This is part of the Queer Film Blogathon hosted by Caroline over at Garbo Laughs and Andreas and Ashley over at Pussy Goes Grrr (who I've been neglecting to mention; please accept my apologies, guys. My bad.).
I'm going to a Gay Pride celebration in St. Louis this weekend. I have mixed feelings about this because even here in the Midwest, in an ostensibly "red" state, Gay Pride celebrations have largely ceased being about politics or a struggle for rights. They've been tamed. They're "family" events now. They've mostly been co-opted to sell a hip young demographic alcohol or cell phones or whatever. Oh, there will be booths dedicated to politics, sure, but I'll cringe at the drag show (as I always do), I'll chafe at the bemused toleration of my own letter(s) in the GLBT alphabet soup, I'll gripe about the fact that the Stonewall riots happened in June rather than some more temperate month, and I'll come home, once again, wondering why I went in the first place. Things are not so rosy elsewhere in the world, however, and if I ever need a reminder of why these events are important, I need only think of the lot of GLBT people in sub-Sahara Africa, who are struggling to assert their own pride in who they are, and who are under constant threat. I should think of Uganda in particular, where the legislature has been toying with the passage of a bill that would make homosexuality punishable by death. The lot of gays and lesbians in Uganda is the subject of Call Me Kuchu (2012, directed by Katherine Fairfax Wright and Malika Zouhali-Worrall), a documentary that mostly focuses on the work of David Kato, who founded Uganda's first gay rights organization.
If you've followed the story of Uganda's anti-gay pogrom, you may have heard of David Kato. He was murdered in early 2011 after he sued the country's most prominent paper, The Rolling Stone (no relation to the American magazine), for publishing photos of him and outing him to the world as a gay man. His case put a kibosh on the paper's practice of outing "homos" (as their headlines screamed). The filmmakers met Kato before this, though, and followed the entire process of his lawsuit and of the operation of his fledgling movement. It listens to his friends and gets to know them a little. The movie offers a portrait of life in Uganda, too, to put everything it shows into some kind of context. Kato was killed mid-shoot, and the footage from his funeral is among the most heartbreaking things I've ever seen in a movie.
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