NewsWrap for the week ending October 26th, 1996 (As broadcast on THIS WAY OUT Program #448, distributed 10-28-96) [Compiled & written by Cindy Friedman, with thanks to Brian Nunes, Jason Lin, Ron Buckmire, Graham Underhill, Hannele Lehtikuusi, Martin Rice, Bjorn Skolander, Rex Wockner and Greg Gordon] Finns went to the polls on October 20th with several openly gay and lesbian candidates running, plus some of their strongest non-gay supporters. The big winner among the gays and lesbians was incumbent Jorma Hentila of the Left Wing Alliance, who retained his seat on the Helsinki City Council. His work there has won him the respect of his colleagues in all the political parties, as well as special recognition from the Finnish gay and lesbian group SETA, National Organization for Sexual Equality. Also winning a seat on the Helsinki City Council was gay TV weathercaster Juha Fohr of the Swedish People's Party, who failed in a bid to sit with the European Parliament. Three openly gay and lesbian candidates of the Green Party lost races for the Helsinki City Council and another open gay failed to win election to the Turku City Council. Under the Finnish system, each party nominates a slate of candidates. The total of the votes received by all those candidates determines how many seats that party will win. The individual votes for those candidates determine their priority in gaining one of their party's seats. Romania's stringent sodomy laws were protested in dramatic fashion this week, as members of the direct action groups OutRage! and Lesbian Avengers stormed the stage at London's Royal Albert Hall during the first act of "Aida". The Verdi classic was being performed by the Romanian National Opera Company with the sponsorship of the Romanian Embassy. A stunned audience of almost 5,000 watched the activists on stage unfurl a huge banner reading, "Romania! Stop Jailing Queers!" while other demonstrators dropped leaflets from the upper tiers. The upstaging activists were dragged away none too gently by security guards. In Spain, the beach resort town of Sitges in Catalonia has long been a favorite vacation spot for the gay men of Europe, but a local official's campaign to clean up and straighten out the town has made it a battleground instead of a refuge. In an operation staged ostensibly to stop prostitution, police in August began running identity checks and maintaining records on all the men they found in a favorite cruising spot in the wee hours. Protests by the group Coordinadora Gai-Lesbiana forced the mayor to halt the checks and destroy the records, but he refused to accept the resignation of the town governor responsible for the police effort. That led to an early October protest with more than 250 activists marching peacefully through Sitges, but the reputedly tolerant townspeople turned ugly, throwing water, eggs and stones at the marchers, while several hundred young men shouted insults and threats and sparked several violent confrontations in the absence of any meaningful police presence. The continuing protests moved last week to the square outside the Catalonia state capital building and Barcelona City Hall, where about 1,000 people rallied, including many members of labor unions and non-gay civil rights groups. In addition to protesting the Sitges situation, they were reacting to the state government's deletion of same-gender couples from a state bill to recognize unmarried couples. The climax of the event was covering the plaza with a 1,600 square meter rainbow flag. The European Court of Human Rights this week heard the case of three British gay men jailed for assault with bodily harm for private, consensual sado-masochistic acts. The plaintiffs, Roland Jaggard, Tony Brown and the late Colin Laskey, were picked up by police as part of the now-infamous 1990 "Operation Spanner", which climaxed with the arrest of 16 men at a party in a private home. Although there were no injuries requiring medical treatment, first the trial judge and then every appeals body in Britain refused to consider the consent factor, instead spouting a great deal of rhetoric concerning family values and the need to protect society from "a cult of violence". The European Court of Human Rights is the last resort for the three men, who hope its judges will find that their convictions were unreasonable and an improper use of the courts to infringe on their private lives. The Court has the power, if it chooses, to order Britain to change its national laws criminalizing private, consensual sadomasochistic acts. A ruling is expected in a few months. The U.S. Supreme Court this week turned down its first opportunity to review the 1993 so-called "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policy on military service by gays and lesbians. The first case to make it through lower levels of appeals to reach the High Court's doorstep was that of Navy Lieutenant Paul Thomasson, an outstanding officer with 10 years in the service who was being groomed for the admiralty. Shortly after "don't ask, don't tell" took effect, Thomasson's much-praised forthrightness led him to write a note to 4 admirals he'd worked with saying, "I am gay." Ironically, 2 of those 4 admirals were responsible for the Navy's enforcement of "don't ask, don't tell"... but even their glowing testimony did not convince any court, military or federal, to keep Thomasson in the Navy. He now manages a restaurant in Washington, D.C. In the original Clinton administration proposal, the policy was nicknamed "Don't Ask, Don't Tell, Don't Pursue". But according to gay and lesbian military activists, pursuit has continued and even escalated, particularly in the Air Force. Activists have charged that a so-called witch hunt has been in progress at Hickam Air Force Base in Hawaii. There one man facing a long prison sentence for sexually assaulting another man was offered a shorter sentence if he gave investigators the names of other gay servicemembers. He supplied the names of 16, 4 of whom have already been discharged. This week proceedings began in the case of the only officer in the group, Air Force Captain Robert Saragosa, whose counsel asked that charges be dropped because evidence against him had been gathered illegally. The Canadian Auto Workers Union this week reached a landmark agreement with General Motors that extends spousal benefits to the same-gender partners of gay and lesbian employees. The benefits include health care and bereavement leave, among others, but not pensions, which are currently prohibited to unmarried couples by Canada's national tax regulations. The contract sets a new industry standard which is already encouraging Chrysler to reconsider its rejection of the same proposal. The Canadian Auto Workers had actually won domestic partner benefits four years ago at a single plant run by GM jointly with Suzuki, but that contract involved only 2,100 workers and fewer than 40 took advantage of the opportunity. The new contract involves 26,000 Canadian workers. The very-much-larger sibling union across the border, the United Auto Workers, had initially sought domestic partners benefits for both heterosexual and same-gender unmarried couples from the U.S. Big Three automakers, but other issues quickly took precedence. The biggest barrier to granting those benefits in the U.S. is the high cost of private health care, compared to Canada's public health care system. Another labor-management dispute was resolved this week by an arbitrator, who supported entertainment giant Disney's new gay- and lesbian-only domestic partners benefits policy over a claim by the company's largest union that unmarried heterosexuals should also be covered. Although the Service Trades Council Union supported the benefits for gays and lesbians, they felt it was only fair that heterosexuals receive them as well. They pointed specifically to two items in their Disney contract, one an assurance against discrimination based on marital status and the other against discrimination based on sexual orientation. However, the arbitrator agreed with Disney that the term "sexual orientation" was meant specifically to protect gays and lesbians from receiving lesser treatment than their heterosexual counterparts. Disney had been careful to require its domestic partner applicants to sign affidavits testifying that they would get married if it were possible to do so, supporting the argument that the heterosexual couples had the legal option of marriage if they wanted to obtain partner benefits. In Sweden, a new mother has the right to a year of maternity leave supported through the national social insurance office. It's possible and common for those mothers to share a portion of that leave with the baby's father. But it didn't work out that way at first for Monica and Pia, two police officers who have registered their domestic partnership and had one child by artificial insemination. The social insurance office could not see its way to granting paternity leave to a woman. The couple appealed that ruling, though, and finally won a decision this week that registered partners are entitled to the same rights as traditional married couples, including paternity leave. And finally ... a regular feature of the venerable U.S. humor publication "MAD Magazine" is a fold-in back cover, which shows one picture in its normal position and a quite different one when carefully folded in half. For the November issue, the cover shows demonstrators before the Congress, one with a picket sign reading "Stop Merger Mania", and the caption "What Proposed Merger is the Federal Government Moving Quickly to Block?" After proper folding, the answer appears: "Same Sex Marriage"... and the picture changes to show two men being married by a priest in front of a happy crowd of guests. -----------*------------- Sources for this week's report included: The Orlando (Florida) Sentinel; Knight-Ridder/Tribune Business News; The Associated Press; The Detroit News; The Los Angeles Times; Bloomberg Business Wire; Canada News Wire; Reuter News Service; The Electronic London Telegraph; The London Times; BBC Radio 5 Live's "Out This Week"; Australian Age/Melbourne; The London Observer; and cyberpress releases from OutRage!/London; Coordinadora Gai-Lesbiana/Spain; Countdown on Spanner/Great Britain; SETA/Finland; and the International Lesbian & Gay Association.