Gay Olympic Medal Winning Boxer Dies Outcome Buffalo

Toronto— Mark Leduc a gay Canadien who had won a Olympic silver medal in boxing has died.

Leduc, 47 was a former light welterweight boxer who was the unlikely silver medalist at the 1992 Barcelona. Leduc gained further notoriety when he came out as a gay man in 1994 in the TV documentary For the Love of the Game. Leduc remains one of the few boxers ever to do so. In 1999 Leduc served as a grand marshal of Toronto’s glbt pride parade.

The Toronto Star reports that Leduc died at St. Michael’s Hospital Wednesday night after he was found unconscious in a local hotel sauna early Sunday morning. Doctors believe Leduc suffered a heat stroke that damaged his internal organs.

The Toronto native turned pro shortly after the 1992 Olympics and retired after winning the Canadian super lightweight championship in1993.

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Gay film festival keeps low profile Toronto Star

BEIJING–When China’s homosexual moviemakers decided to hold their fourth-ever film festival this year, they took pains to avoid confrontation with the cops.

They’d had confrontations before.

So this year, they didn’t issue any press releases. They picked a venue where they didn’t have to apply for a government permit. And they insisted on calling the event The Beijing Queer Film Festival.

“The translation of queer in Chinese is `ku er,’” explains film director Cui Zi’en. “In the Chinese language, it’s actually a less well-known word – a less provocative word than `gay.’”

The idea, Cui says, is not to wave flags in the authorities’ faces.

Yesterday, the five-day film festival opened in a village on the outskirts of Beijing without incident.

It’s no longer illegal to be gay in China: that ended in 1997.

In 2001, the Chinese Psychiatric Association delisted homosexuality as a disease. But gay books and films remained banned here in China and the gay community continues to test the limits.

Cui and other organizers hope this week’s festival goes smoothly – and doesn’t get busted. Gay film fests in the capital were shut down in 2001 and 2005, while a festival in 2007 squeaked by under the radar.

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Activist’s ‘railroad’ helps gay Iranians

Not quite three years ago, Arsham Parsi was an Iranian refugee in Turkey. Today, he is executive director of the Iranian Queer Railroad, trying to help 200 people down the same road he took to Toronto.

“Every day, people escape, people come here,” he said yesterday in his downtown apartment. “It’s constant, like a railroad, always moving.”

On a recent trip to Turkey, he secured refugee status from the UN High Commissioner for Refugees for 45 Iranian gays, but they are awaiting interviews at the Canadian and U.S. embassies. Parsi, 28, is lobbying on to get them out of Turkey where temporary residents must pay a $200 fee every six months.

“People in Turkey say they’re not homophobic and I say, `You’ve living in Istanbul. When you leave Istanbul, it’s different.’ Gays have been beaten on the streets in Turkey and the police do nothing.”

Canada, the U.S. and Australia are the likely destinations for gays, lesbians, bisexuals and transgendered people on his “railroad,” because those countries recognize the kind of persecution they face in Iran, where President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has said there are no gays.

Iran is one of 86 countries around the world that still declare homosexuality a crime and punish it with prison or death.

Parsi was still in Iran when he became an activist in 2001, first starting a clandestine online chat group for fellow gays, then an organization. He left when he heard government officials were hunting him.

Since arriving in Toronto in 2006, Parsi has been a guest speaker at the UN Human Rights Council and his activism earned him awards last year from the International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission and Pride Toronto.

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Toronto Star, Canada

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How Facebook and Web 2.0 are changing the nature of gay activism

Kowing there are at least 13,000 people across the world who support them has been a tremendous boost to Jane Currie and Anji Dimitriou.

The Oshawa lesbian couple was brutally assaulted in front of their children on Nov 3 in an attack that left them battered and bloodied. The couple chose to fight back, but not through press releases and phone calls, the traditional weapons of established activist organizations. Three days after the assault Currie and Dimitriou started a Facebook group.

“One of our friends phoned and said, ‘You should call the newspapers,’” says Currie. “We said, ‘We’re not sure about that.’ Then Anji said, ‘Holy shit. We should start a Facebook group.’ Not only is it unbelievably worldwide, it’s free.”

Currie says when they checked the group a couple of days later there were 87 members.

“We were on there yesterday [Nov 28] and there were 13,000 people,” she says. “Roughly every three minutes a new member joins. We’ve got emails from Norway, Spain, Australia, France, Scotland, Ireland. They’ve seen it [bashings] happen, if not had it happen to themselves.

“We were just trying to get the message out that it’s not an isolated incident, that it happens all the time. It completely snowballed from there.”

Among the snowball’s effects was that rather than having to chase media attention the media, including Xtra, ended up coming to them.

“One girl who was checking out Facebook, her sister was a reporter for the Durham News, which is owned by the Toronto Star,” says Currie. “It was the gay sister of this reporter who was saying, ‘That could have been my sister.’ CNN in New York came across it on Facebook.”

Facebook also played a crucial role in organizing another staple of traditional activism: the rally. The Nov 14 Oshawa rally drew several hundred people out on a windy, rainy night to support Currie and Dimitriou. The event was organized by the Durham chapter of Pflag, but Currie says much of the crowd learned of it through Facebook. See How Facebook and Web 2.0 are changing the nature of gay activism
Xtra.ca, Canada