Call Me Kuchu by Katherine Fairfax Wright and Malika Zouhali-Worrall, and: God Loves Uganda by Roger Ross Williams (review)

The documentary Call Me Kuchu presents an almost palpable rendering of Uganda’s fervent antihomosexual social, political, and religious atmosphere, concentrating on the activities and voices of extremists. Scenes of LGBT dance and drag parties are juxtaposed with scenes of loud preachers shouting that homosexuals are destroying Uganda and America. In 2009 David Bahati introduced the so-called “antihomosexuality bill” in Uganda’s Parliament, which was passed into law in December 2013. Under this legislation homosexuals can receive the death penalty, and it also criminalizes the failure to report homosexuals to the government, even one’s own homosexual child.

This film shows the ignorance, fear, and misunderstanding against which the Ugandan LGBT community struggles, both in families and in the public sphere. Public figures, such as an editor of the Ugandan tabloid Rolling Stone, laugh into the camera about homosexuals’ struggles and appear oblivious or uncaring about their own role in inciting violence; an example is Rolling Stone’s well-known “outing” of supposedly gay Ugandans with a published list accompanied by photographs and headlined with the phrase “hang them!” The measures by which the newspaper collected its information resembled KGB informant tactics, with reporters sent undercover to pose as homosexuals themselves. In the film the LGBT activist David Kato is shown taking this newspaper to court, where the newspaper’s lawyer and other legal officials display the same insensitive attitude as the interviewed editor. The lawyer argues, for example—contrary even to any statutory law at the time—that the individuals whose pictures were displayed on the front page were criminals and therefore had no right to privacy. Interviews with other journalists, lawyers, and politicians confirm the misapprehensions that inform a culture of hate; homosexuals are said to prey on minors, to perform homosexual acts for money, and to be part of terrorist bombing plots in Uganda. Other points of contention are that homosexuality is bad for Uganda’s prosperity, that homosexuals are against procreation, and that homosexual acts are unnatural, immoral, and evil.

The film also presents interviews with LGBT activists who recount their personal stories, including a gay man who was raped as a teenager by a family member attempting to “correct” his sexual orientation and a lesbian who took the bold step of leaving a loveless five-year marriage in order to live as her true self. A central focus of the film is David Kato himself, a key LGBT activist and the first “out” gay man Uganda who had chosen to return to his home country and confront the hostility, including threats to his life, despite having lived for six years as an openly gay man in South Africa. Kato was brutally murdered in 2011 while the film was still being produced and shortly after winning the court case against Rolling Stone. As a central focus of the film he seems to be surrounded by an aura of martyrdom, at least from the point of view of our retrospective knowledge; there is a sense that his murder is actually foreshadowed at an LGBT/NGO meeting where there is talk about the need to spill blood before change can take place. Another inspiring figure in the film is Bishop Christopher Senyonjo, an octogenarian who was excommunicated from the Anglican Church of Uganda because of his support for the LGBT community and who went on to open up a safe house and counseling center for LGBT people.

The 2013 film God Loves Uganda, directed by Roger Ross Williams, examines the role of American religious conservatives in the antihomosexuality furor in Uganda, starting in the late 1990s and the preaching of Scott Lively (whose claims include the insistence that both the Nazi Party and the United Nations were...