“He came to me and beat me pretty bad. He asked if I was gay, if I was a lesbian. I was so scared I told him I wasn’t,” explains the 25-year-old with cropped black hair, who like many people in Mongolia goes by one name.
Zaya, who lives in the capital Ulan Bator, says while her mother and sisters have gradually accepted her sexual orientation, her father is not so understanding and she continues to hide the truth from him.
“We’re scared of what will happen. He’s an aggressive man, he just wouldn’t understand,” says Zaya, who wears a T-shirt with the slogan ‘Let peace begin with me’ on the back. Zaya is not alone in her fear. Discrimination and abuse toward sexual minorities in Mongolia is widespread, according to a report presented to the UN Human Rights Council in November last year.
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In Geneva this week, the United Nations Human Rights Council passed a wide ranging resolution supporting LGBT rights. The United States helped to lead an 85 countries into supporting the resolution, which including a statement on the decriminalization of LGBT conduct in countries where engaging same sex relations are illegal.
As a child in Uganda, John Bosco remembers hearing an old wives’ tale that if a man fell asleep in the sun and it crossed over him, he would wake up as a woman. “I used to try that as a kid,” says John now, some 30 years later. He sits at a table in a busy cafe across the road from the railway station in Southampton, his fingers playing with the handle of a glass of hot chocolate.
