In historic shift, Botswana declares homosexuality is not a crime

When Letsweletse Motshidiemang was growing up in a village in northern Botswana, there wasn't exactly a name for what he was. Certainly no one ever used words like gay, or queer, or LGBTQ. In fact, no one called him much of anything at all. And in that silence, he says, was a quiet acceptance. “People knew I was different, but I was surrounded by people who loved me,” he says. “I was never taught to hate myself.”

So it wasn’t they who first suggested he might have to change who he was. “It was the laws,” he says. Men like him, he learned as a teenager, couldn’t get married to other men. They couldn’t start families. Their very existence, in the eyes of the police and the courts and