Today I was working on a elderly lady's furnace. She's not in very good shape and requires a full time care taker, a young black girl who happened to be from Zimbabwe. The television was on fox news (the only channel anyone watches in Texas) when a story about the Ca prop 8 vote came on. We started chatting about the vote. I mentioned that over time I've come to believe that people are born gay, based on what my gay friends have told me.
The care taker ask me, then if that's true why are there no gay people in Zimbabwe? She indicated she'd never seen a gay person till she came to America. I didn't have an answer for her.
This is because many non-U.S. nations have incredibly low, and terribly negative, responses towards homosexuality. I suspect the care taker knew gay people in Zimbabwe; she just didn't realize it. For instance, in India, there are certainly significant minorities of gay people, but they cannot come out in the open. The culture is so repressive of the idea--your duty is to your family, your duty is to marry (by arrangement, often), produce kids, make a good home, take care of your family, etc. I have known many gay men in India who were married, had kids and incredibly, terribly, miserable; some of them had affairs, on the side, with other men. You do not, under any circumstances, disappoint your parents/family. You do not "shame" them with homosexuality.
I don't know the specifics of Zimbabwe law and culture well, but I would not be surprised this was the case there. Societal and religious pressures and persecution can force people underground, but it cannot overrule basic science. Here is an interesting article on homosexuality in Zimbabwe:
http://news.bbc.co.u...ents/143169.stmI would say the anecdotal evidence given by an individual on homosexuality in Zimbabwe probably does not reflect fact. It reminds me of a situation where I was talking about poverty in India with a young lady who was born and brought up in India. She told me poverty has all but been eradicated in India, since the tech boom, and her evidence was based on the fact that "the city she came from was doing really now". I travel to India frequently for social work and know the state of poverty in the under-developed portions of the country--when I pointed out that the Indian government's own statistics, given this very year, put the population of India who make under .50 cents a day at roughly 700+ million out of 1+ billion, she had no real answer. Her world was limited by her interactions, which was limited to one of the few urban centers that is prospering.