urllib and Unicode

I've been trying to find a solution for this problem, and I haven't
seen any canned ones out there, after searching Google:

Python's urllib cannot encode Unicode strings. This is a problem, since
I use urllib.urlencode() to construct the POST for my LiveJournal client,
Charm. (To support protocol version 1, it must be UTF-8 encoded, and then
quote-plus'd.)

Any ideas?