“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.

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* "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