OUT OF AFRICA

Kenya Police Looking For Gang Blackmailing, Raping Gay Men

With all the hardship gays and lesbians face in East Africa, it turns out there’s a group of thugs looking to blackmail them: Gay Star News reports that police in Nairobi are asking gays and lesbians to come forward and help in an investigation of a group that has been extorting, and sometimes raping, its homosexual victims.

Members from the ring pose as gay on social-networking sites and invite married men out on dates. The goal is to get compromising pictures to use as blackmail, but if a victim can’t be coerced into a sexual encounter, he may be raped. One man claims he was told to pay 65,000 Kenyan shillings ($755) or his wife and friends would see explicit photos.
Extortion is one of the biggest problems facing Kenya’s LGBT community, claims Anthony Olouch of the Gay and Lesbian Coalition of Kenya (GALCK). Homosexual relations are illegal in Kenya but Olouch says victims can come forward without fear of reprisal: “A blackmail case shall be treated as such regardless of the circumstances that landed you in the hand of the blackmailers.”

We want to believe that, really. But day after day of reporting on all the atrocities committed by homophobic thugs wearing badges or judge’s robes has made us uncertain.

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By: Dan Avery
On: Jan 4, 2013
Tagged: Africa, Blackmail, international LGBT rights, Kenya

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7 Comments

No. 1 · 2eo
Follow the money trail back to evangelical churches in the United States.

Jan 4, 2013 at 8:34 am · @Reply ·
No. 2 · Brian
This sounds like entrapment of men who are cheating on their wives. It’s too simplistic to call the victims ‘gay men’ as many of them are not gay in the exclusive sense but bisexual for want of a better word. However, if they’re cheating, they’re cheating. I don’t think we should be connecting this to a gay rights issue.

Jan 4, 2013 at 8:45 am · @Reply ·
No. 3 · darkorient
I don’t think such group should be allowed to exist, but I don’t feel sorry for those cheating men.

Jan 4, 2013 at 10:14 am · @Reply ·
No. 4 · Lefty
To say this was “reported by” (the dreadful) Gay Star News suggests some kind of journalism on their part, but everything they say in their piece (and an earlier piece on the same thing several months ago) is lifted almost verbatim from several (far more in-depth) articles in Identity Magazine as much as a year ago by Denis Nzioka.
The credit for genuine reporting of this story and the real journalism involved to do so, including talking to sources etc (you know, basics of journalism) should go to Identity and Nzioka.
Just reprinting the work of proper journalists with minimal changes to their copy is not journalism. It’s churnalism.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Churnalism

The methods employed by these gangs and the alleged collusion with police are almost identical to similar conspiracies of the past and reminded me of a recent article in Slate by William McGowan about a massive extortion ring that operated across the US in the 1960s:

http://www.slate.com/articles/life/history/2012/07/the_chickens_and_the_bulls_the_rise_and_incredible_fall_of_a_vicious_extortion_ring_that_preyed_on_prominent_gay_men_in_the_1960s_.html

Jan 4, 2013 at 11:45 am · @Reply ·
No. 5 · Samuel
@Brian: Many gay men in the developing world are forced into marraige out of social pressure, a concept many westerners find hard to believe. Even women and girls face such social pressure… often by the family to marry an “appropriate” partner rather than someone of the girl’s choice.

While some men are truly bisexual, many of the married men in the developing world who have sex with other men(MSM) tend to be gay.

Jan 4, 2013 at 2:20 pm · @Reply ·
No. 6 · litper
There are still many “married men” even on american gay dating sites.

Jan 4, 2013 at 8:58 pm · @Reply ·
No. 7 · Mykey
This is especially rampant on gayromeo. Kenya is turning into the Ghanaian scam artists…

Jan 5, 2013 at 2:51 am · @Reply ·