Sunday, October 14, 2012

Remembering the Price Some People Still Pay for Love: A Documentary about Execution of Gay Teens in Iran



As a follow-up to what I posted yesterday regarding Box Turtle Bulletin's report about a horrifying attack on people gathered last week in a gay-affirming club in Moscow:


At his The Authentic Life blog, William Dameron wrote recently about a project of Wajahat Ali Abbasi, a filmmaker who is producing a film about the execution of two gay teenaged boys in Iran in 2005.  The film will be entitled "Sin," and the video clip above is from a Kickstarter fundraising page that has been set up to help gather support for the project. 

As Dameron notes, when he first heard of Wajahat Ali Abbasi's project, he thought to himself, "This can't happen here."  But:

My first thought after receiving this e-mail was “This is another part of the world, it couldn’t happen here.”  But then I thought about our politicians who spew lies and hate about me; about the pastor from my home state of North Carolina who called for gays to be executed; about one of my own family members who called me sick and will not speak to me; about the former class member who hurled a homophobic epithet at us during our high school reunion. 
De-humanizing a population makes it possible to extinguish them.  In eight countries, including Iran, being gay is punishable by death.

The GOP platform in the 2012 election cycle is the most overtly anti-gay platform the Republican party has ever offered the American people.  As I've been telling family members, friends, and acquaintances who inform me that they intend to vote GOP next month for the sake of their pocketbooks, and they certainly don't intend any harm to me, they're deceiving themselves.

But I'm not deceived.  And I do very decidedly take their "economic" choice personally, indeed.

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