On January 26 2011 Ugandan human rights activist David Kato, co-founder and advocacy officer of the organisation Sexual Minorities Uganda (SMUG), was murdered in his home – shortly after he had won a lawsuit against a tabloid newspaper called “Rolling Stone”. The magazine had published his name and photograph amongst the ones of another 99 supposedly gay people under the headline “Hang them”. Its makers were sentenced to pay 1.5 million Ugandan shillings plus court costs to Kato and the other injured persons in this case.
The activist, who had left Uganda in 1992 and after spending 6 years in South Africa came back to fight for sexual equality, was amongst the most visible opponents of the Anti-Homosexuality Bill, a draconian legislative proposal brought to Uganda’s parliament in 2009. 22-year-old Nsubuga Sydney, who was the prime suspect in the murder case, was sentenced to 30 years in jail in February 2011.
On Thursday, one year after his murder, more than 100 activists have paid tribute to Kato in his hometown Kampala. In honor and remembrance of his live and his achievements Jamaican LGBT and human rights activist Maurice Tomlinson will be the first person to receive the David Kato Vision & Voice award in London tomorrow.

Also, a new documentary entitled “Call Me Kuchu” pays tribute to the live and work of Kato and other Ugandan activists. The film project by US filmmakers Katherine Fairfax Wright & Malika Zouhali-Worrall was started in 2010, shortly after the Anti-Homosexuality Bill had been introduced in Uganda’s Parliament. “Call Me Kuchu” will premiere at the Berlin Film Festival on Saturday, February 11 and will have two more screening dates, which you find on the films website. The directors are currently seeking for support on Kickstarter to professionally finish the movie before the premiere and start a campaign for it. The donations will also cover the flights and visas for one of the Ugandan LGBT activists featured in the film, so that he or she can join the film team in Berlin. In conjunction with the anniversary of Kato’s death the filmmakers have also just released a short film, which gives a first insight on their recordings of Kato. You can watch “The Will Say We Are Not Here” on the New York Times website.

Here’s the trailer for “Call Me Kuchu”:

http://callmekuchu.com/

Great blog about the African LGTB rights movement: http://www.mask.org.za/

Another last-minute announcement for all Berliners out there: Today will be the first evening of a series of screenings of movies by French queer underground filmmaker Lionel Soukaz at basso, Berlin (187 Köpenicker Str.) – unfortunately it is overlapping with the screenings of films by Kanadian filmmaker Colin Campbell at Arsenal I posted about yesterday. The event will take place today and on Friday and starts with the movie “Race d’Ep” (engl. title “The Homosexual Century”), a semi-documentary / esay about the origins of the gay liberation movement four different eras of gay culture from the early 20th century (Wilhelm Von Gloeden) to the seventies shot by Soukaz in collaboration with writer and philosopher Guy Hocquenghem in 1979 (Hocquenghem plays a main role in it). The film caused a scandal in France and got an X-rating at the time. According to the basso newsletter I just received the film starts at around 9:30, Soukaz will present the screening himself. The movie will be shown only in French. On Friday Soukaz will also show a couple of his short movies as well as his experimental film “IXE” from 1980. Anyone who won’t make it to the event has the possibilty to watch the second and fourth part of “Race d’Ep” on YouTube and the entire “IXE” right here. Here are a couple of stills of “Race d’Ep”:

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For Berliners the weekend already starts at 5 pm today with the opening of Dean Sameshima‘s exhibition “Cruise or be Cruised” at Peres Projects gallery in Berlin-Mitte (Grosse Hamburger Strasse 17). The show has got the same title as Sameshima’s awesome gay-(sub-)culture-blog which I featured in the “Good Blogs” series a while ago and seems to have a similar approach: The Peres website describes it like this: “Cruise or be Cruised is a continued investigation into a world of maleness, nostalgia, desire and fetish consisting of new paintings and photographs. This body of work references the punk rock and DIY movements that have surrounded and informed the artist since his teens and expands on his Warholian practice of silkscreening using images with multiple coded meanings.” The exhibition runs until June 25.

You can continue the evening just around the corner at c/o Berlin, where the last evening of Todd Sekuler and Aykan Safoğlu’s film series in conjunction with the Mappelthorpe exhibition will take place. The evening entitled “A Queer Portrait of America” (Facebook page here) features a lecture by Jonathon David Katz, the curator of the exhibition “Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture”, which was shown National Portrait Gallery in Washington until February. Katz will discuss the removal of David Wojnarowicz’ film “A Fire in My Belly” from the exhibition and talk about the politics of queer art and censorship in the US. You will also have the chance to see the film itself as well as Kenneth Angers little masterpiece Scorpio Rising from 1964.