AK Soufflé: Genocide

Producing our new news review show QueerSay has been a real eye-opener. I thought, wrongly, that I was keeping up with news from the LGBT+ world, I felt informed and conscientious – I was far from either. Six week and twelve shows in and I now realise that what I had become is complacent.

Here in the UK we have achieved a lot, we have civil partnerships, we have marriage and we have a level of acceptance that some of us back in the 1970s could only dream of. George Montague has after years of campaigning finally received an apology. Life is sweet – or is it?

A week ago whilst researching the show I found a story about a group of lesbians who had been violently attacked after a night out. One, brutally beaten, had lost seven teeth! Now what kind of inhuman being does that to another, female or male.

Over in Chechnya things are really bad right now and the authorities are waging a vile genocidal regime against homosexual men

Oh yes, we have achieved a lot on one level, but what we have not achieved is understanding and whilst animals, they are nothing more than that and the word demeans animals, so let me say savages, savages are still there breathing and venting their vile prejudice against people who are simply expressing their own joy at being who they really are.

Over in Chechnya things are really bad right now and the authorities are waging a vile genocidal regime against homosexual men. It’s odd as the president only a few weeks back denied that there were any homosexuals there. Short memory? I think not, simply blind prejudice which is now manifesting itself in homicidal lunacy.

It’s even worse when you hear that the families of these gay men are being ordered to kill their own, and one uncle it is reported threw his gay nephew from the 9th floor of a building to his death.

So while we sit in our comfy gay village, sipping coffee and holding hands and bantering about how sweet life is, we should be thinking of these appalling atrocities taking place in Russian state right now and demanding that Putin gets off his complacent ass and sorts it out. Every world leader needs to stand up to this and let Russia know that in 2017 this is simply not acceptable. Who would ever have thought that we would be using the word concentration camp again – and not in a historical context?