recap one: how it started

Let’s start with the context.

This project began last summer, mid-June. During the day I was participating in a tech internship in San Francisco, focused on supporting local lgbtq youth. By night, I was scrambling over a research trip I was supposed to start later in the summer. It involved me traveling to four places around the world and documenting the experiences of gender minorities in the Ugandan diaspora with a comic, titled Ink On Parchment. Nearly everything was set… but the project fell through. Technicalities with the IRB (aka: the council that ensures human-centric research protects both the researchers and participants from harm) elongated the application timeline to the point where I couldn’t be given funding until it was resolved, and suddenly I had a research grant but no project I could apply it to. I was given an ultimatum — design a new project that didn’t need IRB approval, and the grant could be updated to match.

By the time I returned home two weeks later, I had developed a fresh project proposal. It pulled from the key questions I was asking with my initial project, shifted to fit my circumstances. I still had time to finalize it before I needed to begin on it, but I thought I had it all figured out by the time I stepped on the plane.

I was aware of the discrimination against the lgbtq community in Uganda. In fact, my initial research grant, in which Northeastern funds paid for my trip to Uganda, hinged on the promise that I would be extremely careful to not associate myself with the lgbtq community both in my project and generally during my trip, for my protection and the protection of my project’s participants. I had reluctantly accepted those terms at the time. Now that I was landlocked, however, my only excuse for keeping my queer identity out of this project was an estranged fear of rejection. My parents were tuned into every step of this project’s development, with my extended family one step behind, waiting for a masterpiece on the nuances of the Ugandan identity. But if such nuance included queerness?

That lesson had been learned a summer ago, after coming out to my immediate family. I didn’t need to learn it twice.

Nearly placated, I designed a project that was quiet, digestible. Safe, reasonable, "for the best, really!" As long as I kept my queerness and ugandanness separate, everyone got what they wanted from me. Proportioned. Easy to chew.

That was the plan on Day Zero, and I thought it’d be the plan for the rest of the summer.

But then Week One arrived, and I realized the true gravity of this situation. Not just my situation, but that of my Ugandan, lgbtq community.

I was aware of the bill making its rounds in the Ugandan government, and that it was bad news for the lgbtq community. But then the bill was finalized and passed in late May. Word got back to me a month later.

The revelation that followed set the course of this project, and on courage. was born.

The first 10 weeks of on courage.’s development was a rollercoaster of revelations and learning, fear and hope. You can find an archive of that journey here.

---

SM