[1] One of their achievements include director Pepe Julian Onziema leading a coalition of 55 civil society organizations to overturn the Anti-Homosexuality Act of 2014.

[3][4] In response, four members of SMUG whose faces appeared in the magazine, David Kato Kisule, Kasha Nabagesera, Nabirye Mariam, and Pepe Julian Onziema "Patience", filed a petition with the High Court seeking to force the paper to cease distribution of the article.

On 15 September 2011, SMUG's executive director Frank Mugisha was named the recipient of the annual Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights Award for his activism.

[11] In 2012,[12] SMUG and several Ugandans, including Onziema, Mukasa, and Mugisha, together with the Center for Constitutional Rights initiated legal action in U.S. Federal District Court using the Alien Tort Statute to sue American evangelist Scott Lively for crimes against humanity for his work on the Uganda's Anti-Homosexuality Bill.

[13] Lively's work has been described as inciting the persecution of gay men and lesbians[12] and as "conduct ... actively trying to harm and deprive other people of their rights".

In August 2013, Judge Michael A. Ponsor ruled that the plaintiffs were on solid ground under international and federal law in rejecting a jurisdictional challenge to the suit.

[16] On the same year, Uganda's government draft the Ant Homosexual Bill that takes away basic human rights and criminalize anyone who identifies as a member LGBTQ Community .

In response to the shutdown order, executive director Frank Mugisha called it "a clear witch hunt rooted in systematic homophobia, fuelled by anti-gay and anti-gender movements.