NewsWrap for the week ending June 19, 1999 (As broadcast on This Way Out program #586, distributed 6-21-99) [Compiled & written by Cindy Friedman, with thanks to Graham Underhill, Brian Nunes, Jason Lin, Martin Rice, Rex Wockner, Chris Ambidge, Greg Gordon & Lucia Chappelle] Anchored by Cindy Friedman and Dean Elzinga Stephen Gately, a singer in the Irish band Boyzone, announced this week that he is gay. Boyzone has been tearing up the charts in the UK since its 1994 debut, and now has six consecutive number-one singles among thirteen consecutive top-five songs, with its compilation album "By Request" outselling the rest of the top 20 combined. Gately, 23, came out after learning that one of the band's former associates was trying to sell his story to the tabloids. Gately knew he was gay at 15, but kept it secret lest it hurt his show business career. In 1995, he came out to his parents and first met the man who is now his partner. That's Eloy de Jong, formerly a singer in the Dutch boy band Caught in the Act, which was very popular in Europe. The men had to be extremely careful to avoid being outed by the media, and didn't really begin their relationship until late last year. De Jong is still concerned that being out will damage his career, but supported Gately's need to pre-empt any media distortion of his situation. As the members of Boyzone married off over the years, Gately became known as the Boyzone bachelor, and there was so much speculation about him in the industry that one pundit remarked that, "I think there were only about 11 people in the UK who didn't know already that he was gay." Also driven out by the tabloids this week was Member of the Welsh Assembly Ron Davies. After eight months of hounding by the media, capped by what he charges was an attempt to entrap him, Davies, married and a father, said he was "left with no alternative but to confirm that I am, and have been for some time, bisexual." In October, Davies was robbed on London's Clapham Common, a notorious cruising area. That incident he referred to as a "lapse of judgment" forced him to resign from his post as Britain's Secretary for Wales and from the leadership of Wales' Labour Party. But his wife and his Caerphilly constituency have stood by him and still do. Now that he's made his announcement, he's hoping that his private life can be left alone and he can get on with the business of running the Welsh Assembly's economic development committee. Nor was he the only Davies in Welsh politics to come out this week. Karl Davies, chief executive of the Welsh nationalist Plaid Cymru party, told a Welsh publication he is gay, without really considering that he was outing himself. Although Davies passed up a chance to run for the British Parliament in 1992 out of fear that his orientation might lose his party a seat, he's not concerned now. He said that a survey found that half of Plaid Cymru voters don't believe a candidate's sexual orientation matters. He's been dating an Italian man for three years, but didn't identify him, because he says the Italians are "not as understanding as the Welsh." And the European Parliament will have a new gay member, with the election of actor Michael Cashman by a district in Britain's West Midlands. Although best-known as the former star of the popular UK soap opera "EastEnders," Cashman has been active in the Labour Party for more than two decades -- or as he once put it, "I was on the bandwagon for so long that I was there when we had to change the tires." He was elected to Labour's National Executive Committee last year. In the U.S., the highest-ranking gay appointee in the White House has stepped down. Veteran activist Virginia Apuzzo, assistant to the President for management and administration for two years, is returning to her home and family in New York. She was the first lesbian or gay to serve as an assistant to the President, although another lesbian and a gay man were later given the same title. Apuzzo was particularly gratified that the White House military detail was one of several groups to give her a going-away party. She's got a terrific new job with the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force Policy Institute, where she'll be doing research and political strategizing as the first occupant of an endowed chair named... the Virginia Apuzzo Chair for Leadership. Then there's that more controversial Clinton appointment, for James Hormel to go to Luxembourg as the first openly gay U.S. ambassador. After waiting more than a year and a half for the Senate to vote on the appointment, Clinton this month used his power to install Hormel while the Senate was in recess. Oklahoma Republican James Inhofe, one of a handful of Senators who had put "holds" on Hormel's nomination to prevent the floor vote that was expected to confirm it, was so outraged by Clinton's recess appointment that he put holds on all of Clinton's pending nominations. This won Inhofe almost universally bad press, particularly since his block on the naming of a new Treasury Secretary was blamed for fluctuations in the dollar in foreign financial markets. Last week, his role as a moralizer took a blow when three of his aides were found to have downloaded mass quantities of pornography on his office computers. This week, Inhofe lifted his holds after Clinton promised to give advance notice of any future recess appointments -- something he'd been doing all along. Also on Capitol Hill this week, the House of Representatives approved a school program to prevent hate violence through teaching tolerance, including tolerance of gays and lesbians. The Department of Justice's anti-bias curriculum called "Healing the Hate" was portrayed by the religious right as a method to "indoctrinate the young" that was an "attack on Biblical Christianity." Indiana Republican Mark Souder introduced a measure to prohibit the department from producing any materials which might offend religious beliefs, but the House voted 216 - 210 against it. A former Nassau County police officer this week became the first in New York to win a federal lawsuit for homophobic harassment by his fellow officers. Gay James Quinn was awarded $380,000 including a quarter-million from the County in compensatory damages, termination pay, and punitive damages levied against two supervisors and a line officer for conspiring to violate his civil rights. The judge's unusual ruling that gays and lesbians constituted a class vulnerable to discrimination, which is not explicit in federal law, may be appealed. In the Canadian Senate this week, the Chretien government's first bill extending equal recognition to same-gender couples was stalled until September. The vote on a Conservative motion to send the pension reform bill back to committee succeeded only because so many members of the ruling Liberal Party were absent at the time. However, extending federal workers' survivor benefits to gay and lesbian partners was not an important element in the Senate debate, even though it had driven a half-dozen Liberals in the House of Commons to break with their party. The lengthy, complicated bill has been unanimously opposed by all the other parties because it gives the government total control of a C$30-billion pension fund surplus that workers and pensioners believe belongs to them. Quebec's legislature, known as the National Assembly, this week unanimously passed an omnibus measure to give gay and lesbian couples status equal to that of unmarried heterosexual couples. The bill changed 28 laws to a gender-neutral definition of de facto couple, covering areas including social benefits, tax deductions and pension benefits. Although this is a landmark step, so-called common-law marriages of heterosexual domestic partners have not had as much legal standing in Quebec as they do elsewhere in Canada. In Ireland, the Lesbian Education and Awareness group is engaged in what's been called "the first-ever high-profile advertising campaign by any lesbian organization anywhere in Europe." For two weeks, billboards in a half-dozen Irish cities will display a poster asking, "How would you feel if your daughter were a lesbian? The same way as if she wasn't." And finally, speaking of lesbian visibility, 17-year-old lesbian Samantha Gellar this week got to see a staged reading of her play "Life Versus the Paperback Romance" before a sell-out crowd in the home of the New York Shakespeare Festival. When the play was a winner of the Young Playwrights Contest in Charlotte, North Carolina, the Charlotte-Mecklenberg schools found its lesbian themes "inappropriate" to be performed before an audience of students who might be as young as 10 or 11. But Gellar became a cause celebre for more famous gay and lesbian victims of censorship, including performance artist Holly Hughes, multiple Tony-award winning playwright Terrence McNally, and Pulitzer Prize winning playwright Tony Kushner. So after working on her script with lesbian Pulitzer winner Paula Vogel, Gellar got to see her script staged with lesbian Obie winner Lisa Kron and "Fried Green Tomatoes" star Mary-Louise Parker in a benefit for two programs for lesbigay youth. Many other big names contributed readings or letters for the event, which was emceed by comic Kate Clinton. Yet when novelist Dorothy Allison asked Gellar about her greatest hopes for her play, she answered, "that it be seen by middle and high school students in Charlotte, North Carolina."