NewsWrap for the week ending June 20th, 1998 (As broadcast on This Way Out program #534, distributed 06-22-98) [Compiled & written by Cindy Friedman, with thanks to Jason Lin, Brian Nunes, Graham Underhill, Martin Rice, Rex Wockner, Björn Skolander, Hannele Lehtikuusi, Greg Gordon & Lucia Chappelle] Anchored by Cindy Friedman and Leo Garcia Demonstrations in Romania this week against further reforms to the nation's sodomy law turned out to be much smaller than anticipated. One event scheduled by the Association of Romania Christian Orthodox Students didn't materialize at all. Another by the Free Democratic Party, PLD, drew 200 protesters, but no other organizations joined in. The PLD has no representatives in the parliament. The Bucharest gay and lesbian group ACCEPT took the low turnout as a sign of progress in changing public attitudes in Romania, over the five years since the Council of Europe made sodomy reform a requirement of Romania's membership. The prosecution rested this week in the world's most famous sodomy trial, that of Zimbabwe's first post-colonial President Canaan Banana. Twenty-two of prosecutors' forty potential witnesses testified, including nine alleged male victims of eleven counts of sexual assaults, most dating back to Banana's tenure as President from 1980 to 1987. Banana's attorney Chris Andersen made a routine motion for dismissal of the charges, challenging the credibility of the witnesses. But although Banana has pleaded not guilty to all charges and previously called all the allegations against him complete lies, Andersen also claimed that consensual homosexual acts should not be a criminal offense. He quoted extensively from British and South African authorities, but prosecutor Augustine Chikumira simply pointed out that the law is different in Zimbabwe. Zimbabwe's law makes no distinction between consensual and forced homosexual acts, although prosecutors often do not take consensual cases to trial and judges tend to sentence them more lightly. But those trends in Zimbabwe may be changing in the wake of the Banana trial. This week a brother of the Anglican Church pleaded guilty to two charges of indecent assault against a man who had come to him looking for a job. But more alarmingly, gay activist Keith Goddard, the program director of the group Gays and Lesbians of Zimbabwe, GALZ, will also be tried for sodomy. Goddard had reported to police attempts at extortion by a man who met him in a bar, but although prosecution is proceeding against that man, he will also be testifying in a sodomy trial against Goddard. GALZ believes it's President Robert Mugabe's government's latest move to repress Zimbabwe's only gay and lesbian organization. Ironically, at the same time Goddard was arraigned, he had just been quoted in a U.S. newspaper about gay and lesbian fears that the Banana prosecution would empower blackmailers. British Minister of State Alun Michael this week called for a major overhaul of the nation's sex crime laws, including several which discriminate against gay men in either their language or their enforcement. Michael made specific reference to both the commonly used "gross indecency" charge and to the charge underlying the recent case of the so-called "Bolton 7," which makes even consensual homosexual acts illegal if more than two people are present. Michael noted that many of the sex crime laws date back more than 100 years. More detailed plans for the review of sex crime laws will be announced in July. Angela Mason, executive director of the gay and lesbian lobby group Stonewall, said that a strong vote in the coming week's vote to lower the age of consent for gay men to 16 could make equal treatment a "ground rule" for the legislative review. Stonewall has already collected pledges from 430 Members of Parliament for votes to equalize the gay age of consent with that for heterosexuals. Meanwhile, the Finnish Parliament equalized the age of consent this week at 16 years without anyone speaking against it. The long-planned move came as part of a larger Crime Bill which passed without opposition. Of the members of the European Union, that leaves only Britain and Austria with higher ages of consent for homosexual acts than for heterosexual ones, and Austria is expected to take up the question in July. The more controversial legislative proposals in progress in Finland are access to fertility treatments and legal recognition of same-gender couples. And while tens of thousands of French gays and lesbians devoted most of their annual pride march through Paris to calls for legal domestic partnerships, Conservative President Jacques Chirac spoke out against the leftist Jospin government's plans to recognize those unions. Chirac asked in a speech to France's National Union of Family Associations, "When conception of a child is not possible, why should a legislator stretch rules that were initially intended solely to protect the interests of children?" Jospin had promised legal recognition for so-called "contracts of social union" in the last round of elections. Now Chirac has chosen that controversial proposal as one of a few issues he hopes will set his party apart from the Socialists in the next round of elections. Leaders of the U.S. Republican Party are also speaking out against gays and lesbians with an eye to pleasing Christian conservatives in this election year. Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott of Mississippi set off a firestorm of reactions and counter-reactions this week while taping an interview with conservative cable television talkshow host Armstrong Williams. In response to a question, Lott said that homosexuality is a sin ... Trent Lott: “You should still love that person ... and you should not try to mistreat them or treat them as outcasts. You should try to, you know, show them, you know, a way to deal with that problem. Just like, you know, my father had a problem, as I said, with alcoholism, other people have sex addiction, other people, uh, you know, kleptomaniacs -- I mean, there are all kinds of problems and addictions and difficulties and experiences and things that you ... that are wrong.” Lott's remarks were of particular concern since only he can schedule the long- delayed vote to confirm open gay James Hormel's nomination to serve as ambassador to Luxembourg. The White House stands firmly behind that nomination, and Presidential press secretary Mike McCurry was one of those responding to Lott's remarks, which he described as "backward" ... Mike McCurry: “... the fact that the majority leader has such views, apparently consistent with some who are fairly extreme in his party, is an indicator of how difficult it is to do rational work in Washington.” Texas Republican Senator Dick Armey immediately seconded Lott with a declaration of his belief that the Bible declares homosexuality to be a sin. Gay and lesbian organizations fired off arguments against Lott's disease model of homosexuality and said he was representing an extremist point of view. Religious right organizations said the gay and lesbian groups were the extremists and had control of the White House, while praising Lott and Armey for their bravery in upholding tradition. U.S. media observed the sixth annual Day of Compassion on June 19, an occasion for increasing awareness of HIV and AIDS and for increasing understanding for the people living with the illness. This year some 350 TV, cable and radio networks and operators broadcast spot announcements and special programming, events were held on the Internet, and Broadway dimmed its lights in a now-traditional observance. The Day of Compassion began when Los Angeles actor Neil Tadken was inspired by an AIDS-themed episode of a daytime soap opera to ask other soaps to include AIDS material one day each year. The observance quickly spread from soaps to talk shows to prime time specials, and on to other media. Both houses of the New York state legislature overwhelmingly passed a bill mandating that physicians report the names of people with HIV to state health officials. Governor George Pataki has indicated he will sign it into law. Although the bill has been introduced for several years and clearly had a majority of legislators behind it, Democrats supportive of the state's powerful AIDS lobby had prevented the measure from coming to a vote until the final hours of this legislative session. Twenty-eight other states now mandate reporting of HIV infections, but none has the number of cases that New York does. Although there has been increasing agreement that health officials cannot track the progress of the AIDS epidemic without collecting information about HIV infections, activists had lobbied to keep such data anonymous through a system using identification numbers instead of names. They fear that people will avoid testing and treatment rather than have their confidentiality violated. The bill also calls on state health workers to interview people with HIV in order to identify and attempt to contact other individuals they may have infected. The health workers have no authority to force cooperation with those interviews, however. The main political impetus behind the HIV tracking bill was a heterosexual man who infected a number of young women. And finally ... despite much-ballyhooed fears that actress Anne Heche's highly publicized relationship with Ellen DeGeneres might damage her credibility with audiences for a romantic pairing with Harrison Ford, the film "Six Days, Seven Nights" opened strongly last week, second only to what looks like the film of the year, "The Truman Show." This week saw the opening of what's been called the first full-length animated musical feature about cross- dressing, Disney's "Mulan". Not only is the fifth-century Chinese heroine willing to pass as a man to fulfill her warrior father's dreams of honor, her allies include characters played by a brace of openly gay actors. One is comic B.D. Wong, who plays her commander and love interest, and the other is veteran actor and playwright Harvey Fierstein, here appearing as Mulan's company’s most macho soldier. ======================================= Pride Is In The Eye of the Beholder by Michelangelo Signorile, and recorded exclusively for This Way Out What does Gay Pride Day mean to me? Not much. It's sort of like Memorial Day or Labor Day: not a day on which I reflect on the intended significance, and more so an opportunity to stretch the weekend out, unwind, and see friends. I haven't even been to the actual Pride parade in New York, where I live, for several years. And that's not a bad thing. It signifies that I've come far enough in my own life that I don't need a special day to think about being out, or to celebrate my gayness. Particularly in the work that I do, covering the gay community regularly as a journalist, I sometimes feel like it's Pride every day. Why do I need a special day to think about it? Because of the progress that has occurred, there are today many people like me. They're not necessarily working in the queer world but they are certainly out enough in their daily lives that Pride Day doesn't hold so much meaning for them. Those of us in this category sometimes look at Pride nowadays and see only the negative things, of which there are many. We see the commercialism, the cheesy rainbow everything, the hokey "We Shall Overcome" rallies, and the often silly--and sometimes just plain dull--parades. And we also see the non-stop partying. We watch the hordes of people for whom Pride is only an excuse to take a take a lot of drugs and dance the weekend away. More often than not, these individuals couldn't tell you much if anything about the Stonewall Riots. But they can certainly tell you the names of the DJs spinning at all of the hot club events on Pride weekend. There's nothing wrong with celebration; partying can in fact be enormously positive. It's quite healthy for any group that is stepped on in the ways gay people have been, and it helps us to let off steam. But too many people use the idea of celebrating "pride" as another reason -- one that supposedly offers more justification -- to blow the weekend out completely and to become a total mess. For a lot of people who have experienced the emotional damage of homophobia, this can often be a way to connect with others superficially and momentarily, often because they're unwilling or unable to do the hard work -- when they're not partying -- of achieving real intimacy. And, as has been reported over and over again, the results of this kind of hyper-partying include everything from unsafe sex to a sense of isolation and low self-esteem when the party's over. Needless to say, this is not something of which any of us should be particularly "proud". Yet, it would be unfair to look only at the negatives of Pride and decide it's time to pack it in. There is yet another, quite large group of people for whom Pride is something vitally important and very healthy, and there is often a disconnect between these people and those of us who've been doing the coming out thing for a longer period of time. Last year, I spoke at Atlanta Pride and Birmingham (Alabama) Pride, and I was a grand marshall at Nashville Pride. For many gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered people in the often- intolerant Deep South, Pride is the one day when they're able to come together and affirm themselves. People come from miles and miles around, from dozens of small towns and rural areas. Many of them have enormously positive, uplifting experiences. They often go back home and organize in their communities. Even in the big cities of the liberal Northeast, like Boston and New York, there are always people coming out of the closet -- from teenagers newly awakening to their sexuality to older people who've been in heterosexual marriages for twenty years and who are now taking those first steps out. For many of them, Pride has a purpose. There are also a great many other people who've been out for many years but who still reserve Gay Pride Day to commemorate and celebrate their own personal journey, for whatever reasons. Conflicts among us about the purpose of Pride today often result from the fact that we each base our views about it on our personal experiences with Pride --and on our personal experiences with being out -- and we often don't appreciate what Pride might mean for others. To those people who did Pride in the past but who now only see the downsides: Have a little patience, and try to understand that for many other people Pride has a significance that outweighs those downsides. And be glad that Pride no longer has a special meaning for you, as that perhaps means you've come pretty far. To those for whom pride is nothing but one big party: Take a moment to examine your own motives, be honest with yourself about whether or not those motives are healthy, and think about what you need to do if those motives indeed are not so healthy. And to those for whom Pride is meaningful, positive, vital and uplifting, whether it is a new experience or something you've done for many years: Happy Gay Pride. ------------ Michelangelo Signorile writes a monthly column for "Out" magazine. He's also the author of 3 books, including his latest "Life Outside: The Signorile Report On Gay Men, Sex, Drugs, Muscles And The Passages Of Life", a national bestseller just published in paperback by HarperPerrenial.