NewsWrap for the week ending August 17th, 1996 (As broadcast on THIS WAY OUT Program #438, distributed 08-19-96) [Compiled & written by Cindy Friedman, with thanks to Brian Nunes, Jason Lin, Ron Buckmire, Bjorn Skolander and Greg Gordon] A new large-scale long-term twin study offers more support for a genetic contribution to male homosexuality. The Australian study was discussed at the annual meeting of the American Psychological Association this week in Toronto. The full study examined 4,500 sets of twins. Among more than 300 pairs of identical male twins, almost half identified themselves similarly on a five-point sexuality spectrum, form strictly heterosexual to strictly homosexual. Fraternal twins were much less likely to share their sexual orientation. The study did not include enough lesbians to reach a statistically meaningful conclusion. Veteran U.S. Air Force Major Debra Meeks was acquitted this week by a military court in San Antonio, Texas of charges of sodomy and conduct unbecoming an officer. Meeks was just a few months short of retirement after 22 years in the service when she was asked to accept discharge without benefits because of allegations by her former roommate, civilian Pam Dillard. Meeks, who had never had so much as a disciplinary citation in all her long career, chose a court martial instead ... although conviction could have led to a sentence of up to 8 years in military prison as well as loss of all benefits. Although the presiding judge rejected Meeks' attorneys' claim that the sodomy prosecution violated the Clinton administration's so-called "don't ask, don't tell" policy, the military jury apparently accepted the defense argument that Dillard is delusional. Meeks has never discussed her sexual orientation, claiming that it's her private life, and did not testify in the highly-publicized trial. Also in the U.S., lesbian Sharon Bottoms has given up her highly-publicized three-year legal battle to regain custody of her son from her own mother. A trial court's award of custody of Tyler Doustou to his grandmother Kay Bottoms was first overturned by an appellate court in 1994 and then upheld by the Virginia State Supreme Court in 1995. Sharon had continued to seek custody at the trial court level. She refused to state the reasons behind her decision not to pursue custody further, and the attorneys working out her visitation with Tyler have been silenced by court order. In Turkey, a lesbian mother has lost custody of her 2-year-old daughter in a ruling by the national Supreme Court of Justice. Although a lower court had granted her custody, the Supreme Court believed the child's moral development would be threatened by living with her mother, whose sexual orientation the Court described as having "a habit in the degree of sickness". The legislature of the state of South Australia has rejected legal recognition of same-gender partnerships in order to reach a compromise on a bill to allow unmarried heterosexual couples to take their property disputes to family courts rather than civil courts. No Australian state has yet granted gay and lesbian couples status equal to that of unmarried heterosexual domestic partnerships, known there as "de facto" relationships. Carolyn Pickles, the Leader of the Opposition in South Australia's Upper House, called the Liberal Party Members' arguments against recognizing gay and lesbian couples "ridiculous" and "downright astounding". Also in Australia, New South Wales state Attorney General Jeff Shaw this week announced there will be a review of the so-called Homosexual Advance Defense, known elsewhere as the "homosexual panic" defense, which in recent years has become an increasingly popular approach in trials of gay-bashers. Shaw's announcement was accompanied by the release of a government discussion paper. Since 1993, a dozen men charged with killing gay men have used the defense. While 5 of them pleaded guilty to either manslaughter or murder, juries convicted only 2 of murder and 3 of manslaughter, while finding 2 innocent. Shaw sees this as an indication that the homosexual panic defense tends to impose prejudice on the jury. The Australian Institute of Criminology has recorded an increase in gay-bashing there to a level it describes as disturbing. Australia has granted asylum to a gay Polish national, making him the first European to gain refugee status there because of homophobic persecution in his homeland. The unnamed Pole told Australia's Refugee Review Tribunal that police in Poland had twice arrested and abused him while holding him without charges, and that on another occasion he had been beaten by a group of men he believed to be police officers. The Polish refugee charged the Catholic Church with creating a climate where gay-bashing was widely regarded as a sport. Since mid-1993, Australia has granted asylum to 11 gay men and lesbians from other continents. The Swedish government has finally released documentation from its recent controversial decision to deny asylum to a gay Iranian national. Apparently the decision was based on a report from the Swedish Embassy in Teheran, which claimed that the Iranian penal code's provision for punishing homosexual acts with whipping or death is unenforceable because of stringent evidence requirements ... unless the acts are performed in a public place, in the words of the report, "almost provocatively". In fact, the Embassy believed that Iranians' acceptance of physical affection between men made discreet homosexuality at least as easy there as in Sweden itself. However, while the report claimed there had been no executions in Iran for homosexuality in the last few years, Amnesty International has documented several. The British Parliament is considering a motion to demand that Romania repeal its sodomy law. So far, 65 Members of Parliament have signed the motion proposed by Lynne Jones. Romania's penal code punishes private homosexual acts between consenting adults with up to five years in prison, the only such law among the member states of the European Union. Although Romania promised to repeal the statute when it joined the Council of Europe in 1993, and the country's own highest court found the law unconstitutional in 1994, the Romanian parliament has yet to agree to its revision. According to a doctor at the Belarus National Center for AIDS Prevention, the former Soviet republic's Parliament acted in 1991 to decriminalize private homosexual acts between consenting adults, and to make the homosexual age of consent equal to that of heterosexuals at 16 ... but did it so quietly that it took five years for the news to reach the West. Chicago appears to be moving against gay venues in an effort to "clean up" for the upcoming Democratic National Convention. Owners of the private gay gym Unicorn had been told earlier this month that it was properly licensed, but last week officials made a license inspection, arrested two patrons, charged the manager with "keeping a house of ill fame", and issued a 30-day warrant for licensing compliance which they replaced hours later with an order for immediate closure. In a similar action about two weeks before, four partons of the gay book and video store Banana Video were arrested for public indecency, and the staff on duty also charged with "keeping a house of ill fame". In Canada, 30,000 Vancouver gays and lesbians marched for pride in early August despite pouring rain. The record 97 contingents for the first time included Vancouver's police department. But in South Korea, there's only one visible gay activist, Seo Dong-Jin. He publicly identified himself as a gay man in 1994 and has been lecturing and appearing in South Korean media ever since. He says Seoul has 20 or 30 small gay bars and three social groups at universities. And finally ... if you believe there is an art to safer sex, you have company: Austrian body painter Karl Machhamer has come up with a latex liquid to be painted on instead of a traditional condom, and allowed to dry for seven suspense-filled minutes. One bottle is said to be good for three uses, but as U.S. journalist Rex Wockner remarks, "Your mileage may vary". ------------*-------------- Sources for this week's report included: The Toronto Globe & Mail; The New York Times; Reuter News Service; The Boston Globe; The Associated Press; United Press International; Brother-Sister/Australia; Rex Wockner International News Service; The Canadian Broadcasting Company; OutRage/Australia; and a cyberpress release from of Lambda Istanbul.