This week on the Everyday Ambassador podcast we continue my follow up to the United Nations Beijing Plus 30 Gender Conference. As I shared last week, I was inspired by activists from Africa to learn more about the issues they are facing, and how multilateral diplomacy shapes their progress.
Our guest is Austin Bryan. Austin is an anthropologist, a soon-to-be professor of Global Health Studies at Allegheny College, and someone who has spent the last decade doing deep, field-based research in Uganda with sexual minority communities, healthcare workers, and activists fighting for dignity and access to care.
The issues Austin studies are difficult and complex—anti-LGBTQ+ legislation, HIV/AIDS policy, mental health, global development funding and the role of international organizations—but Austin brings to all of it clarity and compassion. This is someone who has not just done the academic work but has sat with people in their pain, their hope, and their fight to survive and be seen.
Austin provides some perspective on the impact of international health funding—particularly from the U.S. through programs like PEPFAR—not just as a lifeline for HIV treatment, but as an unexpected incubator for social movements. These funds enabled new forms of organizing, new language, and new spaces for LGBTQ+ rights in Uganda, even in the face of overwhelming adversity. As Austin put it, these programs changed not just lives, but relationships between people and their governments.
But now, in the wake of recent draconian laws and global funding cuts, those same communities are left in an impossible position. Still, Austin reminds us that hope persists—and he shares stories of courage and coalition-building, between LGBTQ+ advocates and sex workers, and even in the religious spaces where some are beginning to carve out affirming spiritual homes.
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