"Where Love Is Illegal": Chronicling LGBT Stories of Love and Discrimination (Part 1) | Nat Geo Live

• I'm really grateful to be here, and the reason I'm so grateful is actually, you're really helping me out. I made a promise to the people whose photograph... photographs who you'll see tonight. I promised them that their stories would be heard, and you're helping me to fulfill that promise. And so, for that, I'm deeply grateful.

The last time that I was here in the US, talking about Where Love is Illegal, was soon after the shootings in Orlando. And that event was, you know... shocking, of course, as it was to everyone here, I'm sure. But it wasn't until a couple of days later that it really hit me. I received a post on my Facebook page from a friend of mine. He sent me this clip of CNN's Anderson Cooper reading out the names of the deceased. Maybe some of you saw that. He read their names, and they showed a photo of each of those who were killed, and they had a little story about them, and what they meant to their families and friends. It was really, really deeply moving. And suddenly, those... The numbers became people, and suddenly I felt a connection to them, and the victims were made real.

The mission of this project, Where Love is Illegal, is about making connections. It's about amplifying lesbian, gay, transgender, queer, intersex, voices that have been silenced by bigotry. And by hearing their stories, we get to make real their survival. By understanding what they have survived, we maybe get some insight and some understanding of the true ugliness and impact of homophobia and transphobia. So tonight, I'm going to talk to you a little bit about Where Love is Illegal, the campaign. I'll talk to you a bit about the making of the photographs because I know there are some people in this audience that are interested in that.

But what's just as, if not more important, to me is that you meet some of the individuals who are brave enough to be involved in this work. This is Buje. Now, Buje is covering his face because he is afraid. In fact, Buje isn't really his name. He asked that we hide his identity because who he is means that he can be put to death. I met Buje and four other young men shortly after they had been released from prison. They had languished there for 40 days. They were tortured in jail, and they were lashed with a whip in court. Fortunately, their case was dismissed, but the community in which they lived were not satisfied with the verdict. They waited outside the courtroom, armed with rocks intending to stone Buje and the other young men to death.

Buje went back into the courtroom. His place of torture, now a sanctuary until the crowd dispersed. But, his suffering didn't end there. They went back to their families, who, in turn, ostracized them. Buje fell ill, and a relative came to him and said, "God should take your life because you've caused such shame to the family." You know, their physical scars would heal, but that rejection from their own flesh and blood cut deepest.

So, what was the crime that Buje committed? What could possibly have him tortured by the State, nearly lynched by his community, and abandoned by his family? He's gay. And, you know, one would think that we would've moved past this barbaric notion, that one should be killed for who they are attracted to. That to be LGBT is unnatural, immoral, or unholy. And while there are now, thankfully, 780 million people living in countries where same-sex relationships are legal, there are 2.8 billion people living in countries where consensual same-sex acts are a crime.

So, prior to starting this work, Where Love is Illegal, like many people, I was appalled by homophobia and transphobia. But like the Orlando shooting, it wasn't until these abstract concepts—the abstract concepts of homophobia and transphobia—it wasn't until they became real that, through meeting these people, I had any real understanding. Of course, hearing their stories cannot be compared in any way to living their experience. But in a small way, when I heard what they've been through, I felt it.

So, trying to get people to feel is what I've been trying to do with my work for the last 15 years since I left my home country of New Zealand. I've been trying to do that through photography as a storyteller and as a human rights campaigner. I've done many different kinds of work, like sexual violence, work about street children and famine, and conflict, and dictatorship, and displacement, and environmental degradation, and illegal mining, and drugs, and prisons, and disease, and a large body of work, which I've been doing since 2011, on mental health in African countries in crisis, which I called 'Condemned.'

Now, prior to starting this work during all that other work that I showed you before, seeing this work here... You know, I was starting to question my role as a documentarian. I felt that I had made the beginnings of strong, important, and work that could have purpose. In fact, it was one of the great motivators for me when I started out as a photographer. I had this belief, like many young photographers who go into photojournalism, that my work could be important and that my work could make a difference. And I thought that maybe, naïvely perhaps, that my work, by being published, would make people sit up and take action.

And sometimes, my work did that. But mostly it did not, and that made me deeply frustrated. It was really important for me that my work felt like it was meaningful. So when I started this work on mental health in African countries in crisis, I started it with a mindset that my work could no longer be made solely to raise awareness—that it couldn't just be to illustrate an article alone. I was determined that it would make a difference, and I started this work on mental health in South Sudan. I went there to cover a referendum for independence and came away with a story about a country which was in a time of hope, had massive challenges to deal with, not least of all, the psychological impact of 20 years of conflict, and almost completely destroyed infrastructure, and a country where there are next to no medical professionals, and no facilities for people with mental health problems.

And I will move through this... And this environment, the prison had become a place to warehouse people with mental health problems. And I moved through this nightmare of a place, understanding that I was seeing a really devastating human rights issue. That was really a crime against society's most vulnerable and voiceless people. And I moved through here thinking, "If the world could see what I was seeing, they wouldn't allow this." I was thinking, "I could stop this with my camera."

I came across one young man by himself at the end of a cell, naked and shackled, with this thick colonial-style chain around his ankle, to the filthy floor. And as soon as I saw him, I thought, "This is the picture, this is the one that will get people's attention." Now, most of the people in the prison, as I moved around, were able to let me know, one way or another, if it was okay to take their photograph or not. But he couldn't. He neither looked nor spoke to me. In my mind, I was thinking, "Okay, I'm here to document a grave human rights offense, and that's the most important thing." But I paused.

Here was a vulnerable young man, whose dignity had been taken away from him, his liberty had been taken away from him, and I was concerned, was I abusing his human rights further? If this was me, if this was my brother, or if this was my son, would I be okay with this image appearing on the front page of a newspaper? So, all of these things went through my mind as I was crouching down over this filthy floor with a camera raised to my eye. And the conclusion that I came to, because obviously I took the picture, is that the only way that this image was going to be okay is if it was made to really make a difference in the lives of this man and the lives of people like him. Not raise awareness, not illustrate an article, but really make a difference.

So that day, in fact that moment, was transformational for me. I moved from being a photographer hoping to change, to make change happen, to a photographer making change happen. I need to say right now, because I know there are photographers here, and lots of people in the photo industry, that I think there is great value in photography and storytelling just for the sake of making pictures, and for the sake of telling stories, and for recording history, and for raising awareness. Those are all really valuable things, but for me, it wasn't enough.

I came to this conclusion, and that is, that with witnessing comes responsibility, and with privilege comes the moral obligation to people less fortunate than ourselves. I decided raising awareness, raising awareness was not enough, and I decided that I could no longer pretend that making change happen was someone else's job. So, I tell you this story about this journey because... to provide some context and hopefully some understanding of my mindset when I started to embark on this work called, "Where Love is Illegal."

So while I was doing all this work, mostly in Africa, I was becoming aware of a rise in homophobia and transphobia. And this oppressive, sometimes violent, reaction, I think came from these conservative elements of many African societies, which I believe was born out of, in large part, out of the rise in visibility of equality rights here in the US and in Western Europe. In this globalized world, increased freedoms here can be seen as a threat to those who would deny the freedoms for people in their own countries.

And then, you have to combine that with the fact that you would have conservative Christian elements in this country, who were, perhaps, felt like they were losing sway and started to pivot towards other parts of the world, and starting... had these Evangelicals, sadly, going to places like Uganda and fanning the flames of bigotry. Encouraged by these Evangelicals in Uganda, bills like the Kill the Gays Bill were brought into court and passed into law. But we shouldn't think that this form of bigotry was entirely imported. There were local newspapers, like Red Pepper, who delighted in trawling Facebook accounts and taking people's photographs and putting them on the front page to expose, in this case, Uganda's 200 Top Homos.

Unsurprisingly, it's happened in many countries with this kind of reporting and with these laws. There's a sharp rise in homophobic attacks. The same homophobic arguments that, you know, many of us heard in a less-tolerant era in this country were... came out. Things like the supposed threats that gay men have towards children. It was particularly disturbing to see young kids marched out in support of homophobic laws as well. But later, when aid was withdrawn from the country, and just a couple of days before President Museveni of Uganda was due to come to this city to meet President Obama, the law was taken off the books by a technicality.

So, while we have... a lot of people will say that international pressure doesn't work, clearly... And the Ugandan Government would deny this too, but clearly it did in this case. So while Uganda got all the international attention, other African leaders also saw some kind of benefit in attacking a community that was too afraid to stand up for their rights. So, the Gambian Government was particularly vile and vocal. But, sadly, across the continent, there was widespread support for these homophobic laws, and it became a very difficult topic for me with my African friends.

Sadly, people that I respected and whose time I enjoyed being with almost entirely held these views that to be LGBT was somehow un-African. That it was imported by the west, that it was a threat to the family. Most of... everyone here will probably think that those sort of arguments are repulsive and ridiculous, but it's actually not that big a step to understand why they might believe these things. After all, there was only one narrative, and that narrative was that LGBT people were unnatural, immoral, and unholy.

Of course, you know, we have to also remember that it hasn't been that long that we've had more accepting... We as countries, have had more accepting views of LGBT rights. In fact, when I was 12 years old, my mother came to me and said that if I turned out to be gay that I would always be welcome in the house, but my "special friend" never would be. Thirty years later, my mum's really proud that I campaign for equality rights.

So, there's hope there, right? There's... But you know, you have to think, what changed her mind? She was exposed to other narratives that countered their views, those views. Views that said that LGBT people were not necessarily a threat to her sons. So, my mum gives me hope, societies and people can change. But, these LGBT narratives are very rarely heard on the African continent, and the community, in large part, is silenced and hidden.

But, this is not just an African issue. Clearly, half of the world makes consensual same-sex acts a crime. And, you know, many politicians see homophobia as a way to garner support from the conservative elements in their societies. This is the Malaysian Prime Minister, branding LGBT a... People. LGBT people as the enemies of Islam. Of course, Syria is a particularly dangerous place to be LGBT right now. One of the Syrian men I met in Lebanon told me that about... The Islamic State, when they take over a new town, or a new region, one of the first things they do is hunt down gay men or transgender women and capture means almost certain death.

Russia introduced homophobic laws. They made LGBT propaganda a crime, which makes campaigning for equality rights quite dangerous. And what followed? Again, was a spike in attacks on LGBT people. One group became popular on social media for baiting young gay men with hookup apps and filming them as they beat and abused them. So, in all these places, what we have is LGBT voices which struggle to be heard. Hate thrives where the perpetrators of hate control the narrative.

So I saw this single, dangerous narrative strengthen and become wider, and I wondered, as a storyteller, "How could I contribute?"