NewsWrap for the week ending April 29, 2006 (As broadcast on This Way Out program #944, distributed 5-1-06) [Written this week Greg Gordon, with thanks to Graham Underhill, Stephen Hunt, and Rex Wockner] Reported this week by Kathy Sanchez and Christopher Gaal Philipp Braun of Germany and Rosanna Flamer-Caldera of Sri Lanka were elected Co-Secretaries General of the International Lesbian and Gay Association -- or ILGA -- during the group's 23rd World Conference in Geneva earlier this month. The organization also created a Transgender Secretariat, and elected Sweden's National Federation for Sexual Equality -- or RFSL -- as Women's Secretariat. ILGA was founded in 1978 and has more than 500 national and local LGBT member organizations from about 90 countries. The global group holds world conferences every two years. The 2008 meeting will be held in Quebec and the 2010 gathering is planned for Moscow. A public demonstration was also held in Geneva during ILGA's April Conference protesting Moscow Mayor Yuri Luzhkov's promise to ban the city's first-ever Pride parade, scheduled to take place on May 27th. Gay and lesbian activists in the Latvian capital of Riga say they'll stage a second annual Pride parade, despite their harrowing experiences at a first-ever march in 2005. Last year's parade by about 150 marchers was completely overwhelmed by some 1,000 protesters shouting obscenities, throwing bottles and rotten eggs, blocking the streets, and forcing the procession to be rerouted. In the end, police had to form a human chain around the marchers to keep them safe. A new LGBT group called Mosaic is organizing this year's march, planned for July 22nd, and has promised better planning and public education prior to the event. "This year a wider and more professional circle of people are involved," a Mosaic spokesperson said. LGBT marches and demonstrations have been hindered, banned or faced violent protests in other European cities in recent years, including Belgrade, Chisinau, Bucharest, Zagreb, Warsaw, Krakow, and Poznan. The European Court of Human Rights has previously said that countries have a duty to protect those exercising their rights of peaceful assembly from violent attacks by counter-demonstrators. But the Pride committee in the Canadian capital of Ottawa is "effectively bankrupt," the Ottawa Citizen newspaper has reported. Ottawa-Gatineau Pride is 187,000 dollars in debt and needs an infusion of 25,000 dollars from the city government to stay afloat and stage this year's parade and festival, the committee said. After poor returns in past years, the festival's traditional supporters have been slow to sign on for this year's events. "If we don't have a festival this year, then there's no guarantee we can pay back the creditors," committee member Tamara Stammis told the paper. Ironically, about 66,000 dollars of the existing debt is owed to the city. Another 100,000 dollars is owed to local businesses, some of which have agreed to accept repayment at 25 cents on the dollar. Gays and lesbians in Israel took part for the first time this week in the country’s Holocaust Remembrance Day, which honors the millions killed by the Nazis. Two representatives of the LGBT group Jerusalem Open House laid a wreath representing the queer community at the foot of the Warsaw Ghetto rebellion monument in the Holocaust Center. An estimated 5,000 to 15,000 gay people, arrested as "sexual deviants," were forced to wear pink triangles and sent to concentration camps and gas chambers during the Nazi regime. Amir Sumaka’i-Fink, one of the Jerusalem Open House members laying the symbolic wreath, said, "As a gay man and as the son of a family of Holocaust survivors, I felt that I was closing a circle by participating in the ceremony... as a representative of the GLBT community." British nationals living in Hong Kong won't be able to legally marry their same gender partners there. Under the civil partnerships legislation that took effect in the U.K. in December, British gays and lesbians can legally marry their partners at consulates in other countries, but only if the host nation has no objections. 14 countries, including Venezuela, Turkmenistan, Colombia, Belarus, the U.S., Japan and Vietnam have given the okay. But "The Hong Kong government has informed us that it does not consider it appropriate to agree to the registration of civil partnerships of same-sex couples at the British Consulate-General Hong Kong at present," the consulate announced on its Web site last week. While homosexuality was decriminalized there in 1991, a Home Affairs Bureau spokesperson said the Hong Kong government withheld approval for the civil partnership registrations because -- perhaps ironically --it's still considering how to address anti-lesbigay discrimination. Two-thirds of lesbian and a third of gay male couples in the U.S. plan to add children to their families over the next three years, according to a survey released this week. Those numbers have increased dramatically over the past four years, according to Jeffrey Garber, president of OpusComm Group, which conducted the annual survey of gays and lesbians with Syracuse University's S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications. In 2002, just 15 percent of lesbians and 5 percent of gay men told the researchers they wanted children. "People are saying they're more comfortable with their sexuality," Garber said, and "that they have a right to a life partner. And along with that -- if they have a loving home -- why not a child?" The proportion of gay people surveyed who reported being "out" also increased from 93 to 97 percent. Of those responding this year, 21 percent of lesbians and 5 percent of gay men said they already have a child living at home. About 7,500 people completed the annual hour-long online survey, which was first conducted in 2001. Two sets of parents in Massachusetts have sued the town of Lexington and its public school system because a teacher read a gay-positive fairy tale to their children's class of mostly 7-year-olds. "King & King" tells the story of a crown prince who rejects a bevy of beautiful princesses, rebuffing each suitor until falling in love with a prince. The two princes marry, sealing the union with a kiss, and live happily ever after. The lawsuit charges that the school system should have asked for parental consent before the story was read to the class. The complaint said the school has "begun a process of intentionally indoctrinating very young children to affirm the notion that homosexuality is right and normal in direct denigration of the plaintiffs' deeply held [religious] faith". It also charges that Lexington broke a 1996 Massachusetts law requiring that parents be given prior notification of sex-education lessons. Lexington Superintendent of Schools Paul Ash said the school was under no legal obligation to inform parents that the story would be read as part of a lesson about different types of weddings, insisting that including the story did not constitute sex education. "This school district is committed to a welcoming environment for all kids," he said. "We embrace the diverse nature of the community." In 2005, GLSEN -- the Gay, Lesbian & Straight Education Network -- surveyed more than 1,700 lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender students between the ages of 13 and 20 from all 50 U.S. states and the District of Columbia. The results were released this week. Almost two-thirds of the respondents said they were verbally harassed because of their sexual orientation, and more than a third suffered physical harassment. About half reported being harassed for their gender identity, and 25 percent experienced anti-transgender physical harassment. The study also reported that only 16.5 percent of the students said that a school staff member intervened when they heard anti-gay insults. About 18 percent said they had actually heard staff making homophobic comments. 28 percent of the students surveyed had skipped school in the previous month because they felt unsafe. Queer students were more than five times more likely to cut class than the general student body, which not surprisingly resulted in their getting poorer grades. Of most concern to equality advocates is that there's been little positive change in the survey results since it was last conducted in 2003. Fewer students in 2005 could identify school staff that they felt comfortable speaking with about LGBT issues, and there's been no improvement in resources for them since 2003, the study found. GLSEN's report also argues that generic anti-bullying laws that don't explicitly prohibit anti-gay harassment in schools are tantamount to no bullying laws at all, but that students from states with specific anti-bias laws often report better school experiences. While anti-discrimination laws helped students, certain policies hurt them, GLSEN reports. Students in schools with abstinence-only sex education, for example, were more likely to experience anti-gay discrimination, according to the survey. "It's kind of scary that something considered education is actually contributing to isolation and fear and harassment," says Judy Hoff, the Safe Schools coordinator at Parents, Families & Friends of Lesbians & Gays. "The abstinence program says you don't have sex until you're married," she says. "The side comment [to gay and lesbian kids] is, oh, by the way, you never get to have sex. You're a second-class citizen." And finally, GLSEN's 10th annual National Day of Silence was held this week, with an estimated 500,000 queer and queer-supportive students at 4,000 schools across the U.S. participating. Students don't speak during the day, and wear tags or hand out leaflets to explain how they feel muzzled and can't truly be themselves on campus. The event is also held to spotlight the pervasive problem of anti-queer bullying and harassment in schools. Dozens of "Breaking the Silence" rallies and events were also held during the week in communities across the country.