LA Now
For years, AIDS Healthcare Foundation President Michael Weinstein has sought to persuade elected officials to protect the health of porn actors by forcing adult film companies to require condom use.

This week, Weinstein celebrated his first major victory after the Los Angeles City Council voted to require condom use as a condition of getting film permits in the city. Now Weinstein wants to take his fight to Los Angeles County.

“This is a case study in the power of persistence,” Weinstein said in an interview. He noted that the concept of allowing drug users to exchange needles, once seen as untouchable, finally gained acceptance as a way to protect people from HIV.

Weinstein has pushed state legislators and the County Board of Supervisors to back mandatory condom use, but has received little support. No state lawmakers have been willing to sponsor legislation, Weinstein said, and Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky said in 2010 that the state, not the county Department of Public Health, should be dealing with the matter.

Weinstein also lost a court battle to compel the county public health agency to take a stronger position on condom use.

The tide began shifting in 2010, when the California Occupational Safety and Health officials said that rules protecting employees from bodily fluids also apply to porn actors. Adult film performers have said condom use in the industry should be a matter of choice for consenting adults -– and is not an issue for the government.

The big change came last year, when the AIDS Healthcare Foundation decided to seek a voter-approved ordinance mandating condom use as a condition for getting a film permit within city limits.

Weinstein said he was surprised that the City Council decided to back the condom measure, thus avoiding a vote of the public, when lawmakers have been reluctant to get involved with the issue.

He’s proposing a similar requirement for county government, which handles health permits for businesses such as tattoo parlors and restaurants.

“We’re going to go through the same drill with the county. We’re going to collect hundreds of thousands of [petition] signatures, we’re going to submit them. They’re going to huff and puff, and then we’ll see whether they’ll want to” have a vote on the issue at the same time as the presidential election, Weinstein said.

Google
BEIJING — AIDS killed 28,000 people in China last year, and another 48,000 new infections from the HIV virus were discovered in the country, according to an official report on Saturday.

In China 780,000 people live with the HIV virus, of which 154,000 developed AIDS, a report jointly produced by China’s Ministry of Health, the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS and the World Health Organization said.

In September 2011 there were 136,000 people receiving anti-viral treatment for the disease, it said, making the treatment coverage rate 73.5 percent, an increase of 11.5 percentage points compared to 2009.

The report, quoted by China’s official state media Xinhua, said some new trends had appeared, notably “a rise in the number of imported cases and those transmitted sexually”.

Sexual relations are the first source of contamination of the HIV virus in China, where a huge blood contamination scandal erupted in the central Henan province in the 1990s.

HIV/AIDS sufferers have long been stigmatised in the country, and rights groups estimate the number of sufferers to be higher, but increased government education has helped raise awareness.

Jerusalem Post
Men had posted pamphlets with title “Death Penalty?” featuring mannequin hanging from a noose and saying gays would go to hell.
Talkbacks (40)

LONDON – Three British Muslim men were found guilty on Friday of stirring up hatred by distributing leaflets calling for the death of homosexuals in what prosecutors said was a landmark case.

The men, from Derby, had posted and handed out pamphlets near their local mosque with the title “Death Penalty?” featuring a mannequin hanging from a noose and saying gay people would go to hell.

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The leaflets were part of a protest by a group of Muslim men against a forthcoming Gay Pride parade in the city.

Ihjaz Ali, Kabir Ahmed and Razwan Javed became the first people in Britain to be found guilty under a law introduced in 2010 making it an offense to stir up hatred on the grounds of sexual orientation.

The jury at Derby Crown Court heard how one witness had felt he was being targeted and feared he would be burned, said Sue Hemming from the Crown Prosecution Service.

“While people are entitled to hold extreme opinions which others may find unpleasant and obnoxious, they are not entitled to distribute those opinions in a threatening manner intending to stir up hatred against gay people,” she said in a statement.

“This case was not about curtailing people’s religious views or preventing them from educating others about those views; it was that any such views should be expressed in a lawful manner and not incite others to hatred.”

Gay rights group Stonewall said the case vindicated their call for specific legislation to protect homosexuals.

“We’re satisfied to see these extremists convicted for distributing offensive and inflammatory leaflets that suggested gay people should be burnt or stoned to death,” said Ben Summerskill, Stonewall Chief Executive.

The men will be sentenced on Feb. 10.

CBC
A man who ran for the New Democratic Party in last fall’s provincial election says a plan to make schools in Newfoundland and Labrador more welcoming for gay students doesn’t go far enough.

Thursday the provincial education department confirmed that this spring it will encourage schools from grade 7 to 12 to set up gay-straight alliances.

Friday Noah Davis-Power, a gay 18-year-old, said the province should go further.

“I think it needs to be mandated, needs to be there. The resources are there now but if you’re too scared to use those resources, it doesn’t matter,” he said.

Davis-Power was afraid to reveal he is gay when he was in high school. Someone ‘outed’ him, but he said that what he feared would happen didn’t.

“No one cared, they saw me as Noah. People still don’t believe I’m gay,” he said.

But he did have to deal with some abuse.

“I’d hear ‘faggot’ as I walked down the corridor, not to my face, never to my face, just behind my back,” said Davis-Power.

He survived it but he’s concerned that some people don’t.

“We’ve seen in the past year, the past few weeks, even more suicides that are directly linked to homophobic bullying,” said Davis-Power.

After he was outed, Noah started a gay-straight alliance group at his school. An idea that wasn’t embraced at first.

“Mostly they didn’t want parental publicity, we didn’t want to look like we were training gays.”

He said the group was tolerated, but not really accepted.

“We need to go from saying ‘It’s all right to be gay, but you’re still over there.’ That’s what tolerance is, it’s the worst word ever. ‘You have a problem but you can stay.’ You have to work from that to acceptance,” he said.

Xtra
In the past few days, there has been some level of attention paid to the fact that the Conservative government has been advocating on behalf of gay rights in places like Uganda, while at the same time trying to put limits on things like same-sex divorce in Canada.

Embassy magazine’s look at the issues notes that the Harper government’s support is at the lowest-common-denominator level (stop killing gays or throwing them in jail). Meanwhile, Matt Gurney at the National Post took that piece and went so far as to chastise the people who still say the government has a homophobic hidden agenda, but with all these wonderful things the Harper government is doing for gays, can’t we lay that to rest?

Well, yes and no. On the one hand, I don’t believe Harper is homophobic, nor the people immediately around him. It’s not just that John Baird is one of his most loyal ministers, or that Harper has a lot of time for out lesbian Senator Nancy Ruth, or that his wife, Laureen, loves gay men. These things are all true, and according to Nancy Ruth, Harper believes simply that sexuality is a private matter and leaves it at that. So be it.

But while Gurney cites things like the government’s declaration that same-sex marriage will remain the law of the land, the pledge to help more queer refugees, or going to bat for decriminalizing homosexuality in the Commonwealth, Gurney doesn’t look at the substance of these moves.

Yes, same-sex marriage remains the law of the land, so long as you were married in Canada and meet the residency requirements for divorce, and Gurney ignores the fact that Harper has opened up a legal can of worms when it comes to the recognition of all marriages abroad.

Moves to restrict the kinds of refugees accepted to only those recognized by states or the UNHCR marginalizes a large number of other queer refugees, primarily from Africa. As well, Jason Kenney’s much-touted pilot program with the Rainbow Refugee Committee on funds for private sponsorship is more of a back-patting exercise. It looks like it’s doing more than it is, given that groups like Rainbow Refugee have a more urgent need for capacity building, something these funds cannot be used for.

And then there’s the promotion of gay rights abroad. It’s one thing to say to the president of Uganda that he needs to stop the bill that would further criminalize queers in his country, but it’s quite another to actually give aid dollars to queer rights groups in those countries. And while Gurney says that this is a “walk before you run” approach to rights, it doesn’t acknowledge that “stop killing gays” is a far cry from a more profound message that queer rights are human rights.

It also ignores the “love the sinner, hate the sin” connotations of the message. Don’t kill the gays, but don’t promote their full equality either. That’s certainly a message that resonates with the evangelical base that does still exist within the Conservative party and that can’t be dismissed as a “hidden agenda.”

Above all, Gurney’s dismissal of criticisms of Harper’s record on queer rights ignores the fact that there’s a lot more to those rights than same-sex marriage. There is also a wide gap between having rights on paper and being able to enjoy them substantively.

Sure we have marriage equality in Canada, but we’re still seeing homophobic and transphobic violence, the lack of access to services – most especially in the health sector – and there still exists a huge urban-rural divide when it comes to queers in this country. It’s easy for city dwellers, both gay and straight, to think that the accepting environment they know extends across the country. It doesn’t.

There are still problems for queer communities in this country that Harper’s government has done nothing about. The majority of the Conservative caucus, including Harper himself, voted against the bill to extend human rights protections to trans people. They say that bullying is an issue but won’t offer any solutions. AIDS service organizations are starved for funds. They steadfastly refused to equalize the age of consent in this country.

Relying on the fact that they haven’t repealed equal marriage, their back-patting on refugees and their bare minimum advocacy abroad starts to look more like a pinkwashing job to say, “See! We’re totally not homophobic!” Until you scratch beneath the surface.

There may not in fact be a homophobic hidden agenda, but this government still has a long way to go before it can claim that it’s actually doing something substantive for the queer community, both at home and abroad.

WFAA
The gay and lesbian community is calling for Dallas Mayor Mike Rawlings to reconsider and sign a pledge in support of same-sex marriage.

In Washington, D.C. Friday, more than 80 other mayors in 25 states had signed the pledge sponsored by the group ‘Freedom to Marry,’ including the mayors of Houston and Austin.

Most of the supportive mayors are democrats, as is Rawlings, but some are republicans.

Among the mayors backing the pledge to fight for gay marriage was Houston’s Annise Parker. She’s a lesbian who has raised three children with her partner, and spoke of the difficulties without legal marriage in Texas.

“We have had to navigate insurance challenges, custody challenges and the school districts,” Parker said.

But not among the group was Rawlings, who said he didn’t feel he should get involved in such social issues as mayor.

“I was asked to pledge my support to ‘Mayors for the Freedom to Marry’ in an effort to pressure state and federal entities to legalize marriage for same-sex couples,” said Rawlings in a statement. “I decided not to sign onto that letter because that is inconsistent with my view of the duties of the office of the mayor.”

But that’s angered Dallas gay and lesbian groups.

“These are issues that affect gay and lesbian people here, and as our mayor, he should be willing to put his money where his mouth is and sign the pledge,” said spokesman Rafael McDonnell of Resource Center Dallas.

Rawlings said he personally supports gay marriage, but feels putting the weight of his office behind it is inappropriate, especially when he wants to focus on larger issues facing the city.

That’s not easing the anger.

“I think it’s causing some people to go, ‘That’s not what we expected,’” McDonnell said.