“a worldwide punishing squad”

After my last blog post offered up a rather meager serving of hope for LGBT progress in Africa, you might wonder if there’s something more you can do. Well, John Waters (you know, the Pink Flamingos writer/director) has given it some thought.

“It’s illegal to be gay in seventy-six countries around the world,” John Waters says. How can that be changed? The gays have gotta rise up! Waters makes a few suggestions on how we could do that. 

Let’s drop a massive stink bomb on Uganda and have our own [gay] navy ‘Seal and Squeal’ squads round up all the American Christian evangelical preachers who went there and provoked Uganda’s parliament to try* to pass a bill to impose the death penalty ‘for the offense of homosexuality.’ We’d spray their thinning hair with industrial strength hair spray and light a match. Voooom! Off with their hairdos. Then we’d track down the snitches who obeyed the other, more liberal Ugandan law that required heterosexuals ‘to report a gay person to authorities within twenty-four hours of hearing of their homosexuality of be jailed for up to three years in prison.’ Why this twenty-four-hour grace period? I wonder. So straights could get their hair done, flowers arranged, homes interior-decorated before the most obvious of their gay merchants were hauled away? Fag hags would be forced to go underground, where they would form their own railroad of resistance to smuggle out queers and lesbians of all degree of butchness, man of whom would later form the Lavender Avengers, who would lead a worldwide punishing squad of queer revenge.

_______

* "Try” no more; Uganda has the evil law on the books. 

source:

Mr. Know-It-All: the tarnished wisdom of a filth elder

by John Waters

2019. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York

Cause for hope in Africa? Or just more lies ...

LGBT news out of Africa is often bad. In spring of 2023 Uganda enacted a new death-to-the-gays law. The first attempt several years ago got struck down by the Ugandan Supreme Court. Ghana’s legislature just passed — by unanimous voice vote — a whole new anti-gay law. The president of Ghana hasn’t yet signed it. Do the politicians who enact these laws really consider queer people a threat? Or are they pandering to an anti-gay populace? Are they merely trying to distract observers from the lousy jobs they’re doing? Whatever the motivation, laws like these have only one effect — pain. They certainly don’t help anyone.  

Chike Frankie Edozien quotes Goodluck Jonathan, Nigeria’s former president, at a London conference saying about an anti-gay law he himself promulgated:

“When it comes to equality, we must all have the same rights, we must all have the same rights as Nigerian citizens. In the light of the deepening debates for all Nigerians and other citizens of the world to be treated equally and without discrimination, and with the clear knowledge that the issue of sexual orientation is still evolving, the nation may at the appropriate time revisit the law.”  

Were Jonathan’s words in London a good sign or just pandering? He probably got asked about the law. I imagine Jonathan knew that justifying himself by condemning the gays in a forum in London would not go over well. 

Just days after his pronouncement came the grisly massacre of forty-nine gay people by a deranged gunman at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Florida. [The ex-president of Nigeria] sent out a message of condolence to the grieving families via Twitter. That small gesture … understandably confused [readers, Goodluck Jonathan having been responsible for] an extremely anti-gay law for which there had been small public clamor.

When the anti-gay law in Nigeria was originally enacted there was criticism by at least two African presidents. Former presidents, anyway. “[F]ormer Mozambican president Joaquim Chissano came out forcefully against it.” Fetus Mogae, former president of Botswana, also spoke up for LGBT equality. “A change in attitude is underway," Edozien says. “The fact that Burkina Faso, Cape Verde, Djibouti, Guinea Bissau, Cote d’Ivoire, Niger, Mali, Lesotho, Mozambique, Sao Tome, the Seychelles, Rwanda, the two Congos, the Central African Republic, and South Africa don’t criminalize their gay citizens leaves me hopeful.”

Unlike Uganda in its embrace of American hate-evangelist Scott Lively, South Africa refused entry in 2016 to “Steven Anderson, a pastor at Faithful Word Baptist Church in Tempe, Arizona” who was plotting an anti-gay crusade. “South Africa ha[s] again led the way, becoming the first African nation to expressly ban someone from entry because of his homophobia.”

This isn’t my first post about a former African leader saying something hopeful once he was no longer in power. Check out this from Feb 2023: Human beings who can do what they like 

source:

Lives of Great Men

by Chike Frankie Edozien

2017. Team Angelica, London UK

how they amused themselves

Of two 9th century Chinese poets:

“They both lived in poverty because of poetry until their deaths. And yet all their lives they amused themselves by writing lines about their suffering.”

source:

Mei Yao-ch’en and the Development of Early Sung* Poetry

Jonathan Chaves

1976. Columbia University Press, New York

*Sung is a ruling dynasty in China