Public aversion
In what is probably the last week of my interviews I finally managed to set an appointment with a guy who is now a friend of mine. He's name is Martin and I wanted to interview him for some time already but he was never really comfortable with the idea of talking about himself in front of a camera. A bit of patience and persuading tactics eventually helped and we met last Tuesday in the very posh lounge bar on the second floor of the up market and downtown Stanley Hotel. I asked the waiter for a quite place to do the interview and he very politely showed us the business area and brought us chairs.
We stared the interview and after some minutes Martin got comfortable and talked openly about his short but turbulent life as a openly gay man. He's only 23 and got out of the closet when he was 19. But after about 15 minutes he got uncomfortable again, he kept on looking around and when I asked him what was wrong he pointed at the three security guards who stood there staring at us from behind a bar. They were giving us strange looks and kept whispering to each other. I guess they somehow listened to us doing the interview and found out what it was about. The situation got a bit tense and we slipped out of the place through the back entrance without managing to complete the interview…
I don't know why but this week seemed somehow cursed in terms of my experience with openly gay people. What happened at the Stanley hotel was not the only incident. Last Saturday was the birthday of my friend Jackson, who I also interviewed in the beginning of the shooting period. We met up with some (straight- and gay friends) and eventually landed in Tamasha, a big and very popular bar in Upper Hill, Nairobi. It was late and everybody had quite some drinks already. The atmosphere was good and Jackson was happy since his ex-boyfriend came over and they were good together again. In a fuddled state people tend to forget they're borders and so Jackson at one point started kissing his boyfriend in the middle of the bar. After about five minutes of strange looks from the 'straight' and also fuddled crowd around us three big bouncers came and threw our whole group out in a very violent way.
We stood there in the rain on a muddy parking lot. Jackson was crying, the other gay guys got also very emotional and me and my girlfriend, who is a radio presenter and award winning actress, basically got very angry and decided to not let this go. Through the status of my girlfriend we managed to get back in and talked to the manager and head of security. It's hard to oppress your anger in a situation like this and we ended up threatening him with talking about what happened on air and publishing it in the newspaper. All this didn't really seem to worry him, he explained that other costumers got uncomfortable with the situation and since it's still an illegal act they had all the rights to just throw us all out. So eventually there was not much to do but to just leave the place in a state of anger and a strong feeling of impotence…
