Documentary About LGBT In Uganda Doing Wonders Across Africa And U.S.

A new documentary explores the American connection to the virulently homophobic climate in Uganda.

When people with opposing viewpoints engage in dialogue, change is possible. It doesn’t happen all the time, or always easily, but it happens.
That’s what filmmaker Roger Ross Williams is seeing with the dialogue around God Loves Uganda, his powerful new documentary about American fundamentalist Christians’ export of homophobia to Africa.
“The most amazing thing happened at this recent screening in Malawi,” says Williams, whose film has been shown around the world and is now having a theatrical release in the U.S.
After a group of clergy and laypeople, the latter largely LGBT but closeted, viewed the movie, they engaged in a nationally broadcast debate about homosexuality, with most of the religious leaders condemning it. But then a few of the LGBT people in the audience made coming-out statements, and one of the ministers recanted the antigay comments he had made earlier. “I’m withdrawing my statement,” he said. “Gays and lesbians are good.”
“That’s why I made the film — moments like that,” says Williams. The minister who recanted said he’d never met a gay person, at least one he knew was gay and the film and the dialogue made him realize they were humans like him. “They had built up this monster in their minds,” Williams says of the religious leaders.
In making God Loves Uganda, Williams found that many of the fundamentalist Christians spreading their antigay dogma abroad are not monsters either, although their message is a harmful one.
“What really surprised me was how nice and well-mannered the fundamentalist evangelicals were,” he says. “I had in my mind, as a gay man, demonized them, the same way they had demonized us. … They’re really nice and you like them, and they’re preaching something really dangerous and don’t even realize it’s dangerous.”