What would have been only the 6th annual Duhovy PRIDE march will not take place this year after organizers cancelled the event.
Duhovy PRIDE has often been targeted by far right extremists and the organizers fear that the climate is not right in the country after opponents of LGBTI rights in Slovakia forced a referendum to try to strengthen the country’s constitutional ban on same-sex marriage. Read More
This year, for the 3rd consecutive year, the protest march for equality returns to pound the pavement of Mindelo,Cape Verde to conjoin the week for equality for Lesbians, Gays, Bisexuals and Transsexuals of Cape Verde.
LGBT week commences the June 19th with activities at the Cultural Center of Mindelo with training activities on Human Rights through the Arts, a conference on sexual and reproductive health of LGBT persons along with the Third Festival of Cinema and Human Rights focused on all different people in addition to a video and photography expedition; not to mention a photography and drawing competition, on behalf of the organization where everyone is welcome to participate regardless of sexual orientation. On June 27th Mindelo will receive the LGBT parade with the slogan "Real equality in Cape Verde for Lesbian, Gays, Bisexuals and Transsexuals. Do not be afraid to come out, we are with you." Read More
A court in the South Korean capital Seoul ruled Tuesday that police violated the law when they banned a pride march to be held June 28 as the culmination of the Korean Queer Cultural Festival. Police had denied permits to hold the march, citing conflicting applications for events that overlapped the parade route. These applications were filed as the result of a showdown between Christian conservative activists and LGBT activists, who had both camped out in front of the police station processing applications for more than a week in May. The conservatives managed to get their public use applications in first.
On Tuesday, the court ruled this violated the LGBT activists’ right to protest. “Unless there is a clear risk of danger to the public, preventing the demonstration is not allowed and should be the absolute last resort,” the court ruled, according to a local news report. Read More
Russian police held around half a dozen activists for attempting to stage an unauthorised gay pride rally in central Moscow, AFP journalists witnessed. Police officers detained the activists and loaded them into waiting vans as around 30 nationalist counter-demonstrators in camouflage clothing and football fans hurled eggs at the activists and attacked them.
Several religious counter-demonstrators were also detained by police as a large crowd of Russian and international journalists looked on.
"Arrested and beaten at 10th Moscow Pride. We are arrested! They probably broke my left hand finger," leading gay rights activist Nikolai Alexeyev wrote on Twitter, posting a photo of himself in detention. Alexeyev, a prominent LGBT activist and lawyer and main organizer of Saturday's gay pride parade in Moscow was sentenced to 10 days in jail for "disobeying police orders" by a city court Monday. Read More
Kiev Pride organizers had been in negotiations with police for a month. According to the event’s executive director, Anna Sharygina, in the days leading up to the march they were meeting daily—still, the police would give no promises. Late into the night, the organizers were making contingency plans for “what we would do if we showed up and there were three cops there,” Sharygina told me. When they showed up, they found several buses full of police in riot gear—but also a number of young men and at least one woman wearing black T-shirts with the logo of Right Sector, the ultranationalist coalition that had threatened violence.
“Right now, during the war with Moscow,” the Right Sector leader Dmytro Yarosh wrote on his Facebook page on the eve of the march, we “will be forced to be distracted from other things in order to stop those who hate the family, break morals, and destroy morality and the traditional concepts of humankind.” He went on to say that the West is exercising too much influence over Ukraine “in order to force them to introduce the ideology of LGBT people.”
During the event, at least a dozen people were injured, including police, and more than 20 others arrested as scuffles broke out between members of a rare Ukrainian gay pride march and their nationalist opponents. Read More
Participants gyrated through the heart of Brazil's business metropolis, letting their hair down at the 19th Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender (LGBT) parade, whose slogan this year is "I was born this way, I grew up so I will always be like this: respect me."
The parade, which saw around 20 themed floats replete with dancers join the party, dwarfed the first, held back in 1997 and attended by only around 2,000 people who professed on that occasion that "we are many, and we are in all professions.” Since then, the LGBT community has increasingly secured rights in a mostly Roman Catholic and socially conservative country of 202 million and where there is widespread discrimination on grounds of sexual orientation.
Organisers said they expected upwards of two million people to attend the event, the largest of its kind anywhere in the world. Read More
The parade is the highlight of the city’s Gay Pride week and is expected to be Tel Aviv’s largest-ever pride event, with 180,000 participants including 30,000 tourists. This year’s celebration features Eurovision winner and LGBT rights representative Conchita Wurst and focuses on supporting the transgender community.
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A new study has found that 6.5% of Australians in their 20s identify as gay, more than any other age group surveyed. The survey asked 18,000 Australians aged 14 and over to agree or disagree with the statement: “I consider myself a homosexual.”
The general trend shows a steady increase in people identifying as gay across all age groups. The figure increased from just over 4%t in 2006 to 2008.
Roy Morgan Research chief executive Michael Levine said that the overall rising numbers reveal a cultural shift. “Finding out the ‘real’ number, therefore, is less about getting a head-count and more a gauge of just how open we are." Read More
Japan has an LGBTI population of 7.6%, according to a recent survey. This is equivalent to one in every 13 persons or 9.67 million people.
Advertising company Denstu polled 69,989 adults aged 20 to 59. A similar survey in 2012 found that only 5.2%, or one in 19, Japanese people identified as LGBTI. Dentsu said their methods had changed so it would be difficult to directly compare the 2012 and 2015 results, but it noted that more LGBTI people were daring to come out as society changed. Read More
To get a local council here to grant symbolic recognition to same-sex couples, the main pitch wasn’t about civil rights but about sharpening the ward’s cutting-edge image at home and abroad: “We need to be on par with London, New York and San Francisco as a cultural center,” said Ken Hasebe, who pushed the issue for 3 years as an assembly member in Tokyo’s Shibuya district.
His success this spring in passing the ordinance—the first of its kind in Japan—illustrates how changes under way in the West are having ripple effects elsewhere, even in deeply conservative countries like Japan. Many activists see the ordinance as a monumental step, however, because it has helped ignite a public discussion about long-ignored issues such as antigay discrimination.
Mr. Hasebe said he avoided painting same-sex partnerships as a human-rights issue to appeal to a wider audience and avoid arguments with conservative assembly members.
“I told them, only we, Shibuya, could be so bold and diverse,” the 43-year-old said in an interview. The ward, with about 200,000 residents, is known for its street fashion and youth culture, but isn’t considered a particularly gay area. Not only did the strategy work in the assembly, but Mr. Hasebe also pulled off a surprise win in April’s elections for ward mayor, beating a candidate from an established party who wanted to roll back the same-sex recognition. Read More
Introducing Project X, a Singapore-based sex workers' rights advocacy group that recognizes the intersectionalities of LGBT and mainstream issues. Its head, Vanessa Ho, laments that much remains to be done to help better the lives of those in the sex industry – the LGBT community, for one, “needs to be more embracing of other minorities” – but she also believes that those in the industry can take steps to help alleviate their situation. “Don’t stay silent. Speak out,” she says. Read More
Li Yinhe, born in Beijing in 1952, is a sociologist, sexologist, and LGBT activist and has studied sexuality in China for over four decades. She is also considered a pioneer of gender studies and advocate of sexual openness in China. She shared with us the huge changes she has seen in China, throughout the entire country as well as within the LGBT community.
“I believe the changes [in attitudes towards sex] have been huge. In the past, sex was only a way to produce children and expand your family. Since the implementation of family planning, this was bound to change since families were only allowed to have one child, or two in the countryside. Now people have sex for their own enjoyment rather than just as a means to procreate,” Li says.
“I remember about 20 years ago, in the People’s Daily, homosexuality, prostitution, and drugs were all supposedly linked to social evils. This was the media’s attitude towards the LGBT community before, and a main reason for discrimination against the LGBT community.”
Li emphasizes the increasing visibility of the LGBT community, and how much more frequently they are now mentioned in state media. This wasn’t the same even 10 years ago, when everybody was convinced that no one was gay, and so they had never met someone who purported to be homosexual. The LGBT community back then was completely invisible. Read More