Description

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In 2009 Uganda’s Anti-Homosexuality Bill became a top global news story. Two years later Hillary Clinton declared “Gay rights are human rights and human rights are gay rights,” but still today there is little consensus on how to advance those rights beyond the United States and Europe. The fact is that international LGBT activism and allies have created winners and losers. In Africa those who easily identify with the identities of the global movement find support, funding and care. Those whose sexualities don’t align so neatly don’t.

In this moving investigation, award-winning journalist Robbie Corey-Boulet shows that LGBT liberation does not look the same in Africa as it does in the United States or Europe. At a time when there is a groundswell of interest in LGBT life in Africa and attempts at reversing LGBT rights across much of the “developed” world, Corey-Boulet lays bare past failures. To the extent that there exists a right way to engage on LGBT issues in Africa—and, indeed, worldwide—Love Falls on Us is for those looking to learn what it is.

About the Author

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Robbie Corey-Boulet is the senior editor of World Politics Review. He has worked for over a decade as a journalist, primarily in West Africa and Southeast Asia. He reported for several years for the West Africa bureau of the Associated Press, and his writing has been published by outlets including the Atlantic, Guernica, World Policy Journal and the Guardian. Corey-Boulet has also worked in Liberia as a media trainer for the NGO Journalists for Human Rights. He is now based in Brooklyn, New York.

Praise For…

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“Corey-Boulet’s timely book, Love Falls on Us, addresses the complicated relationship between African L.G.B.T.Q. activists and an American foreign policy whose shifts on gay rights have in many cases exacerbated their difficulties by shining a global spotlight on otherwise unnoticed ways of living. Wisely avoiding the temptation to write about queer relationships across the entire continent, Corey-Boulet instead focuses on activists and individuals in three countries—Cameroon, Ivory Coast and Liberia—highlighting the peculiarities of their respective political and cultural contexts. . . . Love Falls on Us deepens our understanding of these lives beyond the persecution described in Western media.”
— Uzodinma Iweala

“Corey-Boulet is a meticulous researcher with an unparalleled knowledge of LGBT rights in Africa, a deep connection with local activists, and an understanding of the complex relationship between well-intended outside human rights groups and the local activist community. He is as dogged as a reporter as he is sensitive and connected to the people whose lives and struggles he writes about.”
— Corinne Dufka, West Africa director, Human Rights Watch

"In this thoughtful volume, Corey-Boulet, a veteran Associated Press journalist with several years’ experience working in West Africa, explores the collision of the international promotion of LGBT civil rights with foreign donors' interests in Cameroon, Côte d’Ivoire, and Liberia. Drawing on both personal interviews and documentation (international and in-country) to provide detailed context, he examines how these competing priorities intersect to affect the legal, social, and political realities of life for men and women in these African countries."
— Choice