BURUNDI: AIDS activists condemn new anti-gay law
The Burundian Senate overwhelmingly voted against the draft bill in February, but in March the lower house of parliament reversed this decision, and President Pierre Nkurunziza signed it into law on 22 April.
“We regret that the law will hamper Burundi’s attempts to fight AIDS by further marginalizing an at-risk population,” said a statement by international rights groups, including the New York-based Human Rights Watch, local rights group Ligue Iteka and local AIDS NGO, Association Nationale de Soutien aux séropositifs et Malades du Sida (ANSS). “We urge the Government of Burundi to act promptly to decriminalize homosexual conduct.”
People found guilty of engaging in consensual same-sex relations risk imprisonment of two to three years and a fine of up to US$84. “Our activities will be hampered by this law,” said Georges Kanuma, chairman of the Association pour le Respect et les Droits des Homosexuels (ARDHO), a local gay rights movement.
“Our organization is now closing down its offices [in the capital, Bujumbura] because we are afraid that with the new law we may be arrested.” ARDHO has been in existence since 2003 but has never managed to gain legal recognition as an NGO.
The association distributes water-based lubricants and condoms, and raises awareness of HIV/AIDS among men who have sex with men. According to Kanuma, most Burundians are not even aware of the existence of men who have sex with men in their society.
“We are hoping to meet CNLS [Burundi's national AIDS control council] officials to see if they will also stop the activities they were planning for men who have sex with men,” he added.
In its latest national strategic plan, CNLS lists men who have sex with men among the groups vulnerable to HIV, and recognizes the need for targeted prevention activities in this community. MORE
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Original source : http://gay_blog.blogspot.com/2009/04/burundi-aids-…
DC Bishop Harry Jackson: All of black DC is against gay marriage Metro Weekly
”It’s a race and a class struggle on this. If 51 percent of the people in D.C. are African-American and you have a unanimous vote by the city council on this, somebody’s not listening to the people…. The black ministers are irate that they are being shut out. They feel like nobody’s listening to them.”
Harry Jackson, a African-American evangelical church leader from Bowie, Maryland who is doing his best to ride his anti-gay marriage agenda to national fame and significance among social conservatives. He has repeated alleged that the interests of the black community and gay community are incompatible on the basis of his religious beliefs; defining the civil rights movement as belonging only to black Americans; and spreading misinformation that somehow that the entire gay rights movement is elitist and racist. His arguments, of course, do not allow for the existence of proud, gay African-Americans or that there are even voting members of the DC council who also happen to be black. Jackson has scheduled a protest for Tuesday, 10am, at Freedom Plaza against same-sex marriage recognition being adopted in any form by the DC City Council. (Washington Post)
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Bishop Harry Jackson: All of black DC is against gay marriage
Metro Weekly* Tags = gay men gay news lesbian news transgender bisexual
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Existing gay marriages now on a great divide
With the California Supreme Court likely to uphold Proposition 8 but still recognize those already married, the couples are feeling both elated and isolated.
Jeanne Rizzo, 62, who married her partner of 20 years in September, was “somewhat heartened” Friday that her marriage is poised to survive Proposition 8 — but she was not celebrating.
“We don’t want to be on a marriage island,” said the Marin County resident, who runs a health advocacy group.
The California Supreme Court’s signal Thursday that it would uphold Proposition 8 but still recognize 18,000 existing same-sex marriages raised questions and concerns about the prospect of being a minority within a minority — part of an exclusive club whose doors have been closed to others.
While some gay married couples fretted Friday about being isolated culturally and legally, others expressed relief and joy that their marriages would remain valid. Some said they would feel pressure to be a symbol for same-sex marriage and to always present a positive image.
“If I’m on an island, at least I’m on an island with someone I love,” said Howard Bragman, a Hollywood publicist who married his partner before the November election in which voters passed the gay-marriage ban.
Jon Davidson, legal director for the gay-rights advocacy group Lambda Legal, called the couples “pioneers” put into “an unprecedented situation.”
“It will be challenging for those 18,000 couples,” Davidson said. “They are likely to be frequently asked to prove that they are married. . . . They will be going forward where no couple has gone before.”
At the same time, the gay married couples may help educate Americans about same-sex marriage, Davidson said.
“They will be kind of living examples of the fact that no one else is harmed by the existence of married same-sex couples,” he said.
See Existing gay marriages now on a great divide
Los Angeles Times
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Can lesbian-only communities thrive in current era?
Alapine, a private residential community for lesbians in a rural section of northeastern Alabama, and dozens of other similar “womyn’s lands” dating from the 1970s face new challenges for survival as older members pass away or return to the mainstream world. Younger gay women today are less likely to want to live a separatist existence, and the siting of many of these communities in rural areas makes it difficult to attract people who need to work in a conventional office job, according to this article. The New York Times
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Original source : http://gay_blog.blogspot.com/2009/02/can-lesbian-o…
SENEGAL: Jailing of gay activists sets back AIDS fight
The men, who were involved in providing HIV prevention, care and treatment services to Senegal’s lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) community, have been sentenced to eight years in prison.
Homosexuality is punishable by up to five years in prison, according to the Senegalese penal code. In this case, the judge added three years for criminal conspiracy.
In a statement released last week, the International AIDS Society, which promotes new HIV research and best practice and is the custodian of the International AIDS Conference, and the Society for AIDS in Africa (SAA), which works to slow the spread of HIV, said criminalising and discriminating against any group of individuals only served to fuel the HIV epidemic by denying services and relevant prevention messages.
“The arrest of these men, based purely on their sexual orientation represents a major setback for the Senegalese response to HIV, which is widely viewed as a model in Africa,” said Joanna Mangueira, President of the SAA.
Cheikh Niang, professor of anthropology at Cheikh Anta Diop University in Dakar, the Senegalese capital, and author of studies on AIDS and sexuality in the country, agreed that jailing the activists was “counterproductive”.
“The severity of the sentence has created an atmosphere of panic amongst the associations that are working on HIV prevention and treatment with men who have sex with men (MSM),” he told IRIN/PlusNews.
Michel Bourelly of AIDES, an international organisation working with men who have sex with men in Senegal, said gay activists had gone into hiding or fled the country since the judgement. “Everything has stopped. The associations that provide HIV/AIDS services for homosexuals and MSM are too scared to work.”
Contradictions
According to Bourelly, the men were arrested while attending a meeting on HIV prevention. Brochures, condoms and model penises were confiscated as pornographic material.
“The condoms that were considered pornographic material during the trial were provided by the Senegalese government,” he pointed out.
A young gay member of an HIV/AIDS organisation serving MSM in Senegal, who did not want to be named, confirmed that intolerance of homosexuality had risen.
“Physical violence is more common now. Before we had groups which helped us – they gave us the courage to meet. We would do work on prevention, but now it’s too dangerous,” he said.
The jailed men were detained just two weeks after Senegal hosted the International Conference on AIDS and STIs in Africa (ICASA), where speakers emphasised the importance of addressing the needs of sexual minorities in African AIDS programming. Over 50 gay activists attended.
In an interview with IRIN/PlusNews in November 2008, Souleymane Mboup, President of ICASA, said MSM were a reality in Africa that could not be ignored.
“This is a question that we cannot run away from if we want to advance [the fight against HIV],” he said. “Many countries, including Senegal, must open their eyes and learn. We must think about which strategies to adopt.”
In 2007 the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria granted Senegal US$32 million to strengthen its HIV/AIDS response. Part of the grant was earmarked for targeting “vulnerable groups”, including MSM, with prevention campaigns, condoms and MSM-friendly clinics over the next five years.
“Senegal has been given considerable sums of money to address the needs of MSM in its national AIDS programme,” said Bourelly. “But now they are jailing the people they are supposed to be targeting.”
No one from the National AIDS Committee, one of the two principal recipients of the Global Fund grant, was available for comment. Abdoulaye Wade, director of the AIDS division at the Ministry of Health, told IRIN/PlusNews that the government continued to provide HIV/AIDS prevention and treatment services for MSM, but did not elaborate on what those services were.
Regressive
Joel Nana, advocacy director at the South African office of the International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission (IGLHRC), said Senegal had been praised for its progressive and inclusive HIV/AIDS programmes in the past.
“Senegal was the first country in Africa to address MSM in HIV programming, so this [judgment] is really a step backwards,” he told IRIN/PlusNews.
While Senegal has maintained a low HIV prevalence of about one percent in the general population, official data and studies conducted at Cheikh Anta Diop University suggest that about 21.5 percent of MSM were HIV positive in 2005. The studies also found that over 80 percent of MSM had female as well as male partners.
“It is a considerable error to think that this is just a homosexual problem,” said Bourelly. “Most MSM have had, or continue to have, sex with women, so the impact of effectively shutting down MSM programmes will be considerable on the general population.”
Human rights groups and AIDS organisations are calling for the immediate release of the nine imprisoned men, and for a change in Senegal’s penal code. Niang agreed that it was time to debate the merits of the law.
“There is no point in saying that men who have sex with men do not exist in our societies,” he said. “It exists and it is an ancient phenomenon. By ignoring its existence we will not respond appropriately [to the HIV epidemic].”
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Las Vegas’ oldest gay bar faces gaming license revocation
(Las Vegas, Nevada) Snick’s Place, the oldest gay bar in Las Vegas, is fighting for its existence after gambling regulators slapped it with seven counts of morals violations.
Gaming Control Board inspectors allege that patrons were observed by undercover officers engaging in sex acts in public areas of the bar. The …
A gay Muslim, tested by faith and family
All she has left of the person she used to be is contained in a 5-by-7 photo album with “Aliyah Bacchus” written in blue pen on its cover, each picture inside tucked beneath a slip of clear plastic.
There she is at 17, barely 90 pounds, smiling sourly on her wedding day in Queens, N.Y., dressed in hijab — a pearl-toned princess bridal gown shimmering with beads, her slender hands dipped in sleek white gloves, a veil attached to a white qimar, or head scarf, fastened snugly around her face. The man her father chose for her stands behind Aliyah wearing a black bow tie, his hands resting on her bony shoulders.
That was before. Before she walked out on the marriage. Before her Guyana-born Muslim family discovered she was gay. Before she fled.
Aliyah is 22 now, still hovering at 90 pounds, the dark skin of her Indian roots hugging bone, a boyishly feminine lesbian with cropped black hair gelled into a tussle atop her head, long eyelashes and sharp cheekbones.
She has traded her abaya, which she wore throughout middle and high school, for an ankle-length black trench coat and sunglasses with metallic frames. She has one piercing in her left ear, four in her right, a metal rod bridging the cartilage in the ear’s upper rim, a ring in her bellybutton, another in her nose.
Aliyah is Muslim. It’s a part of her identity she can’t shed, like her sexuality, like her last name — Bacchus, as in the Roman god of wine and merriment — and like her ink-stained flesh: the angel tattooed between her shoulder blades, the dark dragons on her lower back, the polar bear on her stomach, the dying rose on her right wrist.
She knows that in some Muslim sects, homosexuality is considered a crime punishable by death. But Aliyah lives in America, raised in low-income housing projects 20 miles from Manhattan’s West Village, where police raided the Stonewall Inn in 1969, setting off riots that sparked the beginning of a national gay rights movement.
In America, Aliyah knows, it is acceptable to be gay. But how, she wonders, can she be true to who she is while also adhering to her family’s faith? How does she reconcile both sides of her existence?
The pictures, faded and fragile, show Aliyah hugging her little sister, standing next to her father, laughing with her brother — a smiling tribe living in the Far Rockaway neighborhood of Queens. The photographs remind Aliyah that she used to belong to a family.
On an evening this spring, the sun sets as Aliyah sits on a park bench in the West Village, police sirens blaring around her. Police show up to break up two drunken men fist-fighting a few steps away. Aliyah is calm, nearly oblivious to the urban chaos around her.
A gay Muslim, tested by faith and family
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Marriott and Milk
Last month’s passage of California’s Proposition 8, which banned same-sex marriage, unleashed anger among gay and lesbian Americans. One target: Marriott Corp., mostly because the company’s founding family and current CEO, Bill Marriott, are members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Days Saints.
Mormons, of course, played a crucial role in passing Prop 8. News reports say that half of the $40 million spent to support Prop 8 came from LDS members, who also canvassed neighborhoods and staffed phone banks. This is ironic, at the very least, as Hendrik Hertzberg noted in The New Yorker:
You might think that an organization that for most of the first of its not yet two centuries of existence was the world’s most notorious proponent of startlingly unconventional forms of wedded bliss would be a little reticent about issuing orders to the rest of humanity specifying exactly who should be legally entitled to marry whom But no.
But why go after Marriott? According to my friend Bob Witeck, who runs a consulting firm called Witeck-Combs that specializes in gay issues and advises Marriott, neither Bill Marriott nor members of his immediate family donated to the campaign on behalf of Prop 8. What’s more (and this is undisputed), Marriott as an employer has an exemplary record around diversity in general and LGBT employees in particular. It gets a 100% rating in the Corporate Equality Index, an annual survey of corporate practices done by the Human Rights Campaign, an LGBT advocacy group. The HRC’s inaugural gala next month will be held at the Mayflower Hotel, a Marriott property in Washington. GLAAD, an activist group that focuses on the media portrayals of gays, has held its awards ceremony at Manhattan’s Marriott Marquis.
So it would appear that the Marriott Corp. is under fire only because the family belongs to the Mormon church. Bob Witeck says this is unfair. “Their policies and practices have been good for a long time,” he told me. “This notion of targeting people because of their faith is deeply troubling.”
At first, I agreed. Anti-Mormon bias is no less troubling that anti-gay bias. Then I saw Milk, the wonderful new movie about the life of Harvey Milk, the first openly gay man elected to public office in America. Part of it is about a notorious California ballot proposal to ban gay teachers from schools that was defeated in the 1970s. Milk argues, persuasively, that singling out gays and lesbians for discrimination in any way, shape or form is simply un-American.
The broad issue raised by the backlash against Marriott is this: What role should CEOS and big companies play when confronted with controversial issues? Certainly they make themselves heard when it comes to the issues directly affecting them, like taxes, trade, labor and environmental laws, not to mention multibillion dollar bailouts. Ought they not take a stand on social issues, too? Indeed, some do — Microsoft endorsed a gay-rights measure in the state of Washington and Procter & Gamble donated money to a gay rights group to help defeat an anti-gay law in its hometown of Cincinnati, as I wrote in a Fortune story called Queer Inc. in 20006.
Bill Marriott responded to the boycott threats last month on his blog. “Neither I, nor the company, contributed to the campaign to pass Proposition 8,” he wrote. “We embrace all people as our customers, associates, owners and franchisees regardless of race, sex, gender identity or sexual orientation.” Later, he recorded a Thanksgiving message around the diversity theme, mentioning sexual orientation. Clearly the company is worried about the gay backlash.
My guess is that Bill Marriott, who is 76 and a political conservative, has come a long way on the issue of gay rights. But for all his talk about diversity, he has yet to take a position on gay marriage or Prop 8. He has no obligation to do so, but if you believe that gay marriage is a civil rights issue, just as interracial marriage was once a civil rights issue, silence or neutrality is unacceptable. On this point, Milk the movie and Milk the activist are unequivocal. Either you’re for us or against us, Harvey Milk would have said.
See Marriott and Milk
Huffington Post – New York,NY,USA
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Who Will Save America’s Gay Hockey Team?
QUEERTY REPORTS — Like a burning forest fire, the global financial panic is burning everything in its path; businesses are folding, workers are being laid off, and now the burning embers of recession threaten to melt the ice for GForce, America’s national LGBT hockey team.
The team, made up of LGBT athletes from L.A., New York, Atlanta, Denver, Minneapolis, Philadelphia, and elsewhere across the country lost their sponsors this year — and the team’s continued existence is in peril.
“We were saddened but not surprised that our private philanthropists and corporate sponsors pulled out this year,” David Farber, one of the team’s centers, tells Queerty. “With a hard fought political campaign, Prop 8, and a severe economic downturn we were expecting to lose some sponsorship, but not all of it! We are now looking to non-corporate sponsors and grassroots support to help keep this great non-profit alive and spread the message of GForce.”
See Who Will Save America’s Gay Hockey Team?
Queerty, NY -
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