‘Gay man’ disinterred in Senegal BBC News

he body of a man believed to be homosexual has twice been dug up from a Muslim cemetery in Senegal.

The man, in his 30s, was first buried on Saturday before residents of the western town of Thies dug up his body and left it near his grave, police say.

His family then reburied him, but he was once more exhumed by people who did not want him buried there. His body was dumped outside the family house.

Senegal outlaws homosexual acts but there is a tradition of effeminate men.

A police officer told the AFP news agency that the body was eventually buried away from the cemetery.

The state-owned Le Soleil newspaper reports that it was buried within the grounds of the family home.

“Goor-jiggen” (men-women) dress up as women, socialise with females and have long been tolerated in Senegal, a majority Muslim country. However, attitudes seem to be changing.

The AFP news agency reports that local imams, as well as some newspapers and radio stations, have denounced homosexuals after an appeals court last month overturned the conviction of nine people for homosexual acts.

‘Gay man’ disinterred in Senegal

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Gays under threat in Senegal

DAKAR, Senegal — A mob gathered near a mosque outside Dakar. They were there to hunt down and kill nine men accused of homosexual acts.

Earlier this week the nine Senegalese AIDS activists were freed from eight-year-prison terms for alleged homosexual acts, but they went into hiding because of death threats from Muslim religious leaders and the general population.

“The homosexuals will not escape lynching. They will be fish food,” Dakar newspaper L’Observeur quoted a local youth leader as saying.

“Gay men will never be free in Senegal. They expose us all to danger,” said Imam Mbaye Niang, a prominent religious leader and member of parliament. “The judges should understand that Senegalese people need to protect their children, their families from homosexuality.”

In Senegal — where 95 percent of the population is Muslim — homosexual acts are punishable by fines and up to five years in prison. In January, the nine men received the harshest sentence yet for such an offense in Senegal, getting the maximum of five years and an additional three for criminal conspiracy.

Though widely supported in Senegal, the conviction was condemned by international human rights groups and foreign governments, most notably France.

“They were judged and condemned very severely, surely on the basis of public outcry, therefore the justice was neither objective nor founded in law,” said lead defense attorney Barim Sassoum Sy, who called the initial ruling hasty and emotional.

A Dakar appeals court overturned that decision Monday, citing violations of legal protocol.

Acting on an anonymous tip, police had arrested the men — most of whom do HIV prevention work in the “men having sex with men” community — in December at the home of a prominent gay activist. But the police did not have a search warrant, nor did they catch the men in the act, which is required by the Senegalese law prohibiting “indecent acts against nature.” The judge hearing the appeal therefore declared their convictions null and void, Sy said.

Yet even as smiling attorneys and supporters celebrated in the packed courtroom Monday and exchanged congratulations, plans were already in place to get the freed men into hiding outside Dakar.

“The first judge sentenced them to eight years,” said Imam Niang. “He had the courage to say it. The judge that let them go was much less courageous. He yielded to international pressure.”

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Gays under threat in Senegal

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Africa Senegal: Court Frees 9 Gay Men

An appeals court on Monday freed nine gay men who had been convicted of “unnatural acts” earlier this year, in a case that drew international condemnation from human rights groups and foreign governments. Senegal, predominantly Muslim, criminalizes homosexuality like dozens of other African nations. The men were arrested in December at the home of a prominent gay activist and sentenced to eight years in prison. See Africa Senegal: Court Frees 9 Gay Men

New York Times - ‎

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Anti-Gay Senator Out; LGBT Festival Celebrates

Chris Buttars, the Utah Republican state senator famous for racist and anti-gay outbursts, was removed from his post as head of the Judiciary Committee for breaking a deal with his anti-gay Republican colleagues to cool the rhetoric.

Buttars’ latest outburst was to a documentary filmmaker. He called same-sex relations “an abomination” and the LGBT movement “probably the greatest threat to America,” while comparing LGBT activists to Muslim “radicals.”

“Most of what Senator Buttars said, I agree with,” said Republican Senator Howard Stephenson, but his caucus felt Buttars had become too much of a “lightning rod” on LGBT issues.

A Salt Lake Tribune editorial called him a “Buttaraurus,” writing, “Buttars will never change. But Utah will.”

A “Buttars-Palooza” with live music and a DJ was organized by LGBT activists for the lawn of the state capitol on February 28 and attracted more than 1,000 people celebrating the GOP senator being taken down a peg. See Anti-Gay Senator Out; LGBT Festival Celebrates Gay City News

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Utah lawmaker who made anti-gay comments removed as committees’ chairman

A defiant Sen. Chris Buttars, R-West Jordan, said Friday he won’t let his ouster from two key legislative committee chairmanships stop him from defending marriage against “an increasingly vocal and radical segment of the homosexual community.”

Earlier Friday, Senate President Michael Waddoups, R-Taylorsville, took the unusual step of publicly announcing he was removing Buttars as both chairman and a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee

The decision also strips Buttars of his chairmanship of the Senate Judicial Confirmation Committee. Buttars, re-elected last year to a third term, remains chairman of the Senate Health and Human Services Committee and vice-chairman of the powerful Rules Committee.

Waddoups said his action should not be seen as a punishment for anti-gay statements Buttars made to a documentary filmmaker, which include comparing gay-rights activists to Muslim terrorists and calling them “the greatest threat to America going down.”

The Senate leader said Buttars is considered by his colleagues to be a “stalwart” who “represents the views of many of his constituents and many of ours.” Waddoups acknowledged he did not agree with everything Buttars said, but he repeatedly declined to be specific.

See Utah lawmaker who made anti-gay comments removed as committees’ chairman
The Deseret News (Salt Lake City)

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Muslim gay filmmaker’s work to be shown at the arts school

UT at the Movies/Winston-Salem presents the documentary, A Jihad for Love, 7 p.m. Saturday at the ACE Theatre Complex on the UNC School of the Arts campus.

Muslim gay filmmaker, Parvez Sharma, brings to light the hidden lives of gay and lesbian Muslims from such countries as Iran, Pakistan, Egypt, Turkey, France, India and South Africa.

Admission is $5, and all proceeds will benefit the Adam Foundation and UNCSA’s School of Filmmaking.

For more information, call 336-918-0902, or e-mail OUTattheMovies@triad.rr.com.

See Muslim gay filmmaker’s work to be shown at the arts school
Winston-Salem Journal, NC

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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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Eid pardon for Kurdish journalist imprisoned for writing about gay sex

A doctor sentenced to six months by a Kurdish judge for writing an medical article about sodomy has been pardoned and released.

Adel Hussein was convicted under the 1969 penal code of offending “public customs” with his article in newspaper Hawlati and sentenced on November 24th in the city of Arbil, the capital of Kurdish-controlled Iraq.

Massoud Barzani, President of the Autonomous Kurdish Government in Iraq, granted the pardon on Sunday, one day before the Muslim celebration of Eid, according to The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ).

See Eid pardon for Kurdish journalist imprisoned for writing about gay sex
PinkNews.co.uk, UK