POLL: CANADIAN MARRIAGE REGISTRARS SHOULDNT HAVE TO MARRY GAYS

Fifty-seven percent of Canadians think marriage registrars should be allowed to refuse to marry same-sex couples if homosexuality offends a registrar's religious beliefs, a COMPAS poll has found.

The federal government reportedly has considered introducing such an exclusion, along with protections for organizations and businesses that don't want to deal with Gays for religious reasons and for religious leaders who want to denounce homosexuality.

The poll also found that 72 percent of those questioned think clergy should be allowed to reject same-sex couples seeking to marry, and 68 percent think a print shop should be allowed to refuse to print a Gay brochure.

Pollsters said the late-October telephone survey of 502 people would be accurate to within 4.5 percentage points 19 times out of every 20 times it was conducted.

CATALONIA CREATES GAY-EQUALITY PROGRAM

The Spanish region of Catalonia, where Barcelona is located, has created a Gay-equality program within the office of the governor.

Director Màrius Tàrraga said officials have mapped out a four-year plan to advance GLBT equality.

The initiative is similar to programs for women and youth in the governor's office.

According to veteran Barcelona Gay activist Jordi Petit, "This is an unprecedented governmental institution in the worldwide LGBT panorama that can be a future model for many nations."

ITALIAN MP HORRIFIED BY TRANNY IN TOILET

Italian Member of Parliament Elisabetta Gardini, a former showgirl, said Oct. 28 that she felt sexually violated and "ill" upon encountering Transgender MP Vladimir Luxuria in the women's restroom.

She has called for a third bank of toilets at Parliament designated solely for Transgender people. Parliamentary officials are considering the request.

Luxuria, 40, dresses as a woman but is biologically male. A former Gay activist and drag queen, she was elected to Parliament in April as a member of the Communist Refoundation party.

"It would be absurd for me to go pee with the men," she told reporters. "There would probably be bigger problems."

Gardini, of the Forza Italia party, is former Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi's spokesperson.

AUSSIE DEPARTMENT STORE CLOSES TOILETS

The big Australian department store Myer has closed the first-floor toilets at its Pitt Street Mall location in Sydney because of what the Sydney Morning Herald called "rampant homosexual activity."

"Homosexuals were using the facility as a meeting point, often having sex in full view of other horrified users," the paper said.

The report blamed a listing on the Canadian Web site Squirt.org, which publicizes cruising locations, for contributing to the problem. It said Squirt also points cruisers to toilets at the Sydney Opera House, the Royal Australian Air Force base in Richmond, and 15,000 other hotspots in Australia.

CHINA GETS FIRST GAY STUDENT UNION

Sun Yat-sen University in Zhuhai, China, has become the first university in the nation to formally set up a Gay student union, the South China Morning Post reported.

The organization, called Happy Together, will raise awareness of GLBT issues and provide HIV education, chairwoman Liao Mingzhu said.

In Beijing, meanwhile, the city's first Gay clinic opened Oct. 28, the Xinhua news service reported.

A project of the Chaoyang Chinese AIDS Volunteer Group and the Chaoyang District Disease Prevention and Control Center, the clinic offers free, anonymous testing for sexually transmitted diseases and HIV, and free treatment for syphilis, gonorrhea and herpes.

People who test HIV-positive will be sent to free national treatment programs, which presently provide antiviral drugs to 25,000 people in 31 provinces, Xinhua said.

GAY HIV RATE JUMPS IN SWITZERLAND

Like many nations, Switzerland is seeing a sharp rise in the number of Gay men contracting HIV. The rate has doubled in the past three years.

The Federal Health Office blamed safe-sex fatigue, ineffective safe-sex messages, better HIV treatments, the Internet, drug addiction, alcoholism, depression and anxiety.

Improved treatments have made people believe HIV infection is no longer such a serious matter, the office said, while the Internet facilitates casual sex hookups in private homes which, unlike sex clubs and bathhouses, cannot be targeted by safe-sex campaigners.

GAY COUPLE TAKES ON AUSTRALIAN TAX OFFICE

The Australian Tax Office has rejected the tax return of a Gay couple who got married overseas, saying there's no such thing as same-sex marriage in Australia and the couple should not have ticked boxes on their return that suggest otherwise.

The unnamed couple responded that they will file no additional tax returns until the office recognizes they are spouses.

The couple had filed as married in previous years, but new sections on this year's documents made it obvious to officials for the first time that both individuals are of the same gender.

FAROE S GAYS DEMAND EQUALITY

Gay activists are demanding that the Faroe Islands ban antiGay discrimination and pass a registered-partnership law to bring the islands into line with the rest of the Nordic region.

The Faroes, population 47,000, are a self-governing overseas administrative division of Denmark located halfway between Norway and Iceland. In 1989, Denmark became the first nation in the world to pass a registered-partnership law granting same-sex couples the rights of marriage.

Last year, the Faroese parliament rejected an antidiscrimination law by a vote of 20 to 12.

The new push for the law follows a homophobic attack in a bar in Tórshavn, the capital, on popular local radio host Rasmus Rasmussen, who is openly Gay. Rasmussen and his family also received threatening phone calls after local media reported on the beating.

For more information, see http://www.act-against-homophobia.underskrifter.dk/.

QUOTE / UNQUOTE

by Rex Wockner
SGN Contributing Writer

"It made me angry that here's someone preaching [against] Gay marriage and going behind the scenes having Gay sex. ... Reading some of the things he was saying about Gay marriage and homosexuality, I started getting pissed. I've been out my whole life. I have a lot of Gay friends, and I've seen a lot of Gay people suffer."
--Mike Jones, 49, of Denver, a prostitute and fitness consultant, outing the president of the National Association of Evangelicals, Ted Haggard, 50, of Colorado Springs, who Jones says was his client for three years, paying about $200 per visit for monthly sex. Haggard stepped down from the NAE presidency and from leadership of his local church on Nov. 2. He eventually said he got a massage from Jones and bought crystal meth from him, but claimed he never took the meth or had sex with Jones. Later, on Nov. 5, Haggard admitted that he is "guilty of sexual immorality," but did not provide details. Jones says Haggard used meth when the two had sex, but did not buy it from him.

"[I]f [the Rev. Ted] Haggard's unblinking congregation could sit and listen to such a liturgical Liberace week after week and not realize they were in the presence of someone who makes Barry Manilow in a full-length mink look butch, they really need to recalibrate their ability to detect prescription-strength doses of flamboyance."
--Mrs. Betty Bowers, "America's Best Christian," Nov. 5. See bettybowers.com.

"The public eye has always been kind to me, and until recently I have been able to live a pretty normal life. Now it seems there is speculation and interest in my private life and relationships. So, rather than ignore those who choose to publish their opinions without actually talking to me, I am happy to dispel any rumors or misconceptions and am quite proud to say that I am a very content Gay man living my life to the fullest and feel most fortunate to be working with wonderful people in the business I love."
--Actor Neil Patrick Harris from TV's Doogie Howser, M.D. and How I Met Your Mother, to People magazine, Nov. 3.

"I left my home country, then-communist Czechoslovakia, to live in a country where I would be free to chase my dream without the specter of a faceless and menacing government watching my every move, spying on my family, controlling my travels, and confiscating most of what I earned. Ironically, today, in the name of protecting our democracy and freedom, my chosen country's government is behaving a lot like the totalitarian communist regime I left behind."
--Lesbian tennis great Martina Navratilova in a column published in Cleveland's Gay People's Chronicle, Oct. 13.

"If the last month has taught us anything about the Republican Party, it is that homophobia is campaign strategy, not conviction. Congressmen who trust their careers to Gay staffers vote for laws to enshrine second-class citizenship for Gays in the Constitution. Gay appointees and their partners are treated as married people at official ceremonies and social gatherings. Then whenever an election rolls around, the whole team pretends it's on a mission to save America from Gay marriage. Mr. Bush and his faithful acolytes seem perfectly willing to stoke fears that create division and sorrow in a country that doesn't need any more of either. The president has just a little more than two years left in office. You'd think that for once he'd want to consider devoting his time to making things better instead of worse."
--New York Times editorial, Oct. 29.

"[The New Jersey Supreme Court same-sex-marriage decision will have] virtually no effect on the election despite the hyperventilating of the anti-Gay marriage industry and political statements from the president, who would like to shift the country's attention from Iraq and economic insecurity and political scandal. They've gone to this well too many times. People are not going to be fooled this time around."
--Freedom to Marry Executive Director Evan Wolfson to Newsweek. Oct. 30.

"We believe in family values, we believe values are important, and we believe marriage is a fundamental institution of civilization. Yesterday, in New Jersey, we had another activist court issue a ruling that raises doubts about the institution of marriage. I believe that marriage is a union between a man and a woman, and I believe it's a sacred institution that is critical to the health of our society and the well-being of families, and it must be defended."
--President George W. Bush, Oct. 25.

"Denying committed same-sex couples the financial and social benefits and privileges given to their married heterosexual counterparts bears no substantial relationship to a legitimate governmental purpose. The Court holds that under the equal protection guarantee of Article I, Paragraph 1 of the New Jersey Constitution, committed same-sex couples must be afforded on equal terms the same rights and benefits enjoyed by opposite-sex couples under the civil marriage statutes. The name to be given to the statutory scheme that provides full rights and benefits to same-sex couples, whether marriage or some other term, is a matter left to the democratic process. ... The [existing] Domestic Partnership Act has failed to bridge the inequality gap between committed same-sex couples and married opposite-sex couples. ... The equal protection requirement of Article I, Paragraph 1 leaves the Legislature with two apparent options. The Legislature could simply amend the marriage statutes to include same-sex couples, or it could create a separate statutory structure, such as a civil union. [T]he Court will not speculate that identical schemes offering equal rights and benefits would create a distinction that would offend Article I, Paragraph 1, and will not presume that a difference in name is of constitutional magnitude. ... To bring the State into compliance with Article I, Paragraph 1 so that plaintiffs can exercise their full constitutional rights, the Legislature must either amend the marriage statutes or enact an appropriate statutory structure within 180 days."
--The New Jersey Supreme Court, Oct. 25.

"[One night while I was in the Air Force,] a bag was put over my head. I was stripped of my clothes. I was forced to do things sexually with two other male cadets. That's when you start having suicidal thoughts, and that's when you start saying, 'Oh my God. I am so stuck in this situation. I can't go to anyone.' ... I think it's the first time that I've said that that happened. I've been ashamed of it."
--Reichen Lehmkuhl, former Amazing Race winner and current boyfriend of Lance Bass, to ABC News, Oct. 22.

"I was never certain what to call my boyfriend of eight years -- ick, 'boyfriend.' I'm 35, not 15. But 'partner' sounds clinical, 'lover' sounds too '70s and 'longtime companion' sounds pathetic, evoking two old queens in cardigans watching Bette Davis movies. Nothing else sounds right because we already have a terminology for our better halves -- spouses, husbands, wives. But because Michael and I couldn't marry, calling him my 'spouse' was a lie. So I always introduced him as my 'partner' and put my hand around his waist, to show we didn't just run a pet store or a restaurant or a Hollywood studio together."
--John Cloud writing at Time.com, Oct. 25.

"I'm sure I can't make a movie here [in Hollywood] with the same freedom that I'm used to in Spain. I was asked to do Brokeback Mountain but refused for that reason. Before that, I had asked for the rights for The Hours and The Human Stain, but they were already sold. If they had given me the rights, I would have made them."
--Gay filmmaker Pedro Almodóvar to Bloomberg News, Oct. 31.

"All that's been accomplished by this [Mark Foley] scandal is to call into question one of the central erotic archetypes of Gay male tradition -- the ephebic beauty of boys at their muscular peak between the ages of 16 and 18. It goes back through Western iconography from Michelangelo's nudes to Hadrian's Antinous and beyond that to Greek sculpture. It's a formula at the heart of Plato's dialogues, as in the Symposium, which shows Socrates in love with but also declining sex with the handsome young Alcibiades."
--Bisexual writer Camille Paglia to Salon.com, Oct. 26.

"What does it mean [in the Mark Foley scandal] for Democrats to be agitating over Web communications, which in my view fall under the province of free speech? It's a civil liberties issue. We can say that what Foley was doing was utterly inappropriate, professionally irresponsible, and in bad taste, but why were liberals fomenting a scandal day after day after day over words being used? And why didn't Democrats notice that they were drifting into an area which has been the province of the right wing -- that is, the attempt to gain authoritarian control over interpersonal communications on the Web? It's very worrisome and yet more proof that the Democrats have lost their way."

--Bisexual writer Camille Paglia to Salon.com, Oct. 26.

"[On my book tour] I'm meeting these closeted men and women and Gay youth who, in certain cases, are very much filled with the same fear that I confronted as a young man. In St. Louis, a man who came to the book signing told his wife that he was at the gym that night. ... I mean, it just happens every time. I'm loath to give advice because people have shared stories that they've come out and they've lost their job or they find themselves in difficult circumstances. I mean, I can only tell them what my story has been and how much healthier, grounded and spiritual I am now. Mostly, I listen without judgment. It's in every city, but in sort of the red states, if you will, there's many more."
--Former New Jersey governor James McGreevey to San Diego's Gay & Lesbian Times, Nov. 2.

"This is not what I wanted [having sex at adult bookstores and highway reststops]. What I wanted was an open, monogamous, committed relationship, which I have now. But this is all that I felt that I could have. Ultimately it was, for me, unhealthy and self-destructive. ... It only compounded the shame which I had accepted from [my] faith."
--Former New Jersey governor James McGreevey to San Diego's Gay & Lesbian Times, Nov. 2.

"In a society which can be so casual about infidelity and so careless of the consequences, which does not quite know how to value friendship or affirm its importance, where so many children are given televisions in their bedrooms but are starved of time with their parents, and where the horrors and the prevalence of domestic violence are only beginning to be faced, the Church has enough that is challenging to say, enough hard words to speak, without condemning loving homosexual couples."
--Chester Cathedral vice dean Trevor Dennis writing in Britain's Guardian, Oct. 14.