The two tender, soft-spoken Ugandans shared a circle of good friends back in their hometown of Kampala. They were close with their families and they started a restaurant together. Life was good.

That was before everything went wrong. They were disowned by their families. Their restaurant was burned down. Their car was stoned and set ablaze.

And so they fled Uganda and came here, thousands of kilometers east with little more than the clothes on their backs. They came as brothers to live in a scorching refugee camp in northern Kenya. Surrounded by thousands of others who have fled wars and drought in neighboring countries, they came here to save their own lives.

These two men are not rebel soldiers. They are not fleeing war or drought, and they aren’t really brothers. They are lovers, and they came here to escape what they feared would be certain death after being outed last year in a country where homosexuality is widely considered a mortal sin, as “unnatural” as it is “un-African.”