Sir Ian Mckellen leads protest through London against brutal anti-gay laws.
Sir Ian McKellen has never been one to stay quiet, and on Saturday he was back on the streets where it counts.
Gandalf doesn’t do silence
The actor, 87, led a “Commonwealth Walk of Shame” through central London on 30 May, marching beside veteran campaigner Peter Tatchell against laws that still criminalise being gay across much of the Commonwealth. They began outside the Nigerian High Commission and pressed on to seven more: Uganda, Papua New Guinea, Trinidad and Tobago, Ghana, Jamaica, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka.
Half the club still wants you in a cell
The numbers are hard to stomach. According to the Human Dignity Trust, 29 of the 56 Commonwealth countries still criminalise consensual same-sex intimacy, with penalties from two years in prison to death. In Uganda, Brunei and parts of northern Nigeria, same-sex relations can carry the death penalty.
McKellen named the culprit without flinching. “When Britain had an empire, it introduced into countries far away from here the laws that we had in this country, including the laws against gay people,” he said. Those laws were repealed at home decades ago. Abroad, they never left.
A love letter, not a war cry
He refused to make it about rage. The march, he said, was “not about hatred” but about “a love of justice, a love of equality.”
This was no red-carpet cameo. Many who marched were queer refugees who had fled the very countries on the route, walking openly in London because they cannot at home. Tatchell turned his fire on the Commonwealth itself, which has spent decades refusing to even discuss the issue. We’re with him. Fifty years of looking away is fifty too many.
Source: https://www.dnamagazine.com.au/ian-mckellen-commonwealth-walk-of-shame-london/
