NewsWrap for the week ending January 4th, 1997 (As broadcast on THIS WAY OUT Program #458, distributed 01-06-97) [Compiled & written by Cindy Friedman, with thanks to Brian Nunes, Jason Lin, Ron Buckmire, Graham Underhill, Mark Proffit, Alejandra Sarda, Rex Wockner, Lucia Chappelle and Greg Gordon] Argentina 's second-largest city has become its second to enact protections from discrimination based on sexual orientation. The city of Rosario in the state of Santa Fe has banned discrimination based on gender, physical appearance, nine other categories, and the catch-all phrase "or any other circumstances." Rosario has also declared it will promote "the removal of any and every type of obstacle that actually restricts equality and freedom and may impede a person's full development and her/his effective participation in the social, political or economic life of the community." Rosario's guarantee of what's called "the right to be different" was proposed by the local gay/lesbian/bisexual/transgender group Colectivo Arco Iris, who modeled it after a law enacted by Buenos Aires in late August. The U.S. state of Colorado this week paid out $950,000 for the legal costs of the plaintiffs who successfully sued to overturn Amendment 2, the ballot initiative passed by voters in 1992 to prohibit civil rights protections for gays, lesbians and bisexuals. The six legal groups involved in the case had originally sought 1.4 million dollars for the original 3-week trial in Denver District Court, appeal to the Colorado State Supreme Court, and appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court, including photocopying, expert witnesses, and other costs in addition to attorneys' billable hours. It's as big a payment as anyone remembers Colorado making in a civil rights lawsuit, and apparently not out-of-line with other attorneys' costs in pursuing a case from pre-trial through a U.S. Supreme Court ruling. Colorado's own legal costs in unsuccessfully defending Amendment 2 ran to at least another $420,000, while the national boycott that followed passage of Amendment 2 lost the state an estimated ten million dollars in gross business income. Will Perkins, head of Amendment 2 's sponsoring group Colorado for Family Values, said the costs would not stop him from trying again to deny legal minority status to gays, lesbians and bisexuals ... instead, the big numbers confirmed for him the importance of that effort. A Massachusetts jury has awarded 1.2 million dollars to a man fired because of the perception that he is gay. John Walsh has refused to state his actual sexual orientation, claiming it's nobody's business. He claims that employees he supervised as manager of housekeeping for Boston's Carney Hospital were displeased by his efforts to stop their use of racist, misogynist and homophobic language, and they labeled him gay to make trouble for him with the Catholic-run institution. Although Massachusetts' civil rights law has protected gays, lesbians and bisexuals since 1989, Walsh's case is believed to be the first in which a jury punished anti-gay discrimination with a civil judgment. The jury award is half compensatory and half punitive damages. The hospital says Walsh was fired for cause. Claiming anti-Catholic bias on the part of the jury, the hospital has asked the judge to overrule the jury's decision, and failing that, will appeal. Israeli President Ezer Weizman did penance for offensive homophobic remarks he made in late December in a nationally broadcast speech before a group of Haifa high school students. He and his wife Reuma met for an hour-and-a-half on December 23rd with representatives of Israel's national lesbian and gay group the Society for the Protection of Personal Rights, giving them the same kind of treatment as visiting heads of other nations. Also present at the meeting were four gay-friendly members of the Knesset, the Israeli Parliament, two from the Labor Party and two from the liberal Meretz party. A group of protestors outside -- some holding signs reading, "homo plus lesbian equals Meretz" -- chanted throughout the meeting, "Homos go back in the closet". The meeting was spent educating the President, who is in his 70's, that gays and lesbians are not perverts but regular human beings with full legal status. Both the activists and the politicians left feeling that progress had been made and confident that the President would not be promoting anti-gay legislation. A Weizman aide read his formal apology to the media, saying, "The president sees legislation which discriminates as undermining the foundations of democracy, the rules of natural justice, and the dignity and freedom of man, and he has no intention of encouraging legislation which leads to discrimination between citizens of the state regardless of origin, religion, sex or sexual orientation." He expressed regret for any humiliation that may have been caused and affirmed that all citizens' dignity, honor and welfare must be upheld. Australia has its first openly lesbian legislator in Liz Watson, a Green Party member elected in December to Western Australia's Legislative Council, the upper house of the state parliament. Watson, who's commonly known as "Giz", had failed in two previous runs for the lower house, the Legislative Assembly. She's a carpenter and joiner, a feminist, and a veteran activist in the areas of peace, social justice and the environment. Prior to the election, she said, "I want to make it quite clear that I will speak out loudly on lesbian and gay issues -- my commitment to the community is totally whole-hearted." She enters the Western Australia Parliament as part of a major shift of power, as the conservatives lost the controlling majority they've held in the Legislative Council for the entire 103-year history of the state. Even before serious flooding threatened the gay resort area on the Russian River in California this week, two serious fires had marred the holiday season for gays and lesbians. In Indiana, an arson fire destroyed most of the offices of Project AIDS Lafayette on Christmas morning. In Superior, Wisconsin, the Main Club, long a landmark for the region's gay and lesbian community, was completely destroyed by a fire December 27th, killing two men who lived in an apartment over the bar. Several days of intensive investigation did not find evidence of arson, although the building had passed all its fire inspections for several years. A Washington state appeals court threw out a lower court's requirement that gay father Ward Wicklund not display affection for his lover in front of his children. The unanimous ruling said, "The evidence showed only that the children experienced difficulty adjusting after their parents' separation. But where the only harm is adjustment, the remedy is counseling, not restrictions on the parents' lifestyle in terms of sexual orientation." A judge has aborted a legal challenge to Denver, Colorado's new spousal benefits for the gay and lesbian partners of its employees. Two local residents who didn't want their tax dollars supporting such partnerships had claimed that the city was overriding the state's definitions of marriage and family. In a preliminary hearing, the judge said the new policy didn't even try to define those terms and ruled that the plaintiffs had failed to establish a likelihood of success in a full trial. An argument similar to the plaintiffs' had previously been successful in striking down a past domestic partners benefits plan in Atlanta, Georgia. U.S. President Bill Clinton will be re-inaugurated on January 20th, and the Lesbian & Gay Bands of America will be part of the festivities. When they played at his first inauguration four years ago, they were the first gay and lesbian group ever to participate in a presidential inaugural. They're one of more than a dozen bands chosen from among hundreds of applicants. The Lesbian & Gay Bands of America includes performers from two dozen gay and lesbian instrumental music groups from across the U.S., who must pay their own expenses for the chance to play before the inaugural parade begins. New Zealand's Triangle Television, after years of trying, has been granted a non-commercial UHF frequency for the Auckland area. Triangle's primary mission is to present programming reflecting the diverse lifestyles of gay, lesbian and bisexual communities in a positive way. To that end, they'll be broadcasting a substantial amount of both locally-produced and imported lesbian and gay news, entertainment and talkshows, beginning later this year. They'll also be giving access to, and seeking participation from, other groups in the community which rarely have the opportunity to present themselves and their views in mainstream broadcasting. And finally ... "Rebel Without A Cause" star James Dean died young, but he's won a new honor nonetheless: a U.S. postage stamp portraying him was the best-seller of 1996, with collectors picking up 31 million copies. Only an entire series of stamps celebrating the Olympic Games sold more. Film historians rate Dean's sexual orientation as anywhere from primarily gay to heterosexual-but-experimenting. Certainly Dean told his Korean War-era draft board that he was gay, an incident he later recounted as his having kissed the medic. But when asked directly if he were gay, Dean said, "Well, I'm certainly not going through life with one hand tied behind my back." ------------*------------- Sources for this week's report included: The Associated Press; The Boston Globe; Colorado Online/The Gazette Telegraph; The Denver Post; Independent Newspapers; The Jerusalem Post/Israel; The Lafayette (Indiana) Journal & Courier; The (St. Paul, Minnesota) Pioneer Press; United Press International; USA Today; focusPoint/Minneapolis, Minnesota; The Melbourne (Australia) Star Observer; Options Magazine/Denver; Queer News Aotearoa (New Zealand); The West Side Observer/Australia; and cyberpress releases from the U.S. Postal Service; Escrita en el Cuerpo Archives & Library Electronic News Service/Buenos Aires; Lesbian & Gay Bands of America; Triangle Television/New Zealand; and the World Congress of Gay & Lesbian Jewish Organizations.