AK Soufflé: Global perspective
It’s over a month since I started to make the programme Queersay for Latest LGBT+ TV and I am shocked by what I now realise had become my own complacency. I thought that I was well informed, motivated and aware. It seems that I am not, and though I have been hardly burying my head in the sand I was simply happy to allow snippets of news from the gay world across my life.
Five weeks in and ten shows recorded and I now see that the global problems that affect men and women who are LGBT+ are as worrying if not more worrying than ever. We have come a long way in the UK, we have so much to be proud of in terms of our rights and one day, maybe, we will be able to live our lives without having to use that word equality, once we have it that word will become redundant.
But beyond our shores, well things are very different. It’s not just in the Arab states either, yes there are problems there, huge problems of homophobia that manifest themselves not just in the form of oppression but in cruelty, torture and murder too. In Chechnya the powers that be are currently “ridding” themselves of homosexual men, despite them claiming that in their country there is no such thing.
We raped and plundered the planet for our own gain
But what came home to me this week, prompted by the eloquent Geoffrey Bowden, is that these problems also exist in countries that remain part of the commonwealth. Now I suspect that some people will tell me that the word commonwealth should be started with a capital “C”, but I am not going to even consider dignifying it with that. Until the commonwealth looks closely at homophobia across the member states it will have to make do with a small “c”, small to indicate the scant attention that it is paying to the increasing horrors that are perpetrated there.
The commonwealth is based on our imperial behaviour, colonisation and our oppressive acquisitive past behaviour. We raped and plundered the planet for our own gain, and I suspect that we fear upsetting the colonial apple-cart for fear of losing out on resources like oil. Well it’s simply not good enough.
The same applies of course to the christian church and no doubt other faiths who were again part of that global take-over, shame on you too. I must pay closer attention, rid myself of complacency and start to shout, Pride, it’s a global issue!
