US: Bruce Springsteen Cancels North Carolina Concert Over Anti-LGBT Law

North Carolina’s controversial new anti-LGBT law doesn’t sit well with Bruce Springsteen. 

The Boss, 66, has been thrilling audiences across the country on The River Tour with his E Street Band since the start of the year. Although he and his bandmates had been slated to perform at the Greensboro Coliseum on April 10, Springsteen announced Friday that he was canceling the show following North Carolina’s passage of House Bill 2, or HB2, last month. 

Springsteen blasted the new legislation, which Gov. Pat McCrory signed into law March 23, in a lengthy statement on his official website April 8. 

“HB2 — known officially as the Public Facilities Privacy and Security Act — dictates which bathrooms transgender people are permitted to use,” Springsteen wrote in the statement. “Just as important, the law also attacks the rights of LGBT citizens to sue when their human rights are violated in the workplace. No other group of North Carolinians faces such a burden.”

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UK: LGBT rights: The brave nurses who supported people who underwent 'gay cures' in post-war Britain

As the RCN celebrates 100 years of the nursing profession, it’s worth pausing to remember the nursing staff who had the courage and compassion to fight back during some of the health service’s darker days.

Homosexual men – and it was predominantly men – were institutionalised in British mental hospitals and given "treatment" for their "condition" – the most well-known being Second World War Code Breaker, Alan Turing. Following his arrest and prosecution for a relationship with another man, Turing was given the "choice" between a prison sentence or oestrogen treatment and died not long after. 

Whilst the majority were enduring chemical aversion therapy, the absence of protocols or medical guidelines for such treatment meant that in some cases homosexual and transsexual men were given electrical shock treatment in the most appalling of circumstances. Refused water and being forced to lie in their own vomit and faeces as matter of course, many likened their experiences to torture. But this wasn’t Nazi Germany – this was post war Britain – a country supposedly entering into a new and brighter future.  Read more via the Independent 

UK: Archbishop of Wales apologises for gay prejudice

The head of the Church in Wales has apologized "unreservedly" to gay couples for prejudice in the church. Archbishop of Wales Dr Barry Morgan spoke at a meeting of the governing body in Llandudno. 

The church tweeted "Archbishop of Wales offers a pastoral letter on same-sex relationships apologizing unreservedly for prejudice within the church."

Last year, r Morgan said it would be "foolish" to bring forward a bill for same-sex marriages in church. A statement released by the church said although it was not ready to allow or bless same-sex marriages, "the debate is not over".  Read more via BBC

Australia: LGBTI Victorians speak out about the issues they want addressed by local and federal government

The Victorian Gay and Lesbian Rights Lobby recently surveyed LGBTI Victorians about issues they were most important and should be addressed on both a local and federal level. 

On a federal level, 88 per cent of respondents said they wanted to see greater legal protections from discrimination, while 85 per cent said they would like to see violence and public harassment addressed. On a local level, 83 per cent of respondents said they wanted to see their local government focus on LGBTI-inclusive health and community services. Read more via Star Observer

UK: Did police homophobia allow a serial killer to target gay men for over a year?

The deaths of gay men in 2015 went unconnected despite similarities between the cases and a history of serial killers targeting gay men. A 2007 review into the Metropolitan Police's investigation of 10 killings and attacks on LGBT people concluded that the police's work on such cases was influenced by institutional homophobia. The review, published by the independent police advisors LGBT Advisory Group, condemned the 1993 Gay Slayer police investigation as a "serious failure of policing." It said: "The initial investigations seemed to us to be more focused on determining promiscuity and risk taking," adding that more should have been done to warn the community.

In fact, one of the world's foremost experts on serial killers, the British criminologist David Wilson, says that the gay community receives "at best, a patchy service from the police." In his 2007 book Serial Killers: Hunting Britons and Their Victims 1960-2006, Wilson concluded that "homophobia has created the circumstances in which gay men have become one of the prime targets of serial killers in this country."

While somewhere between one and ten percent of the UK population is LGBT, since Nilsen's conviction in 1983, gay men have accounted for all or most of the victims of five out of the 14 serial killers since active in the UK. Read more via VICE

South Africa: Ekurhuleni lesbian teen murdered on her birthday

Lucia Naido, a young lesbian woman, was stabbed to death on the night of her birthday in Katlehong on Johannesburg’s East Rand.

The teen was murdered in a suspected hate crime meters from her home on March 19. She was found dying by her horrified mother, who ran outside when she heard her daughter’s desperate screams.

Her mother Xoliswa is now concerned for her own safety and fears being targeted by the two suspects (who likely live in the same community) because she is a witness. She also has little confidence that the police will find the men.

“I don’t think the police are going to do something. It is better for us to find the two men before they find us. I am scared to go outside and I can’t go to the shops. It’s not safe anymore in my own community,” she said. Read more via Mamba Online

Colombia: high court rules in favor of same-sex marriage

Colombia’s highest court has given the green light to gay marriage in the conservative, mostly Catholic country. The magistrates of the constitutional court voted six to three against a proposed ruling that said marriage applied only to unions between men and women and that it was up to the congress and not the court to decide on same-sex marriage.

Magistrate Alberto Rojas, who voted against the proposed ruling and will now write up the majority decision making gay marriage legal, said: “All human beings ... have the fundamental right to be married with no discrimination.” 

 Read more via the Guardian

UK: Doctors are failing to help people with gender dysphoria

Dr James Barrett, the lead consultant psychiatrist at Charing Cross Gender Identity Clinic and president of the British Association of Gender Identity Specialists, warned about the issues facing trans people in the British Medical Journal: “In the experience of those of us who work at gender identity clinics as many as one in five GPs won’t prescribe for people with gender dysphoria, even after expert advice from an NHS clinic.

“Reasons that GPs have given me for this refusal include concerns about it being dangerous (it isn’t), difficult (it isn’t), expensive (it’s not, particularly), and I’ve also heard disturbingly frank admissions that it was against ‘deeply held Christian beliefs’ or that ‘we are trained to treat illnesses, not to change nature’.

“NHS England’s guidance on specialised commissioning makes it clear that GPs are expected to care for people with gender dysphoria just as for any other group with an uncommon condition easily managed with a joint care model.  Read more via PinkNews

Canada: Transgender man beaten to get $15k compensation from nightclub

A transgender man who was physically assaulted and humiliated by a bouncer at a nightclub in Ontario is awarded $15,000 in compensation. The altercation took place two years ago, when the victim, Caesar Lewis, was with his friends at Mississauga’s Sugar Daddy’s Night Club.

Lewis, who is in his mid-twenties, described to the court that he was in the men’s washroom when a bouncer of the nightclub came banging on his cubicle, demanding him to leave or he would be thrown out. However, before Lewis was ready, the bouncer forced open the door and dragged him out with his pants still at his knees.

Lewis’s friend, who is also a transgender male, said it was their right to use the men’s washroom, but the bouncer yelled back: ‘You freaks need to get your fucking faggot asses out of this club.'  Read more via Gay Star News 

South Africa musician Nakhane Toure tackles gay themes

Nakhane Mahlakahlaka, popularly known to many as Nakhane Toure, is an award winning South African singer-songwriter influenced by Mali's Ali Farka Toure. His 2014 debut album Brave Confusion saw him being crowned newcomer of the year at the South African Music Awards, and he is now working on a new project with popular South African DJ Black Coffee.

He has also come out as gay, something which he has addressed in his music. Read more

Brazil: How to fight transphobic violence

Imagine if one transgender person was murdered every 21 hours in the United States. In Brazil, we don't have to imagine this horrific, overwhelming epidemic of fatal violence against transgender individuals. One transgender person truly is killed every 21 hours, according to a statement from Transgender Europe’s Trans Murder Monitoring Project emailed to my colleague Eduarda Alice Santos. She is a correspondent for Planet Transgender, an English-language hub for international transgender concerns, who also provided the image above from a "die-in" protest in Rio de Janeiro this year.

Brazil has the world’s highest rate of fatal violence against transgender people. In fact, the South American nation's trans murder rate is 16.4 times higher than anywhere else on the planet. If the world overall experienced Brazil’s transgender murder rate, there would be 1,260 homicides in approximately 70 days worldwide. In a year, we would lose an estimated 6,588 transgender people to homicide. Read more via the Advocate

Australia: Love wins—Marriage equality forum feels the passion

Andrew Bolt derided it as a “leftie love-in” – a Guardian Australia special event on marriage equality featuring political leaders Bill Shorten and Richard Di Natale, and veteran campaigner Rodney Croome.

Why Knot? had all the hallmarks. A progressive panel of speakers, check. Gathered at an inner-city theatre, check. An audience who saw marriage equality as vital to LGBTI people’s dignity, check.

What more was there to learn about a legal change that, according to all the polling evidence, most Australians just want to be done and dusted? As speakers shared their personal anecdotes of wanting recognition for their partnerships, or facing discrimination because they were raised by gay parents, the answer was clear: unRead more via the Guardiantil marriage equality is law, there is still plenty more to say.