The British Commonwealth And Anti-Homosexual Law

The British Commonwealth was first formed in 1931,
after a 1926 conference that passed the second Balfour declaration.
The first such declaration having been made in 1917.
In 1926, including Britain, The Commonwealth
was defined as being six or seven countries.
The Irish Free State left it in 1949, never to return.

Nowadays the number of commonwealth coutries
and former commonwealth countries is 57, combined.

Of those 24 have rescinded or updated the laws
that were written in the days of empire, to make consent
the basis of all modern law about same sex sexual activity.

The 24 are Australia, Bahamas, Belize, Botswana, Canada, Cyprus, Dominica, Fiji, India, Lesotho, Malta, Mauritius, Mozambique, Nauru, New Zealand, Palau, Rwanda, St Kitts and Nevis, Samoa, Seychelles, Singapore, South Africa, Trinidad and Tobago (subject to appeals) and the United Kingdom.

The other 33 British Commonwealth countries retain homophobic laws that originated from the days of Empire. Their disinterest extends to obscuring the difference between homophobic and non-homophobic law, and in obscuring the nature of the case law rhat follows. So it is hard to distinguish homphobic case law and non-homophobic case law, and the decisions that follow from it. 

They are Antagua and Barbuda, Bangladesh, Barbados, Brunei, Cameroon, Eswatini, Gabon, Gambia, Ghana, Grenada, Guyana, Jamaica, Kenya, Kirfibati, Malawi, Malaysia, Maldives, Namibia, Nigeria, Pakistan, Papua New Guinea, Saint Lucia, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, Sierra Leone, Solomon Islands, Sri Lanka, Tanzania, Togo, Tonga, Tuvalu, Uganda, Vanatu, and Zambia.

The wave of recent recinding of colonial era anti-gay law started with the Nauru, Belise, and the Secchelles in 2016. Trinadad and India followed in 2018. Next Botswana overturned colonial era anti-gay laws in 2019. In 2022 St Kitts and Nevis, Antigua and Barbuda, Barbados, Singapore overturned their colonial era anti-gay laws. In 2023 Mauritious overturned some of its anti-gay laws. The present focus on overturning colonial era anti-gay laws is focused on an appeal held in Britsh courts over colonial 'anti-sodomy laws' in Trinidad and Tobago. For much more about the advance in civil liberties please left click here.

It is odd how new American money is buying into 500 year old British colonial law. Many Commonwealth countries are now little more than tax havens to the people who don't live there. This might explain how  American homophobes with money are attracted to this now weak institution. If that is the draw, how do we dismantle that attraction?   

'The Burdened' - Kithchen Sink Drama Lives! A Film Review

It is rare to see a film set in Yemen, a country that is new to film making. It is rarer still in 2026 to see a kitchen sink drama. 'The Burdened' (2023) is both of these things, and more besides. It was co-scripted and directed by Amr Gamal, and was his second film and only the second film to be made in Yemen. I watched without doing any prior reading about the film, or the country that I expected it be set in. That the film script, co-written by writer Amr Gamal, was rooted in the theatre was obvious from the first scene onward. 

The film focused on one family, a mother, father, and three chidren all well under ten years old, living a hand to mouth life in the city port of Aden, which as I read after was until 1967 British, and like many cast offs of the British Empire was left to fend for itself in a very uncertain post empire world. In the last decade or more uncertainty turned to civil war. The effects of the war were there to be seen in the footage of the streets of Aden, where there was very little rubble but the place looked like mny bombs had hit it, and there was not the money to fully repair buildings. The script was terrific and made a virtue of its theare roots and minimal resources to craft a tight story where desperation fought decency, and wanting to do what was approved involved conflict. 

I lost count of the number of times when two characters met one would say to the other 'As-salamu alaykum', 'Peace be upon you' where the reply was 'Wa alaykum as-salam', 'And upon you be peace'. Those two phrases were the most used words used in the 91 minutes of the film, to the point where I wondered if there was some private intonation of the two rsponces in the film where, different intonations conveyed more private meanngs between the women who used both phrases. But the fact that the women where the majority of the characters and greeted each other so often with those two phrases pushed the film far further than I would have expected into it passing the Bechdel Test. The indications of the taboo with women's dress was also made clearer with, depending on the company, the women wore veils that were detatchable in an instant.

The core of the film was a family trying to get by an economy where the government does not pay its own workers the wages they are due for months after the wages were due. And yes, just as talk of illegal abortion was the sure fire way to spice up a BBC kitchen sink drama in the plays it broadcast in black and white in the 1960s, so the same rule of drama follows here. The real delight was in seeing not a second of the camera framing or the script wasted, as the characters explore disaster after disaster narrowly avoided. 

The film ends on an uncertain note of hope.

How Is Your Appetite For Life?

I can't mind appetite suppressants
taking up the air time that they take,
as they are talked up in the media.
I take control of what I eat,
so I have less need of them,
whether they are pills or injections.

I would like to be modest in how I live,
so I ask, is there a pill that will help me
reduce my appetite for living? Something
that as it helps me ask less of other people
will give those people I no longer ask for
more time that they can be with the truly needy?

The Unfinished Book

It is only when we have so few friends
that is clear that we have forgotten
how to  consolidate new acquantances
that a book that speaks about friendship
becomes a book we don't want to finish,
becuase to read all of the book feels
like reaching the end the friendship.

One such book is 'When The Cranes Fly South',
by Swedish first time author Lise Ridzen,
in which an elderly man's life is slowly dismantled
by time and circumstance, but the writing
about the dismantling is so detailed and tender
that even his fears seem like the old friends
he once relied upon and is loathe to part with.

I still have not finished the book:
I am not sure I want to, like life
I don't know that I want to know
what was on order to come after. 
  

The World Is Full Of Unoriginal Thought

There is an awful lot of bad poetry
bad painting, and bad photography
in the world. By all means add to it,
where that is the limit of the discipline
of the talent in your hand and in your eye.

I can testify to the thrill of taking photos
that on viewing them after, turned out less like
what I thought was in the viewfinder at the time.
There deleting the images was the obvious solution.

By all means put the bad art on your own walls,
if you are at ease with it, then let it be your style.

Put it online for free if you want to to, I have,
but please don't think it has any commercial life.
The market for AI 'paintings' already owns that market,
just like the commercial American AI songwriting,
replete with synthetic performance, AI 'painting' is a 'craft'
that is set to engulf and outrun it's once human counterpart. 

The Future Is Alive And Well

Even as it is in many fragments
where what remains is being retrieved
along with the dead who are to be buried.
The components are being reasembled
to be pieced back together from the rubble of Gaza.

Please left click here to listen to, download and share
a thirty minute audio documentary on how that future is being recovered.

Picture Set Of The Month - August - Stills From Andrei Tarkovsky's 'Nostalgia'

Which I saw recently at a 4k screening/rerelease of it, knowing nothing about the film
and little about the director, before I sat down in my cinema seat to watch it.   

Yes, there is a plot to the film, but it is, as The Guardian describes the film,
'a cine-poem'. 

The scene depicted above, where a mad preacher sets himself on fire
whilst preaching on libery was worth the price of entry on its own.  

 

The film also had what seemed at first viewing like a false ending, the scene above
which followed the preacher setting himself on fire. 

The image above was the closing scene in which any cynic/critic 
would have said was one of the scenes in which 'nothing happens',
repeatedly, but the image grows in richness with every second
that the viewer is given that, and just that, to focus on.