s performance was also part of Lara’s life. “Despite being dangerous, I have always lived with LGBT people, I was part of the direction of Lambda, which is still not accepted by the government. It is not an easy task. Religion influences so much, especially the evangelicals. They think they are the owners of the truth and position themselves as God. My wife’s mother is an extreme evangelical, for example.”
(Translated)
Refugiada por causa da LGBTfobia e da violência do Estado de Moçambique, Lara foi agredida e viu amigas sendo mortas e estupradas por sua sexualidade. Desde 2013, ela vive com a esposa e um filho em São Paulo … “Ele me deu um soco na cara, nunca vou esquecer isso”, lembra a empresária de 37 anos, Lara Lopes, ao se referir a uma das memórias de sua vida em Moçambique, sudeste da África – ela foi agredida por um homem na rua por ser lésbica. Outra recordação viva em sua mente foi o dia em que a própria família a excluiu de um jantar. “Nunca esqueço o dia que eu fui jantar na casa da minha tia, entre primos, eles me excluíram, me colocaram num canto sozinha e proibiram suas mulheres de conversarem comigo”. Ambos os episódios têm o mesmo motivo: LGBTfobia. … O pai, que frequentava muito o meio do esporte, ouvia outras pessoas falando de Lara e abandonou a família por conta da orientação sexual da filha. “Ele ouvia sempre alguma coisa, mas nunca chegou para conversar a respeito. Um dia ele saiu de casa, não falou para ninguém e quando a minha mãe procurou saber o porquê, ele falou que eu estava consumindo drogas, mas eu nunca consumi na minha vida. Logo entendi o que estava acontecendo”, conta.
Além do abandono do pai, o preconceito, segundo ela, faz parte da sociedade influenciada fortemente por religiões cristãs, predominantemente as evangélicas. “Xingavam e gritavam na rua, eu ouvia às vezes, sem nem saber onde é que a pessoa estava. Às vezes a pessoa jogava alguma coisa do alto de um prédio na nossa cabeça, tinha gente que jogava água”.
Fora isso, Lara viu formas ainda mais violentas de LGBTfobia no país em que era crime ser homossexual até julho de 2015. “Chamam a pratica de estupro em pessoas LGBTs de ‘violação cura’, ou ‘violação correctiva’, que agora na África do Sul eles fazem muito. Duas amigas minhas que não aguentavam os desaforos foram assassinadas. Eu às vezes me pergunto: será que se eu estivesse em Moçambique não estaria nessa estatística delas duas?”, questiona.
Um dos casos lembrados por ela foi o dia em que um homem a agrediu ao final de um jogo de futebol. “Foi em um campo público que fica no centro da cidade, chama-se Campo do Estrela. É normal os homens mandarem indiretas, só que tem gente que engole, minhas amigas não. O cara estava com vontade de criar briga com a gente, ele foi pra cima, com tudo mesmo, xingou a gente um monte de nome, ele me deu um soco na cara. E eu tenho a certeza absoluta que se ele me ver hoje, ele vai se lembrar muito bem disso”, conta, revoltada. “São coisas que não tem como você esquecer, está lá guardado numa gavetinha”, lamenta.
Violência do Estado A LGBTfobia é uma herança do colonialismo que impera até hoje em ao menos 30 países africanos que persistem em manter como crime as relações entre pessoas do mesmo sexo ou em restringir práticas sexuais não heteronormativas, segundo informações do relatório Homofobia Patrocinada pelo Estado 2019, produzido pela Associação Internacional de Gays e Lésbicas (ILGA).
Moçambique, que foi colônia portuguesa, se desvencilhou de seu Código Penal que penalizava pessoas LGBT em 2015, mas nenhuma proteção foi concedida em relação à orientação sexual ou identidade de gênero, diz o relatório, que também apontou a negação do Estado moçambicano em registar a ONG Lambda Moçambique, que trata dos direitos LGBTs “.
Lambda está há mais de 10 anos em uma batalha jurídica para ser reconhecida legalmente pelo governo moçambicano, apesar de ser a primeira associação de defesa de minorias sexuais no país. A atuação da entidade também fez parte da vida de Lara. “Apesar de ser perigoso, eu sempre convivi com pessoas LGBTs, fiz parte da direção da Lambda, que até agora não é assumida pelo governo, não é uma tarefa fácil. A religião influencia ainda mais, principalmente na parte dos evangélicos, eles se acham os donos da verdade e se colocam na posição de Deus. A mãe da minha esposa é evangélica extremista, por exemplo”.
Listening to Lesbians 