"NewsWrap"
for the week ending June 9, 2007
(As broadcast on "This Way Out" program #1,002, distributed 6-11-07)
[Written by Greg Gordon, with thanks to Graham Underhill, and Rex Wockner
with Bill Kelley]
Reported this week by Rick Watts and Greg Gordon
Several thousand gays, lesbians and their supporters marched and partied in
Tel Aviv on June 8th at the 9th annual Pride Parade and Beach Bash. The
event in Israel’s commercial hub has been funded by the municipality in recent
years after most business sponsors backed out, fearing a backlash from religious
factions opposed to it.
Participants walked and danced in a carnival atmosphere from the central
Rabin Square to a downtown beach to hear speeches, DJs, and musical acts. Police
reported no serious incidents, despite threatened disruptions by rightwing
religious opponents. About fifteen protestors voiced their hostility to the
parade in a nearby closed-off area.
The event was held two days after Israel’s parliament, called the Knesset,
passed the first reading of a bill that would allow Jerusalem city officials to
ban Pride gatherings "which would hurt public order, public feelings or for
religious reasons." Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, who has an openly
lesbian daughter, is opposed to the measure. It needs to pass three more readings
to become law.
Police in Jerusalem approved a permit earlier in the week for a Pride event
scheduled for June 21st. Violent opposition from religious fundamentalists
forced the cancellation of two previous Pride parades on the streets of
Jerusalem. It’s not clear whether this year’s event will be similar to a
police-protected enclosed gathering held last year, or if a parade will again be attempted.
But third time was the charm for a Pride parade in the Latvian capital of
Riga on June 3rd.
In 2005, about 150 marchers were heavily outnumbered by more than a thousand
anti-queer protesters, who hurled insults, bottles and rotten eggs, blocked
the streets, and forced the parade to be rerouted. After the Riga City Council
banned the parade in 2006, organizers held a religious service at a church and
meetings at a hotel. Fundamentalist Christian, ultra-nationalist and
neo-Nazi protesters pelted participants with eggs, rotten food and feces at both
venues. Armed with a Latvian Constitutional Court ruling that the 2006 ban was
illegal, more than 500 LGBT people and their supporters marched this year around
a fenced-in park under very heavy police protection, dodging only a
paint-bomb and a few firecrackers. Riot police outnumbered both the marchers and about
a hundred jeering anti-queer demonstrators. Pride participants included
Sweden's Migration Affairs Minister Tobias Billstrom and six of his country’s MPs,
a Danish MP, a German MP, Spanish and Norwegian members of the European
Parliament, and a large multinational contingent from global human rights group
Amnesty International. Marchers carried rainbow flags and placards saying "Love
is a human right," and "No to hatred, we love Latvia."
At the same time, however, more than a thousand people attended a "World
Against Homosexuality" concert in another part of town. Many attendees signed an
anti-gay petition and were rewarded with a T-shirt showing two male stick
figures engaging in anal sex with the international circle-and-slash "no" symbol
superimposed on top of them.
Hundreds of gays and lesbians took part in the ten-day "QueerFest '07" in
late May and early June in New Delhi.
Organizers said the festival was a celebration of being gay or lesbian, and
also a protest of India’s Penal Code Section 377, which outlaws "carnal
intercourse against the order of nature" and carries a 10-year prison sentence.
Activists say that the law is not usually enforced, but allows police to
harass and solicit bribes from queer couples and scuttle HIV-prevention activities.
According to a recent report by the "Reuters" news agency, "If couples refuse
or are unable to pay a bribe, they are often put in dingy cells, brutally
beaten and humiliated."
A legal challenge to Section 377 has been bogged down in India’s court system
for several years.
Other "QueerFest" events included a film festival, seminars, photo exhibits,
performances, and a candlelight vigil.
Nearly all the men arrested at a private party in Iran last month have been
released, according to reports this week by Amnesty International.
Police raided a birthday party for a gay man in the Iranian province of
Esfahan on May 10th. According to witnesses, the police brutally assaulted the
host, his parents, and the guests. One said that "their clothes were ripped,
their faces and bodies were covered in blood. They were beaten up badly."
Twelve of the men were released soon after the incident, while five remained
in custody until May 29th, when four of them were released. Amnesty says
there have been conflicting reports about the remaining detainee.
87 people were arrested at the party, but most of them - including all of
the women -- were released unconditionally. The remaining detainees all had to
post bail and will face trial later this month. A judge has reportedly said
that they’ll be charged with consumption of alcohol and "homosexual conduct."
According to Amnesty, the 17 men who remained in jail the longest were said to
have been wearing "feminine" clothing, but that there was no evidence that
any sexual activity had taken place.
The raid marked the largest single attack on Iran’s gay community in recent
memory. Sodomy is a crime for which both partners can be punished by death.
Any sexual activity outside of heterosexual marriage is also illegal in Iran.
Three months after he called homosexual acts "immoral," the Chairman of the
U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, Marine General Peter Pace, is headed for
retirement. Pace’s term ends in September, and U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates,
who admitted this week that congressional confirmation for Pace serving another
two-year term "would be a backward looking and very contentious process,"
said that the Bush administration would nominate Navy Admiral Michael Mullen to
replace him.
Steve Ralls, a spokesman for the Servicemembers Legal Defense Network, or
SLDN, a support group for lesbigay military personnel, said that, "General Pace’s
remarks are still fresh in the memory of many of our troops, and no doubt
still fresh in the memory of many senators, too."
Admiral Mullen, currently Chief of Naval Operations, said during an April
appearance at the Brookings Institution in Washington that "Don’t Ask, Don’t
Tell," the Clinton-era policy that bans military service by open gays and lesbian
s, has "served us very well," but that he would be open to reconsidering the
issue. The SLDN’s Ralls told reporters that "Public opinion is soundly on the
side of revisiting this law. Eight out of 10 Americans want to see it
repealed," he said.
All of the Democratic Party’s presidential contenders favor repeal of "Don’t
Ask, Don’t Tell," while all of their Republican counterparts support the
policy.
Meanwhile, U.S. queer advocacy groups are expressing alarm over the Bush
administration’s nomination of Dr. James Holsinger Jr. of the University of
Kentucky College of Public Health to be the next U.S. Surgeon General. Holsinger
and his wife founded the Hope Springs Community Church, a well-known "ex-gay"
ministry that claims gays and lesbians can undergo conversion therapy and
become heterosexual. Such so-called "reparative therapy" has been denounced by
nearly every major medical organization in the country, including the American
Psychological Association.
In a paper titled "Pathophysiology of Male Homosexuality," Holsinger claimed
that his understanding of biology and anatomy led him to oppose equality for
gays and lesbians. As president of the United Methodist Church's national
Judicial Council, Holsinger voted last year to support a pastor who refused to
allow a gay man to join the congregation, and in 2004 he voted for the expulsion
of an openly lesbian minister.
The National Gay and Lesbian Task Force’s Matt Foreman said that the Bush
administration was "once again throwing red meat to its ravenous anti-gay
supporters," while the Human Rights Campaign’s Joe Solmonese said that "It is
essential that America's top doctor value sound science over antigay ideology."
Holsinger's nomination must be approved by the U.S. Senate's Committee on
Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions, whose Democratic members include
presidential hopefuls Hillary Clinton of New York, Barack Obama of Illinois, and
Christopher Dodd of Connecticut.
The new mayor of England’s university town of Cambridge is a male-to-female
transsexual, and so is her partner.
45-year-old Liberal Democrat Jenny Bailey was elected to the post by fellow
City Council members in late May.
Bailey’s partner, 49-year-old Jennifer Liddle, is a former council member
herself, and assumed the honorary title of "mayoress," which is given to the
spouse of the mayor.
"People can take me as a role model if they want," Bailey told London’s
"Times" newspaper. "But for transgender people, all we want is to disappear and
become normal, so I don't want to let it define me [and] I certainly do not want
it to eclipse being mayor."
Bailey is the first self-identified transsexual to serve as a mayor in
Britain. The world’s first transsexual mayor, New Zealand’s Georgina Beyer, went
on to win a seat in her country’s parliament.
And finally, 32-year-old Kanako Otsuji is a candidate in next month’s
elections for a Democratic Party of Japan seat in the legislature’s upper house.
She became the country’s first openly lesbian or gay elected official in 2003
by winning a seat on the local Osaka Assembly, and now she’s Japan’s first
such candidate for the national legislature to be nominated by a major political
party. Even though Japan does not legally recognize lesbian and gay unions,
the outspoken Otsuji celebrated her same-gender relationship this week during a
festive ceremony with Maki Kimura, her partner of four years. The event took
place in Nagoya, the country’s third largest city, during an HIV/AIDS
prevention festival called Nagoya Lesbian & Gay Revolution.
About a thousand guests attended the ceremony. The Chairperson and the
Secretary General of the Democratic Party of Japan, and the Governor of Osaka, sent
congratulatory telegrams. Photos of the smiling couple, each wearing bridal
gowns and holding bouquets, appeared in newspapers across the country.
Otsuji told the "GayJapanNews" Web site that "Gays and lesbians are hiding th
emselves in society to protect themselves. I want people to know that gays
and lesbians exist in society by looking at us."
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