Uganda’s Minister for Ethics and Integrity cannot contain his fury as his visitor Stephen Fry extols the joys of being gay. “I WILL ARREST YOU! I WILL ARREST YOU!” he thunders as Fry, smiling politely tells him, “Homosexuality is wonderful, you should try it.” The government apparatchik wants a law that would make homosexuality illegal and an imprisonable offence.
He’s one of a handful of frothing homophobes that Fry meets in a journey to discover why some people are so terrified of homosexual men and women. There’s a nice moment when a smarmy American practitioner of so-called “reparative therapy” (which aims to “cure” people of their gayness) looks like he’s been hit with a brick when Fry tells him, charmingly, that he could pass for a homosexual man.
Throughout the programme Fry struggles to maintain his genial equilibrium, but as he hears of atrocious repression, he cracks.
About this programme
1/2. Part one of two. The broadcaster travels to various parts of the world to learn about people's experiences of coming out as gay and talks to a number of homophobes to try to understand the origin of their hatred. He begins by reflecting on the changes that have affected homosexuals in his lifetime and chats to Elton John and David Furnish, as well as US actor Neil Patrick Harris, about their own experiences. He also travels to Uganda, where the government is proposing a new anti-homosexuality bill that includes death penalty and life imprisonment clauses, and visits America to investigate a therapy treatment that claims to be able to change a person's sexual orientation.