Angels in America and World AIDs Day

I attended my local area pickets on yesterdays public sector strikes however I'm a little delayed as my camera has had a few faults I'm in the process of fixing. Expect a post on it either tonight or tomorrow until then heres a quick post to commemorate this years World Aids Day, its a review by a very clever chap Kyle Kalgreen of an important and influential film made to explore what it meant to be Gay and have AIDs in the 1980s and early 90s in America. Back when AIDs was considered an exclusive form of "gay plague" and one in four Americans believed AIDs was a divine punishment from God.

The film though very long is brilliant and the review is both touching and very informative. While it is refreshing to see that in America and Western Europe the stigma surrounding the LGBT community and AIDs suffers has improved with casual bigotry becoming as taboo as racially orientated insults and moves to equalise civil rights gaining momentum other parts of the world are embracing the hysteria. In Russia with have the major and historic St Petersburg Municipality banning "homosexual propaganda" and many nations in Africa that coincidentally just happen to have a large Evangelical/fundamentalist Christian or Muslim religious population have begun to take harsh measures.

I'm sure most will be aware of the Ugandan bill to make Homosexuality a capital offence. But thats just the tip of the iceberg, in both South Africa and Zimbabwe prisons have a policy of "corrective rape" of homosexual prisoners to "set them straight" fortunately in South Africa the abhorrant practice is being shelved



In Ghana the government empowered police to lock up all the gays and in Cameroon a Gay person can recieve a maximum sentence of Five years.
There are sadly plenty more examples of this absurd abusive behaviour but I think just one of these I've mentioned should be enough to elicit disgust and illustrate why World AIDs day is an important day for education and action.