LGBTQ In Russia
 

Going Legal in Russia
St. Petersburg holds first sanctioned gay pride demo

BY DOUG IRELAND
Published: Wednesday, November 24, 2010 2:25 PM CST


Maria Efremenkova, a principal organizer of Equality St. Petersburg’s November 20 gay pride demonstration.

In an historic first for Russia, on Saturday, November 20, activists in St. Petersburg held the first-ever legal gay rights demonstration approved by authorities anywhere in that nation.

The rally took place just one month after the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) issued a landmark ruling in the Alexeyev v. Russia case, declaring that Moscow’s repeated bans on gay pride marches and events were illegal.

A jubilant Maria Efremenkova, a principal organizer of Saturday’s successful demonstration, told Gay City News by telephone from St. Petersburg, Russia’s second largest city, that “there were 15 gay activists who were participants,” while a number of supporters looked on.

But the gay contingent was hugely outnumbered by a highly organized homophobic counterdemonstration that included more than 100 religious extremists and skinheads. Some local radio stations played Christian Orthodox religious music during the demonstration, the Russian news agency Interfax reported.

“These fanatics screamed homophobic insults at us and chanted religious songs and slogans, threw eggs at us, and finally tore down our posters, banners, and rainbow flags, at which point we ended the demonstration after about 40 minutes,” Efremenkova said.

She noted her disappointment that police did a wholly inadequate job of protecting the gay activists from the violent counter-demonstrators. The 40-some police present were outnumbered by more than two to one by the homophobic demonstrators.

“The police explained to us they weren’t expecting so many of them,” Efremenkova said. “But that is no excuse for not following Russian law and protecting our right to free speech.”

In another first, the gay activists’ rally received coverage on local St. Petersburg TV stations, which are government controlled.

“Although most media coverage focused on the egg-throwing by the homophobes,” Efremenkova told Gay City News, “the impact of breaking the silence on homosexuality cannot be overestimated. Seeing strong, proud gay people speaking out and standing up for themselves and declaring they want the same human rights as everyone else inspires many people — especially those gays in the closet and young people struggling with creating their own identity in a homophobic society — to know they are not alone.”

The demonstration was also extensively covered on Echo Moscovy, a popular independent radio station heard throughout the country.

“Most Russian gays are in the closet, so visibility and coming out are our path to a brighter future of freedom and our day in the sun,” Efremenkova emphasized.

The gay rights rally was organized by Equality St. Petersburg, a fledgling direct action group of lesbians and gays founded in February with the help of Nikolai Alexeyev, the courageous young Moscow lawyer who has been the lead organizer of the banned Moscow Gay Prides and the founder of gayrussia.ru, the gay human rights news website that has been the principal catalyst for modern Russian gay organizing. Alexeyev was in St. Petersburg at that time in connection with a gay rights demonstration at which 12 activists were arrested. (For a profile of Nikolai Alexeyev and his work, see this reporter’s June 24, 2010 article, “Moscow’s Man of Action.")

“Nikolai was terribly important in helping organizing our group,” Efremenkova told this reporter. “His example and his experiences in gay organizing were inspiring and invaluable lessons for us.”

Alexeyev told Gay City News that at that February meeting, “I related our five years of experience and struggle around Moscow Pride and told them we’d support whatever they do. But I told them, ‘You have to choose your own way to fight for your rights,’ and I reassured them that they had the right to decide for themselves what they wanted to do.”

The soft-spoken Efremenkova traces her own decision to become a gay activist to seeing the film “Milk,” which starred Sean Penn as the gay activist who was elected to the Board of Supervisors in San Francisco and assassinated by a homophobic ex-colleague from that body. The film was commercially released in Russia.

“It was after seeing ‘Milk’ that I decided I had to do something,” Efremenkova told me, saying she next began contacting people who could form the nucleus of a new, militant activist organization. “Some I’d met in discussions after an LGBT film festival, others I knew from a Day Against HIV we’d held in December 2009, and some I met through social networking on the Internet,” she said.
After pulling that group together, Efremenkova explained, “it was after our meeting with Nikolai Alexeyev that I was inspired to organize the first St. Petersburg Gay Pride, which we chose to have on June 26 this year to commemorate the Stonewall Rebellion, of course.” That event, however, was banned by the city authorities.

“Now,” she said, “we have a core group of about ten people who participate in every one of our actions, and another dozen supporters who come from time to time.”

After the visibility of Saturday’s successful demonstration, Efremenkova said, Equality St. Petersburg’s plans include launching its own website, now in preparation, and “recruiting new people to join us. We want to recruit you, as Harvey Milk used to say,” she noted with a chuckle.

There are no public actions planned in St. Petersburg for the winter months —“You know that our winters are very cold!,” Efremenkova said. The next big focus for Equality St. Petersburg will be the third annual Slavic Gay Pride march to be held there next June 26.

Slavic Gay Pride was founded in November 2008 by Alexeyev and his colleagues in the Moscow Pride committee in collaboration with activists from Gay Belarus, the LGBT group in that former Soviet republic, the Belarusian Initiative for Sexual and Gender Equality, and the LGBT Rights Committee of the Belarusian Green Party.

The first Slavic Pride was held in Moscow — and broken up by police — at the time a delegation of Belarusian gay activists traveled to the Russian capital during the Eurovision song contest, a popular annual event televised all over Europe.

This year’s Slavic Pride took place in the Belarusian capital of Minsk, but was violently crushed by police in that authoritarian country, with a dozen activists arrested.

“We will come out for Slavic Pride even if we don’t get permission to hold it!” Efremenkova declared of the scheduled St. Petersburg version next summer.

She said that the ECHR ruling that bans on Moscow Pride were illegal was “definitely a big influence” on the decision by St. Petersburg authorities to grant permission for Saturday’s demonstration.

Just as important, Alexeyev pointed out, were two October federal district court decisions in St. Petersburg invalidating that city’s prohibition on gay pride demonstrations.

“The city has very smart lawyers, and adding those district court decisions to the ECHR ruling, they saw they could be in a world of trouble if they didn’t grant permission for Saturday’s demonstration,” Alexeyev said. “The city did not even appeal those court judgments against them.”

St. Petersburg is one of Russia’s great tourist destinations, with such well-known attractions as its network of canals, the immense art collection in the Hermitage, and the sumptuous Winter Palace of the former czars, the seizure of which capped the October 1917 Revolution that brought the Bolsheviks to power. It has historically been considered the most European city in Russia ever since it became the country’s “window to the West” during the reign of Peter the Great. Even during Soviet rule, St. Petersburg prided itself on its reputation as culturally cosmopolitan and more liberal than other Russian cities.

The sort of unfavorable global publicity provoked by the repeated bans on gay pride celebrations in Moscow by its ultra-homophobic former mayor, Yuri Luzhkov, is clearly at odds with St. Petersburg’s efforts to continue luring Western tourists. That factor undoubtedly played into the city’s calculation in granting Equality St. Petersburg permission to demonstrate.

At the end of September, after 18 years as Moscow’s mayor, during which the notoriously corrupt Luzhkov and his wife became billionaires, he was fired by Russian President Dmitri Medvedev as he became mired in yet another ethical scandal. The new mayor, Sergei Sobyanin, a loyalist of Russia’s strongman prime minister, Vladimir Putin, was appointed by Medvedev and approved by the Moscow City Council last month.

Gay City News asked Alexeyev if, given his win at the ECHR, there had yet been any indication of the new mayor’s attitude toward gays or Moscow Pride. “Sobyanin has never publicly expressed his views on homosexuality, and so far there has been absolutely no reaction on the part of city authorities to the ECHR decision,” he responded.But on November 16, the news website Gazeta.ru published a letter penned by Moscow’s prosecutor general, Yury Semin, demanding that police crack down on opposition groups planning unsanctioned rallies, with authorities bringing charges as soon as organizers announce their plans. Human rights advocates say that Semin’s proposal is not based on Russian law, and could be considered applicable to the kind of unauthorized gay public actions Alexeyev has organized for the last five years.

And on November 22, the daily Kommersant quoted Russia’s top magistrate, Constitutional Court Chief Justice Valery Zorkin, telling a law forum in St. Petersburg this past weekend, “Russia, if it wishes, may withdraw from the jurisdiction of the European Court of Human Rights.”

Zorkin added that the right of recourse to the European Court could be seen as “encouraging those in Russia who want any excuse” to sidestep their own courts at home. To cut off Russians from the European Court, the Russian government would have to pull out of the 47-member Council of Europe, which it joined in 1996 — a move which would severely damage its relations with Western Europe.

Alexeyev responded to Zorkin’s comments by saying, in an e-mail, “This is not the first attack of the head of the Constitutional Court of Russia against the European Court. His ‘arguments’ are senseless.

“It’s worth noting that the Constitutional Court managed to make a decision supporting the law which bans propaganda of homosexuality to minors in one region of Russia. While this regional law clearly contradicts the Constitution, his Court confirmed it does not. While it obviously contradicts the European Convention, his Court said it does not. I can’t even imagine the blast at him when the European Court gives its decision in this case. And this case is also pending with the UN Human Rights Committee.”

Reuters reported it had been told by a member of Medvedev’s administration that Zorkin’s proposal would most likely not be approved by the Kremlin. “I do not think we are developing backwards just yet,” he told Reuters on condition of anonymity.

But the success of Equality St. Petersburg in winning the right to demonstrate is a clear vindication of the young Moscow lawyer’s two-pronged strategy — a series of militant direct actions, including civil disobedience, in defiance of the more than 200 bans on gay events in Russia in the last five years, which have raised the visibility of Russian gays and their human rights struggle, followed by a long and patient fight in the courts using Russia’s own laws, constitution, and the international treaties which it has signed to hold authorities accountable and to expand freedom of speech and assembly.

In the course of his intrepid fight, Alexeyev has been arrested countless times, and, in the most bizarre government harassment aimed at him, in September, he was subjected to a frightening 72-hour ordeal in which he was kidnapped, drugged, and intimidated by Putin’s security forces in an attempt to get him to withdraw the ECHR lawsuit he only weeks later won. (See this reporter’s September 29 article, “Global Outcry Frees Russian Gay Leader.”)

Just back from St. Petersburg, Alexeyev spoke to Gay City News via cell phone early on November 22 as he was heading to yet another court hearing — the first in his legal challenge to Moscow’s ban on a demonstration he and his colleagues planned outside of the Moscow office of the Council of Europe early this month in support of their victory at the ECHR.

“This ban was particularly outrageous and discriminatory because the Moscow authorities had authorized a large homophobic demonstration in the very same place protesting the ECHR’s ruling,” Alexeyev said.

Every one of these pro-gay efforts in Russia is crucial, from the perspective of activists there.

“People in many countries made this first legal gay rights demonstration here possible,” Equality St. Petersburg’s Efremenkova told this reporter. “Gay Pride means the whole history which has gone before in all the countries in which homosexuality was once a crime. It’s easier for us to speak out because of what the world’s LGBT community preceded us in doing. But it’s such a long struggle...”

The full text of the European Court of Human Rights historic decision in Alexeyev v. Russia, in English, is online at tinyurl.com/3az2sdf. Doug Ireland can be reached through his blog, DIRELAND, at http://direland.typepad.com/.

http://www.gaycitynews.com/articles/2010/11/25/gay_city_news/news/doc4ced52f76f0ea115536900.txt

Illinois Civil Unions Bill PASSES State House
 

what a way to mark World AIDS Day....
 

...with threats of extortion and censorship by elected representatives. :|

http://www.advocate.com/News/Daily_N...k_Smithsonian/


"It’s 1989 all over again in Washington, D.C., as House speaker designate John Boehner of Ohio and incoming House majority leader Eric Cantor of Virginia have called for the dismantling of a Smithsonian exhibit focused on same-sex attraction.

The congressmen’s efforts are already paying off, as officials at the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery, where the exhibit—“Hide/Seek”—is being shown, have agreed to remove one controversial piece, a video by David Wojnarowicz, The Washington Post reports. The gallery was exhibiting a four-minute video by Wojnarowicz, a gay artist who died from AIDS in 1992, that includes 11 seconds of a crucifix with ants crawling on it. (Watch an excerpt of Wojnarowicz's piece here.)

Boehner spokesman Kevin Smith told the conservative website CNSNews.com that “Smithsonian officials should either acknowledge the mistake and correct it, or be prepared to face tough scrutiny beginning in January when the new majority in the House moves [in].” Smith later added that his boss wants the exhibit “canceled.”

Cantor said he wants the exhibit “pulled” and that it’s “an outrageous use of taxpayer money.”

Boehner's and Cantor's censorship calls are similar to a controversy that kicked off in 1989, when then-Senator Al D'Amato of New York ripped up a catalog containing Andre Serrano's "Piss Christ" on the Senate floor. The ensuing political and legal wrangling resulted in the National Endowment for the Arts cutting off funding for individual artists.

snip/
In response to Boehner's and Cantor's demands, a spokesperson for the Smithsonian explained that no federal funding is used to pay for exhibits—only infrastructure, curating of works, and staff, The Hill reports."

Mercury poisoning makes male birds homosexual

Low levels of mercury in the diet of male white ibises cause the birds to mate with each other rather than with females. As a result many of the females can't breed, and fewer chicks are produced.

It's the first time a pollutant has been found to change an animal's sexual preference. Many chemicals can "feminise" males or reduce fertility, but males affected in these ways still prefer females.

Mercury is extremely toxic, particularly in the form of methylmercury, which reduces breeding in wild birds by disrupting their parenting behaviours. To find out if it also affected mating, Peter Frederick of the University of Florida in Gainesville and Nilmini Jayasena of the University of Peradeniya, Sri Lanka, captured 160 young white ibises from south Florida. They gave them food laced with methylmercury and monitored them closely.

The birds were split into four groups. One group ate food with 0.3*parts per million methylmercury, which most US states would regard as too high for human consumption. A second group got 0.1*ppm, and the third 0.05*ppm, a low dose that wild birds would be exposed to frequently. The fourth group received none.

Poisoned

All three dosed groups had significantly more homosexual males than the control group. Male-male pairs courted, built nests together and paired off for several weeks. Higher doses increased the effect, with 55 per cent of males in the 0.3*ppm group affected. Male-male matings were responsible for 81 per cent of unproductive nests in the dosed groups.

Meanwhile the heterosexual pairs courted less and were bad at parenting – patterns of behaviour that were both already known to be caused by methylmercury poisoning. The combined effects of male-male pairing and poor performance by male-female pairs could be severe. "In the worst-case scenario, the production of young would fall by 50 per cent," says Frederick.

Looking for effects on courtship and mating is novel, says Tony Scheuhammer of Environment Canada's National Wildlife Research Center in Ottawa, Ontario. "People normally study pairs that have already mated to see how good they are at parenting," he says.

Other birds would probably be similarly affected, though both Frederick and Scheuhammer say it's far from clear whether other animal groups would be. In particular, there's no evidence for increased homosexuality in humans resulting from mercury poisoning, despite several long-term studies. "If the effect was as strong in humans as in the ibises, they'd have found it," Frederick says.

Journal reference: Proceedings of the Royal Society B, DOI: 10.1098/rspb.2010.2189
If you would like to reuse any content from New Scientist, either in print or online, please contact the syndication department first for permission. New Scientist does not own rights to photos, but there are a variety of licensing options available for use of articles and graphics we own the copyright to.

From the "How much crazy can one person spew" files
 

A Christian minister in Minnesota said on his radio program that the nation's first Muslim member of Congress was soliciting the support of the gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender community to implement Sharia law. Follow his logic with us, wouldn't you?

Bradlee Dean of the religious ministry You Can Run But You Cannot Hide International said on his radio program that Rep. Keith Ellison (D-MN) is only supporting LGBT rights as part of a strategy to bring Sharia law to the United States, the Minnesota Independent reported.

"I said time and time again that there is a correlation between the Muslims and the homosexual agenda, and we have a couple of fools in the state of Minnesota that are putting a rope around their neck and they just don't realize it," Dean said on a radio. "Here, let me give it to you this way: Keith Ellison is a Muslim."

Dear reasoned that Ellison's support of protections for the LGBT community (like the Matthew Shepard Act) and for same-sex marriage is part of a plot to overthrow the Constitution and put Sharia law in its place.

"Why is he so adamant about overthrowing the Constitution as it is right now? Because if you pay attention to the plow he's planting the seed," Dean said. "He's trying to come through with Sharee [sic] law."

Full article is here.

So if I follow this person's logic, the thing that will bring Sharia law to America is gay rights because, don't you know, that homosexuality is positively celebrated in every Muslim-majority nation you can think of. I mean Iran and Saudi Arabia--just to name two--are SO enthusiastic about homosexuals that they love them to death--literally.

Cheers
Aj

I read the article and glimpsed at his website. No Comment. :|

I didn't make it far on the guy's web site. Once I saw the rant against hate crimes laws, I knew that it was too early to deal with that kind of crazy.

(Plus they won't let me keep brain bleach (aka tequila) at my desk at work, even though I only use it for medicinal purposes, so there would be nothing to kill the pain of being exposed to that kind of high-dose crazy.)

Cheers
Aj

http://www.wtop.com/?nid=600&sid=2182930

TSA is a homosexual plot. hahahahahaha

Is there something in the water today? Between this story and the one AJ posted earlier, it is beyond ridiculious the accusations being made about "homosexuals" and of course the "agenda" thing.

The Huffington Post December 2, 2010


First Posted: 12- 2-10 10:37 AM | Updated: 12- 2-10 01:26 PM

Nigerian authorities will charge former Vice President Dick Cheney over a bribery scandal that is alleged to involve Halliburton, BusinessWeek reports. An arrest warrant "will be issued and transmitted through Interpol," said Godwin Obla, the prosecuting counsel at the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission in Nigeria.

The charges center on an alleged $180 million bribery payment used to secure a $6 billion liquefied natural gas contract. Prosecutors are also looking into international companies Saipem and Technip. Cheney was the CEO of Halliburton from 1995 to 2000, before becoming George W. Bush's running mate. "As the CEO of Halliburton, he has the responsibility for acts that occurred during that period," Obla told the AFP.

Nigeria arrested 12 employees of Halliburton earlier in the week, reports Reuters. The firm's offices in Nigeria were raided by anti-corruption police, although the company said that the detentions "had no legal basis and that its employees had since been freed."

Nigeria's Guardian newspaper reported that charges against Cheney were confirmed by the government and included "criminal conspiracy."
Well needless to say this makes me happy!!! I would be happier if Cheney was prosecuted here in the USA for crimes he committed here.

Death row inmate executed by firing squad

Convicted killer Ronnie Lee Gardner was executed by firing squad early Friday, the Utah Department of Corrections said.

Gardner, 49, is only the third person to die by firing squad in the United States in 33 years.

This is the problem with two-line articles.

The state of Utah allows a person sentenced to die to choose the method used, and firing squad is one option.

It was his choice to be executed by firing squad.

i think killing people is wrong unless it's to prevent the immediate death or harm to another. it seems pretty barbaric to me - it all does - but firing squad seems pretty barbaric and bloody.

I wasn't saying it was *more* barbaric than his crimes. I just think once a person's no longer a threat (because the person is imprisoned), killing a person is murder. I don't think the government should participate in murder. This is an area where there is a lot of disagreement - I think most people disagree with me. I think maybe I'll start a different thread just about the death penalty because I think it's a big topic.

AND it turns out that article wasn't breaking news. It happened back in June. So, sorry about that. Also, MsDemeanor had a point about the article not containing enough info. It almost seemed like a fake article to me because it was so short, but it was from CNN which I don't consider fringe, so I went ahead and posted it. If I'd hunted around for a better article I would probably have noticed that it wasn't "breaking" news.

I like the firing squad idea.
 

As long as they are breathing the violent criminal mind is active. They are always a threat. We just had a guy let out that was a serious agravated child molestor, because of the system. See system below.

The Really Old West Ruled. Kill someone. Get killed.:fastdraq:

Then the progressive Old West added a sheriff, then the jail, then the judge, then the jury, then the bigger jail, then the lawyer, then the bail bondsmen, then the prison for criminals, then the lawyer teams, then the institution for the criminally insane, then the rogue cops, then the appeals, then...we have today's repeat offenders..

Okay, my cat woke me at 5 AM..on my day off. :mohawk:

I understand what you are saying and I have a really hard time with the death penalty, but I also know there are times I hear about someone dying by execution, their own hand after killing others, or some type of karma, and I am relieved that person no longer resides on this planet.

Andrea