Caught on camera: the lobbying that legitimises bigotry against LGBT communities around the world
Last night’s Hunted: Gay and Afraid was a documentary about the recent global wave of regressive anti-LGBT legislation – and not the first, either. The excellent 2012 documentary, Call Me Kuchu, explored similar territory in 2012, as did BBC2’s Stephen Fry: Out There in 2013 and Reggie Yates’ Extreme Russia, earlier this year.
All of those documentaries benefited from compelling personal insights into how individuals in the LGBT community have been affected. This Dispatches film, fronted by the former Newsnight reporter Liz MacKean, took a different tack.
MacKean’s film focused not on the victims but on the “villains”, specifically the World Congress of Families, an organisation which, though based in the US, has tentacles stretching into Europe, Africa and beyond. View footage of any high-level meeting to draft draconian, homophobic legislation, anywhere in the world, and it seems you’ll find a WCF member or affiliate lurking in the corner of the frame.
Figures such as the WCF managing director, Pastor Larry Jacobs, and Brian Brown, president of the National Organisation for Marriage, were tracked down by MacKean and confronted with the accusation that the effect of their lobbying can be to legitimise violence.
This isn’t news to viewers of the above-mentioned documentaries. It was striking to note how the same lobbying tactics have been replicated from country to country: First, select a biddable local politician as a frontman, then falsely conflate homosexuality with child abuse, spuriously blame gay people for public health issues and repeat as necessary.
Sadly, MacKean’s strategy of pointing out the logical flaws in these arguments seemed to have little effect. Bigotry rarely responds to reason.
Over on Fox, Will Ferrell and Kirsten Wiig are continuing their run of strangely unfunny TV genre spoofs and I still don’t get it. The Spoils Before Dying, which began a six-part series last night, is a follow-up to The Spoils of Babylon, and in the same vein as last month’s A Deadly Adoption. None of them could raise a wry smile in an enclosed space during a laughing-gas leak.
This is mysterious because, once again, the cast is great. The Wire’s Michael Kenneth Williams plays Rock Banyon, a jazz musician who gets embroiled in a murder mystery when his chanteuse friend Fresno Foxglove (former Saturday Night Live cast member Maya Rudolph) is found dead. Kristen Wiig is another singer, Delores DeWinter, and Haley Joel Osment, better known as the kid out of The Sixth Sense, is all grown up now as Alistair St Barnaby-Bixby-Jones, Rock’s agent with a dodgy English accent.
In hard-bitten film noir, writers Matt Piedmont and Andrew Steele have found a more recognisable – and therefore better – subject for spoofing than the schlocky Seventies mini-series that The Spoils of Babylon took aim at. Here, both the soundtrack and the styling are spot-on and enjoyable in their own right. Yet the series’ very slickness is a problem; it just isn’t silly enough to work as pastiche.
Still, you have to admire the tenacity of Ferrell et al. They seem determined to continue donning wigs and calling it comedy for as long as audiences will let them get away with it. That’s good news for anyone who feels they’re in on the injokes. The rest of us are left waiting for a punchline that never comes. Different tack: in ‘Hunted: Gay and Afraid’, Liz MacKean focused not on the victims but on the ‘villains’