Katie G. Nelson | Love is: A Message from Uganda's Gay & Transgender Community Original title: Love Is: A Message from Uganda's Gay and Transgender Community / 2016

taking hands

by Douglas Messerli

 

Katie G. Nelson (director) Love is: A Message from Uganda's Gay & Transgender Community Original title: Love Is: A Message from Uganda's Gay and Transgender Community / 2016 [3 minutes]

This very short “statement” is as crude and simple as its title, yet given the fact that in Uganda being gay is not only illegal but that members of the LGBTQ community are subject to community discrimination, violence, arbitrary arrests, death threats, and murder, it may be one of the bravest of shot documents put on film.

    Except for one transgender young man, who lives in a safe house, the others in this work attempt to express how they define love while we see only their hands. No one except the transgender boy dares to show his or her face. It is not just a closeted world, but a society that the larger Ugandan culture has attempted to make disappear. As one young man’s sweatshirt proclaims, “I am the only gay in my village.” It is hard to imagine, accordingly, the bravery of even showing one’s hands or fragments of the body while speaking out about LGBTQ forms of love on film that these individuals chose to do is evident.

 

    As the young transgender boy sums it up: “We have to stand out and show that love can change anything.”

 

Los Angeles, March 27, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (March 2024).