NewsWrap for the week ending February 8th, 1997 (As broadcast on THIS WAY OUT Program #463, distributed 02-10-97) [Compiled & written by Cindy Friedman, with thanks to Brian Nunes, Jason Lin, Ron Buckmire, Graham Underhill, Martin Rice, Tom Ramsey, Rex Wockner, Lucia Chappelle and Greg Gordon, and anchored by Cindy Friedman and Brian Nunes.] There have been two major sticking points in San Francisco's effort to require its contractors to extend equal spousal benefits to their employees' gay and lesbian partners -- and both were resolved this week. Roman Catholic Archbishop William Levada had begun his protests weeks ago, claiming it violated the moral tenets of Church-affiliated charities to recognize same-gender partnerships. The solution the Church has agreed to is to allow its charities' employees to designate any other person they choose to receive their dependent benefits. They're willing to pay the extra price to avoid equating gay and lesbian couples with married heterosexual ones. United Airlines is the largest user of San Francisco's airport, and has many contracts in connection with that. The first to come under the new domestic partners ordinance has been a 25-year lease agreement. Negotiators have agreed to convert that agreement to a 20-month lease with a 23-year option. United won't have to offer spousal benefits until the 20 months have expired, but in order to then use the 23-year option, the airline will have to extend those benefits to all its 86,000 employees worldwide. State legislatures across the U.S. have been spurred to action by the possibility of legal gay and lesbian marriages in Hawai'i following a court ruling later this year, and no legislature is more frantic than Hawai'i's own. In the first three weeks of their legislative session, no less than 8 measures have been proposed on the subject, and this week the Senate followed the House in passing two of them. There's bound to be contention when the House-Senate compromise committee meets, though, because the Senate is ready to offer unmarried pairs a much longer and stronger list of rights and privileges for what they're calling "reciprocal beneficiaries" relationships. While both the House and Senate have offered citizens the chance to approve an amendment to the state constitution to reserve legal marriage for heterosexual couples, the Senate version takes more seriously the Hawai'i State Supreme Court's 1993 ruling that the process cannot discriminate based on gender. Still, both sides are eager to break the stalemate that has paralyzed them previously, when the House rejected any form of domestic partnership and the Senate insisted on it. In France, the Parti Socialiste has introduced a bill in the National Assembly to establish a "social union contract" -- "contrat d'union civile" -- a domestic partnership with substantial marriage-like benefits and responsibilities. That move has been endorsed by the gay and lesbian political group Homosexualites et Socialisme, which congratulated Socialist Party leaders including former Prime Minister Francois Mitterand for their commitment to the bill's passage. Since the Socialist Party is not currently in power, the fate of the bill is not yet clear, but it's already been watered down from its original draft. Some significant changes include loss of residency privileges for foreign partners, the requirement of a separate contract to establish property rights, and a year's delay after the signing of a civil union before the partners can receive government benefits for couples. Australia's first legal ruling granting lesbians equal access to artificial insemination treatment has led both national and Queensland state officials to act to deny lesbians all government-supported fertility services. The first to react was Australia's Deputy Prime Minister Tim Fischer, who said on a radio show, "I think society should tolerate gay and lesbian couples, but should not have to subsidize their child-bearing whim." Queensland Health Minister Mike Horan announced that he would change licensing requirements for fertility clinics in his state to deny lesbians access to them, saying those services should be reserved for heterosexual couples. He compared lesbians' desire for fertility services to the Nazi breeding programs intended to produce a "super race" and described access for lesbians as a "lifestyle loophole" in the regulations. He said, "These clinics are not there to promote lifestyles." Horan had previously used the "promoting lifestyles" argument to reject AIDS prevention materials targeted to gay men. National Health Minister Michael Wooldridge affirmed that the Australian government would not support fertility treatments for lesbians in states which had made them illegal. Gay and lesbian activists called the politicians "ignorant and ill-informed" and argued that the government should support fertility services for lesbians to prevent the transmission of AIDS and other diseases through "backyard inseminations". Also in Australia, about 20,000 gays and lesbians joined Melbourne's second annual Pride March February 2nd, watched by a crowd of about 10,000. That's nearly twice as many participants and four times as many spectators as last year, and the on-lookers' supportive applause for the marchers was described as "unheard of". Melbourne's Pride March bans floats in order to avoid any sense of competition within the community, which makes it less like the glitzy Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras than it is like a family picnic. Marchers' political statements focused on legal recognition of gay and lesbian couples, repeal of Tasmania's sodomy laws, and AIDS. The group Gays and Lesbians of Zimbabwe -- GALZ -- this week issued a powerful statement denouncing the recent homophobic rhetoric of nearby Namibia's President Sam Nujoma and SWAPO party. GALZ itself has experienced two years of similar verbal abuse from Zimbabwe's President Robert Mugabe and his ZANU-PF party. GALZ members declared themselves to be "sickened and disgusted" by what they called the "ignorant rantings" of politicians, and asserted their solidarity with Namibian gays and lesbians. Responding to SWAPO's charges that homosexuality is "alien" to Africa, GALZ said, "Far from being un-African, the continuing research in Zimbabwe continues to unearth overwhelming evidence of homosexuality existing in pre-colonial Africa, but the minds of many of our Southern Africa political leaders remain thoroughly colonized by Victorian dogma which they now have the audacity to claim is the backbone of our African heritage." Asserting that their own movement has only grown larger and stronger as a result of political oppression, GALZ concluded, "We are not frightened, we belong in Southern Africa and we are not going away." In South Africa, the constitution specifically prohibits discrimination based on sexual orientation, but a lesbian mother there has had to turn to the courts for relief from her neighbors' harassment, and homophobia in her local police department. The Pretoria Supreme Court this week awarded an order of protection to open lesbian Albertina Smuts, her daughter and one of her friends. Smuts had acted to end her daughter's contact with a neighboring couple because of their problems with alcohol abuse and domestic violence. Soon after, the couple and a male friend barged into Smuts' livingroom without invitation, where the woman shouted that lesbians cannot take care of their children, and the two men physically assaulted Smuts. When the whole group ended up at the Carletonville police station, police laughed with the neighbors and claimed Smuts was drunk and unable to identify them as her assailants. Smuts says one police sergeant told her, "Go away. If I see you lesbians again in this police station, I will kick your backsides so hard that you won't find your way back to Carletonville. You are sick people and you disgust us." Smuts complained to the local deputy police commissioner to no avail, but the court has ordered her neighbors to keep their distance and cease harassing her. In California, it was the Los Angeles Police Department that once attacked open gay Peter Mackler, but this week he found some justice when his lawsuit against them was settled for $87,000. That amount is believed to be the LAPD's highest payout ever in a case of anti-gay brutality, and one of the highest ever made to a single individual for police brutality anywhere in the U.S. Mackler was protesting the gubernatorial veto of an employment rights bill as part of a peaceful demonstration in 1991. When police moved to disperse the crowd, one officer used his baton to shove Mackler in the back more than ten times. When Mackler turned to see his badge number, the officer clubbed Mackler in the head hard enough to knock him to the ground and to send his glasses flying 25 feet away. Another officer then joined the first in battering him further. Mackler was left with a severe eye injury, headaches and dizziness. While Los Angeles has not admitted any wrongdoing in reaching the settlement, they did agree to clarify with officers that any citizen has a right to know their names and badge numbers. And finally ... there was a brief moment in the U.S. in the 1970's when gay was chic, and no one exploited that moment more successfully than the disco band known as The Village People. Most of their songs were gay-oriented, from their signature "Village People" song to the still-popular "YMCA", with lyrics including a number of details not likely to have occurred to a non-gay man. Most of their costumes were the stuff of gay cruising and gay fantasies, from leather to construction gear to painter's pants. Above all, the audience that made them both hip and famous was a gay one. But today, gearing up for a 20th anniversary tour and negotiating for the production of a biographical film, one of The Village People -- Felipe Rose, the one who always dressed as an Indian chief -- has said that, "Our group was never gay." He seems to blame it all on the drugs the band was taking at the time. Yeah ... right. ----------*---------- Sources for this week's report included: The San Francisco Chronicle; The San Francisco Examiner; The Australian Broadcasting Corporation; The Argus Correspondent (Argus Cape, South Africa); The Associated Press; The Honolulu Advertiser; The Honolulu Star-Bulletin; The Los Angeles Times; The Melbourne Age (Australia); The Melbourne Herald Sun (Australia); The New York Times; Reuter News Service; United Press International; Variety; The Washington Post; and cyberpress releases from Gays and Lesbians of Zimbabwe; Homosexualites et Socialisme (France); The International Lesbian and Gay Association; The Lambda Legal Defense and Education Fund (U.S.); and The Marriage Project (Hawai'i).