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Sunday, Jul 06, 2008
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Rex Wockner |
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| International News | |
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IGLHRC denounces Iran sodomy executions -
HRW urges caution in interpreting reports The International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission on July 18 condemned Iran for its continuing executions of teens and men accused of engaging in sodomy. In many, but not all, of the instances that have been publicized, the individuals have been accused of other crimes as well, such as rape. IGLHRC Communications Director Hossein Alizadeh, a gay Iranian who won asylum in the U.S. based on his sexual orientation, cited recent cases of sodomy-related executions in the cities of Mashhad, Gorgan and Kermanshah. "Despite a widely publicized outcry two years ago when Iranian authorities executed two young men in the northeastern city of Mashhed, the government continues to target, arrest, prosecute, and execute individuals under its sodomy law," IGLHRC said. "IGLHRC ... condemns Iran's violations of human rights law and asks that human rights groups around the world work to support those targeted by the government. "The Iranian media regularly publishes stories about the execution of alleged criminals on sodomy-related crimes," the statement continued. "Just a week ago the Spokesperson for the Iranian Judiciary announced that in the next few days some 20 criminals will be hanged in Tehran on a variety of charges, including sodomy. "The International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission condemns the prosecution and execution of individuals for consensual sex, including sodomy." The 20 announced executions also were the subject of a July 11 New York Times article, which said some of them were punishment for "homosexuality." IGLHRC Executive Director Paula Ettelbrick said execution amounts to "cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment under international law, particularly in the context of consensual sexual conduct." "The added problem in these cases is that Iran seems to be arbitrarily targeting individuals perceived to be gay for these forms of heinous abuse," she said. "The systematic use of torture, forced confessions, and the inhumane treatment of detainees discredits Iran's criminal and judicial systems." IGLHRC noted that Iran refuses to allow independent investigation of its human-rights situation, which "makes it impossible for IGLHRC and other human rights organizations to verify many of the charges against alleged perpetrator[s] and to monitor their access to fair trials." The organization called upon human-rights defenders to support the work of the Toronto-based Iranian Queer Organization (irqo.net), to lobby their own governments to oppose Iran's treatment of real or perceived GLBT people, and to request that their "government's immigration service adopt policies to provide refuge to individuals who fear persecution based on sexual orientation or gender identity." HRW struggles to gather facts Meanwhile, Human Rights Watch continues to question whether Iran is routinely executing men solely for consensual same-sex relations, noting that, with one exception, the cases that have been publicized seemingly also involved other charges. In postings to the Euro-Queer e-mail list on the topic of the most recently announced sodomy executions, HRW researcher Jessica Stern said that "reports from diverse media sources indicate" that the men to be executed for sodomy "have been convicted of rape, not homosexuality." Asked to name those sources, Stern, in a telephone interview and via e-mail, cited "BBC Persian, ISNA, IRNA [and the] Fars News Agency." "It is not in the best interest of LGBT Iranians for the international community to claim as a 'gay case' one that could in fact be about the rape of juvenile boys and girls," Stern said on Euro-Queer. HRW has responded similarly to some other reports that Iran allegedly has executed teens and men for engaging in consensual "lavat," which HRW translates as "sodomy" and defines as "penetrative and non-penetrative sexual acts between men." The problem, Stern said, is: "There is no inherent meaning of consensual or non-consensual sex in this word [lavat]. Thus, it can be applied in criminal cases of consensual sex between men ... and it can be applied in cases of non-consensual sex between men, as may be the case here" in this latest case. In the latest case, a Farsi-speaking New York Times reporter said some people were to be executed for "homosexuality." But Stern said several native Farsi-speaking sources told her that the Farsi syntax of the charges presented to reporters July 10 by an Iranian judiciary spokesman was such that the word "lavat" (sodomy) -- which appeared at the end of a spoken list of various charges faced by a group of 20 people -- was modified by the word "rape," which appeared at the beginning of the list, creating, in the minds of her sources, the phrase rape-sodomy. However, Stern, who has been responsible for much of HRW's research on Iran's sodomy executions, said in a telephone interview that she is aware of at least one case where Iran apparently did execute adult males for consensual lavat. "There was a case in 2005 ... that basically two men were executed seemingly for consensual sex, lavat, when one of the men's wives discovered a videotape of them having sex -- so that was the one case I'm aware of that sort of seemed to break the mold," she said. "The wife found the videotape, she watched it, she was horrified, she turned it in to the police." Meanwhile, on July 19, the second anniversary of the widely publicized hangings in Mashhad, gay activists gathered in Moscow, Cologne and San Francisco -- and reportedly in Warsaw -- to remember the hangings. GayRussia.Ru said about 25 people picketed Iran's Moscow embassy. In San Francisco, activists and city Supervisors Ross Mirkarimi and Bevan Dufty lit candles in Mirkarimi's City Hall office. Mirkarimi, an Iranian American, told the Bay Area Reporter, a San Francisco gay newspaper, that it is important not to underplay the issue of Iran's sodomy executions. "It's important to be strategic ... but we can't tiptoe around something that is a blatant horrific action such as this," he said. Blogger and longtime activist Michael Petrelis, who organized the San Francisco vigil, told the BAR, "If this were 1941 Germany ... I would not be silent, as a homosexual Jewish American." In the end, given information currently available, there is no disagreement among human-rights activists that Iran executes men convicted of sodomy. But in many of the cases that are publicized, the executed individuals apparently have been convicted of additional crimes, too. Some of the activists working on the issue at various human-rights groups have said they personally believe that executions solely for consensual sodomy between adults are taking place in Iran regularly but that such cases usually are not publicized because such executions could cause public outrage both inside Iran and elsewhere. In a "reflection" circulated July 20 by IGLHRC, the organization publicly acknowledged its "suspicions that [Iran's] current practice really is to rid society of lesbians and gay men." Kathmandu police assault transgendered for carrying condoms Police in Kathmandu, Nepal, have admitted that they target effeminate males and transgender people (both known as metis) for the apparent crime of carrying condoms. On July 14, city police allegedly beat, stripped and sexually abused several metis who had gathered in Ratna Park. Upon receiving complaints about the incident from Nepal's GLBT Blue Diamond Society and a visiting activist from New York-based Human Rights Watch, a Janasewa Police Station Sub-Inspector, Pardeep Chand, reportedly informed the activists: "We found metis carrying condoms and the metis also told us that they use condom while having anal or oral sex. So it's our regular campaign to control metis inside the Ratna Park and elsewhere." According to Blue Diamond's account of the events in the park, officers approached the metis; threatened to shoot them if they tried to flee; slapped, kicked and clubbed them; searched their pockets; found money; and stated, "You ... motherfuckers, you make this money by anal sex and prostitution." According to Blue Diamond, the officers forced the metis to strip and pull back their foreskins to be checked for semen residue. The officers allegedly searched the metis' bags, found condoms, and asked what they were for. When the metis said they use the condoms for sex, the were beaten further and accused of engaging in unnatural and illegal sexual activities. The metis were later held in two police vans, then released. Mayor blasts Budapest pride attackers Budapest Mayor Demszky Gábor on July 9 denounced the hundreds of neo-Nazis and skinheads who violently attacked the city's gay pride march on July 7. "Physical violence and murderous threats were meted out against peaceful marchers who were expressing their sexual identities," Gábor said. "Not a single well-meaning democrat can remain silent about this! [It was] intolerant, primitive and cowardly, all at once. "It was those [GLBT marchers] who dared to declare their own selves, in spite of the threats, who bore witness to true courage," he continued. "The main demand of Saturday's march was the extension of the right to marry to gay couples. A part of Budapest probably agrees with this demand, while another part does not. I am certain, however, that an overwhelming majority of the citizens of the capital condemns all the acts of violence committed against demonstrators standing up for their rights. "As mayor of Budapest it is my duty to stand up for all those who are persecuted in Budapest. [I]f need be, I am also Jewish, Gypsy and gay. ... We will not allow that anyone should fear because they belong to a minority." Hundreds of skinheads, neo-Nazis and other opponents threw eggs, bottles, smoke bombs, Molotov cocktails and plastic bags of sand at the 2,000 marchers. The counterdemonstrators shouted, "Faggots into the Danube, followed by the Jews," "Soap factory" and "Filthy faggots." Later, dozens of pride attendees were attacked in the vicinity of the post-parade party at the open-air, riverside Buddha Beach nightclub, the parade's endpoint. Parade opponents included members of Movement for a Better Hungary and the Hungarian National Front, who said they were annoyed that the Hungarian Socialists, part of the ruling government coalition, have come out in support of legalizing same-sex marriage, and that Gábor Szetey, the government's human resources secretary of state, publicly came out July 5 as he opened Budapest's 12th Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Festival of culture and arts. Ireland to pass civil-union law Ireland's government will pass a law to extend marriagelike rights to same-sex couples, Taoiseach (prime minister) Bertie Ahern said July 16. Speaking at the reopening of the refurbished Outhouse GLBT community center, Ahern said his government is committed to full equality for gay couples, the Evening Echo newspaper reported. "We will legislate for civil partnerships at the earliest possible date in the lifetime of this government," Ahern said. The Outhouse center provides office space to 70 GLBT groups and contains a library and cafe. Hong Kong acquits car-sex couple Hong Kong's Court of Final Appeal on July 16 cleared a gay couple who had been arrested for having sex in a car in an isolated location in the dark. The court said the prosecution of Zigo Yau Yuk-lung, 19, and Lee Kam-chuen, 30, was impermissible because the public-sodomy ban under which they were charged unfairly targets only male couples, not female or opposite-sex couples. The court declared the law unenforceable and unconstitutional. In 2006, a law that punished gay sex by males under age 21 with life in prison also was struck down as unconstitutional. |
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| "There was no question that was a completely self-destructive act. I spent years making sure I'd never go anywhere near anything like that in L.A. -- I knew how awful the police were. So why did I do that? To come out in the most self-destructive way possible!"
--Singer George Michael on his 1998 arrest in a cruisy Beverly Hills, Calif., park toilet, to London's Gay Times, July issue. "If HIV/AIDS were the leading cause of death of white women between the ages of 25 and 34, there would be an outraged outcry in this country." --Hillary Clinton at the June 28 Democratic presidential candidates' debate. "The pharmaceutical companies realized there wasn't any money in cures and vaccines, because once you cure them, they don't need your pills anymore. So the industry made a conscious effort to steer away from finding any permanent cures or vaccines and got the public thinking more about living with an illness or disease for the rest of their life. In my humble opinion, it is most evident with HIV." --Filmmaker Michael Moore to The Advocate, July 17. "The last five years have been the greatest demonstration ever seen of evil done by people who think they have God on their side. The religious right in America is completely insane. That said, I think normal Americans are becoming more liberal again. Thirty percent really believe that Jesus is in the White House; the rest watch Ellen DeGeneres' talk show on TV and accept gay couples. Homophobic bigotry is less expressed now; it's becoming as unacceptable as racism." --Tales of the City author Armistead Maupin to London's Gay Times, July issue. "Somebody ... noticed that the epigraph at the beginning of the book, 'People like you and me ... we're gonna be 50-year-old libertines in a world full of 20-year-old Calvinists,' is credited to Michael when it was actually Brian who said that to Michael in 1976, so now I have to apologize profusely. Several fans have noticed this on my Web site, but it bugs me more than anyone. I'm such a perfectionist with that kind of stuff but I do trip on my own lore and I probably should have read my own books all over again before writing this [new] one." --Tales of the City author Armistead Maupin to Philadelphia Gay News, June 29. Maupin's seventh Tales book is called Michael Tolliver Lives. "Don't know about this blogging business -- especially on the road. Book tours have a crushing sameness to them. All I want to do after a signing/reading is flop in my room with midnight room service and hotel porn. (Mercifully they have gay porn now. In the old days you had to make do with dickless straight porn.)" --Tales of the City author Armistead Maupin on his blog, June 21. "There's almost a psychosis in someone like [the late Rev. Jerry] Falwell who obviously knew he had gay friends and gay associates and then turned around and blamed gay people among others for 9/11 on national television. I mean, who can make this stuff up, it's so batty." --New York Times columnist Frank Rich to Gay City News, July 5. "[Mitt] Romney has a record in Massachusetts where he ran to the left of Ted Kennedy on gay issues and Giuliani lived with a couple of gay guys when Donna Hanover threw him out of Gracie Mansion. When you see them trying to fudge it, particularly Romney more so than Giuliani -- who tried to fudge it but realized there was just too much on the record for him to do it, particularly on abortion -- it just seems like pandering to what is increasingly a fringe. I challenge the Karl Rove wisdom that this is the key to winning the nomination, let alone the presidency." --New York Times columnist Frank Rich to Gay City News, July 5. "My mother didn't have a good grounding. When you're a kid, and you're making that much money, and supporting all these other people, there's imbalance in your family and there's no one to say, 'No!' The people around her liked their lifestyles, and they liked their cars." --Lorna Luft, Judy Garland's daughter, to London's Gay Times, July issue. "I've always been very grateful to the gay community; they're the ones who always kept my mother's name in the public [eye]. I'm proud that my mom's funeral was the breaking point for the gay community to stand up and stop being harassed. I grew up in a house where prejudice wasn't an option. My mom would have been really proud that people stood up at Stonewall and said, 'We won't take it any more.'" --Lorna Luft, Judy Garland's daughter, to London's Gay Times, July issue. "The wave of American TV shows that supposedly signaled a new era of tolerance toward us -- Will & Grace, Queer Eye for the Straight Guy -- no doubt resulted in a backlash of homophobia among average Americans. It certainly must have alienated a whole new generation of homosexual kids, who wanted in no way to be associated with such insulting drivel." --Columnist Bruce LaBruce in London's Gay Times, July issue. "My appearance is also a concern, especially in West Hollywood. I have silicon routinely put into my cheeks and temples to give me a more rounded look and mask the [HIV-drug-induced] wasting. Originally, I thought it was trivial, but it's important not only to have my [lab] numbers look good, but also for me to look good, especially when I'm doing public appearances." --West Hollywood, Calif., Mayor John Duran to POZ magazine, July issue. "I was the GLC [Greater London Council] member for Norwood in 1973 and by sheer coincidence the gay liberation front squatted [lived without paying rent] in my constituency [district] in 1973. Just as I got elected. They were great fun, completely mad in retrospect. They made Peter Tatchell look conservative. And that traumatised the local political establishment because they thought this was a diversion from the real issue of class struggle, comrade. The gay liberation front had a horse, and the candidate rode on the horse through the streets and then on polling day he was carried around in a coffin, to represent the death of democracy. I remember a lot of the hard Left thought it was an outrageous undermining of class struggle." --London Mayor Ken Livingstone in a pride-week chat with PinkNews.co.uk. "You've got London, Berlin, and Copenhagen and Amsterdam, and San Francisco, New York, but these little gay friendly jewels are floating in a great effluence of homophobia, and the vast majority of gay people in the world are still risking if not their lives, a savage beating. We've had this huge influx of Poles into London over the last 15 years, and then you see the Polish government and these homophobic twins who run it, and you think, perhaps all the Poles who come here are fleeing them. If you were gay or lesbian in Poland, where would you want to be? You'd want to come to London." --London Mayor Ken Livingstone in a pride-week chat with PinkNews.co.uk. "[Y]ou do have to laugh at the vicious antics [of] this administration, and perhaps Dick Cheney in particular, that most nefarious molester of U.S. law and ignorer of all political integrity and deeply homophobic father of a creepily lesbian daughter and overall gruntingly guff sneerer at all moral principle, masterful mocker of everything you somehow still manage to think, even in your most despondent and ethically disillusioned state, that American politics is somehow supposed to be about." --San Francisco Chronicle columnist Mark Morford, July 4. "I've given my life and I continue to give my life, as many entertainers have done before me. I'm known for my big dick and good body and I keep it up. It's just my obligation to share it." --Gay porn legend Jeff Stryker to Boston's In Newsweekly, July 4. "I dedicated my life to entertaining gay men. I always try to justify what I did because I feel like I'm doing a public service in this day of AIDS and sexual disease because I can give somebody an alternative to going out and having unsafe sex. And if I save one life, hey, it's worth it. That's the way I've always looked at it." --Gay porn legend Jeff Stryker to Boston's In Newsweekly, July 4. "We're trying to provide a family environment where people can take their children who need to use the bathroom, without having to worry about a couple of men in there engaged in a sex act." --Fort Lauderdale Mayor Jim Naugle who wants the city to buy a $250,000 robotic toilet and place it in what he called "the rainbow parking lot" at the gay beach, according to the July 4 edition of the South Florida Sun-Sentinel. Naugle says the high-tech, self-cleaning, music-playing toilet won't allow people to stay inside long enough to have sex. Police told the paper that gay sex in toilets is no longer a problem in Fort Lauderdale -- "no evidence, no reports or arrests." "I don't use the word 'gay.' I use the word 'homosexual.' Most of them aren't gay. They're unhappy." --Fort Lauderdale Mayor Jim Naugle to the South Florida Sun-Sentinel, July 4. "Part of right wing dogma holds that when a straight person snorts a line it is a personal sin. However, when a gay person does the exact same thing, it is a communal sin and part of a 'lifestyle.'" --Syndicated gay-press columnist Wayne Besen, July 4. "The crowd cheered when we marched out [to sing the national anthem]. Rainbow flags were visible waving in every section. There was no audible booing or hissing, to our shock and surprise. It was a breeze. [T]he Christian wackos from El Cajon were so few in number and so pathetic on TV, using worn out sound-bite platitudes like 'lifestyle' and 'protect our children,' to the yawns and boredom of all present." --Gay Men's Chorus of San Diego member Fergal O'Doherty after the chorus sang The Star-Spangled Banner at the July 8 San Diego Padres game at Petco Park. Christians from the blue-collar suburb of El Cajon had raised a stink before game day, denouncing the Padres for welcoming the chorus and a group of 1,000 gay baseball fans to the same game at which it was promoting a giveaway of "floppy hats" to children. About 75 Christians picketed the ballpark before the game started. |
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| Hilary Clinton, Armistead Maupin | |
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