“I felt like I was flying,” says Aloysius Ssali, recalling the day he was granted refugee status in the UK in 2010. He had been living on London’s streets for five years, homeless and undocumented since the UK didn’t formally recognize sexuality as a reason for protection at the time.
Ssali grew up as a gay man in Uganda, where homosexuality can be punished by life imprisonment and where he had been targeted for campaigning for LGBTQ rights. When he returned home in 2005 after studying in the UK, he was captured and tortured – a common occurrence in the country, which ranks 13th on the LGBTQ danger index.
After finally being granted asylum in the UK at age 33, his elated feeling was soon quashed due to further barriers. “Navigating the system as a gay man was very difficult,” he told LGBTQ Nation.
Wanting to support others in the same position, he founded Say it Loud Club, a community of LGBTQ asylum seekers and refugees helping others to navigate the UK immigration system. Over 10 years later, more claims were being granted based on sexuality and gender identity, and Ssali believed things were slowly progressing.
But in April, when the British Home Office announced plans to relocate asylum seekers to Rwanda, Ssali was “horrified”.
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