Patience Akumu has written about the lives – and deaths – of gay activists for five years in the Kampala Observer. Here she explains how a deep-rooted discrimination blights her country

I never meant to write about gay rights in Uganda. The issue just crept up on me as I got lost listening to the cries of battered women and holding the hands of dying children.

These faceless, mysterious, ominous homosexuals tagged at my skirts and beckoned my heart to look their way. I looked for a moment and knew it would be cruel to turn away again. I never meant to give up the possibility of a lucrative career in the law just to be an advocate for the accursed and rejected – and to be accursed and rejected myself. I never meant to spend two hours before my computer, thinking of ways to explain why on earth I meddle with homosexuality just to break the hearts of my kinsmen, disappoint my father and worry my fiancé; to cause my mother and daughter to be pitied.

Homosexuality is illegal in Uganda and in 2009 a bill that suggested the death penalty for certain homosexual acts was tabled before parliament, highlighting the brutal, government-sanctioned discrimination against sexual minorities that blights my country.

I ran into the gay issue at 22, a fresh law graduate and young journalist eager to make her mark and willing to do jobs no other journalist wanted to do. It was a world where it was all right, even heroic, to question the decades-old regime and its ways on other things. If your camera got smashed or you slept in jail for covering a riot, the social media would sing your praise for weeks and proudly share pictures of your defiance.

But heaven help you if you wrote about homosexuals, unless of course you were condemning the havoc they are wreaking on culture and religion. Or "investigating" how they are infiltrating schools, spreading sexually transmitted diseases, causing anal fistulas and forcefully recruiting minors to join a "gay army".

Reporting anything else would immediately cause you to be looked at with suspicion: "Are you gay yourself? Do you need to visit Butabika [mental hospital]? Are white people paying you to do this?"

Yet homosexuality stared us all in the face. A comment here and there from a law don saying it was a human rights issue; a brief newspaper story about a homosexual who had disappeared; a call by a minister who thought homosexuals should leave the country; defiant homosexuals wearing masks and appearing on TV and police threatening to arrest them. Who were these people? For a long time, when I thought of homosexuals I only saw the masks and the innocent-looking boy who was expelled from high school for purportedly being gay.

It was forbidden and altogether exciting territory and I dived in without a care in the world – if it was the kind of story that my media house was willing to publish, then why not? I still remember my first meeting with gay rights activists Pepe Onziema and Frank Mugisha at a restaurant near my workplace. I took a friend along for this "dangerous" assignment. We shared chips (my friend said the worst part of the interview was having to eat with gay people) and talked about a lot of stuff I had heard in the human rights class at university – the right to equality, freedom from discrimination, privacy.

They also spoke about things I had never imagined. Gays and lesbians were being raped, sometimes with sticks; parents had banished their children for being gay and now the children threatened suicide. A father had tried to beat to death the partner of his lesbian daughter. Surely these are things the media should cover! All the women's and children's rights stories I had written about had turned me into a voice for the voiceless, the one whom NGOs loved to call for anything human rights related because of my "refreshing" and "caring" journalism.

For me, covering gay rights was simply an extension of the good work. I never really expected the hate emails, the vile Facebook messages or the face- to-face insults. No one warned me that there would be suspicious looks from colleagues, lost friendships and stern warnings not to write too many gay stories because they might affect the paper's circulation. And no one told me that having a baby would make me even more loathsome – a hypocrite campaigning for gay rights while she herself has a husband!

Until I had a baby, I could not have cared less if the whole world thought I was gay, as long as I knew I was doing the right (and professional) thing.

But now, when I am home in the evenings playing with my daughter or watching her sleep, I scroll through the hate mail, remember the venom in my colleagues' eyes and imagine what life would be like for her with a mother who does what I do. But then again, I tell myself, I would not be any worse off if I was reporting on politics, or the army or the country's botched economy.

Either way, I still run the risk of failing to get admission for her at the top schools in the country. The only difference is that I will not have a sympathetic public by my side, just some insignificant minorities.

My fiancé, while supportive, always warns that I underestimate the dangers of my job. That my passion blinds me to the hate, that our society is just not prepared to hear my message.

Sometimes, before he comes home, I think of his warnings, caress my degree certificate and toy with the idea of applying for a job in the law. I dream of a life where I am an easy heroine – only talking about the women and children whom we all agree deserve better. One where I turn my back on homosexuals because, well, why should I care? I am not gay and I do not have any gay relatives (at least none I know of). They will survive, those homosexuals. I am sure. On days like this, I go to bed with one resolve: I will be damned if I write one more story on homosexuality.

But then the morning comes with a story about a clobbered gay man. Or a text from Frank telling me that one of the gay people I visited has died of Aids and that there are many more about to follow in his wake.

Yes, the morning comes with newspaper headlines calling on Ugandans to "hang them" and no one seems to care. A phone call from the gay NGOs: "Patience this, Patience that"… Can't they just leave me alone? I realise that, unlike me, they cannot just wake up one day and walk away from the issue of homosexuality.

My story for the last five years has been the story of their lives and deaths. Again, I hear them creeping up on me and I know that it is a story that must be told. And if I do not tell it, the rest of the world might do the job for my country. And again say we are the worst place to be gay. And we are not, really. There is just a big misunderstanding.

I just have to find a way to show them; while letting my countrymen and women know that gay people do not bite. It is time to stifle my human desire to be embraced by all and sundry and to tell the stories that must be told.

Patience Akumu, who works for the Kampala Observer, was a winner of the 2013 David Astor journalism awards, nominated for her work on human rights in Uganda