Kenya’s first gay music video swiftly banned by the country’s film board shows a well-toned young man, naked apart from his underpants, leaning over his tattooed male lover in bed.
Two pretty young women exchange kisses on a park bench, one putting a ring on the other’s wedding finger, as the vocalist sings: “I can’t change, even if I tried, even if I wanted to.”
The song, same love, was originally recorded by American hip hop duo Macklemore and Ryan Lewis during the 2012 campaign to legalise same-sex marriage in Washington State.
A remix by Kenyan rap artist, Art Attack, set out to provoke similar debate in the conservative East African nation, where homosexual acts are punishable by up to 14 years in jail.
“We expected that this will create controversy, we expected that a lot of people will talk about it but we didn’t expect the amount of publicity it has received,” the report said.
“The erotic scenes were meant to show that these people also fall in love.”
Interest in the video has been fueled by the Kenya Film Classification Board’s (KFCB) Feb. 23 decision to ban it and ask Google Kenya to take it down.( Reuters/NAN)