This is the second attack on a gay Georgetown student to occur off campus in the past week.  The first attack occurred last Tuesday, when “a female student walking near campus was assaulted by two men in their late 20s, who shouted antigay slurs and pushed her to the ground before striking her with her book bag.”

“Both cases were referred to D.C. police because the incidents occurred off campus…Neither victim has filed a report with police, but officers are working with gay groups on campus in hopes of encouraging them to do so,” The Washington Post reports.

A vigil was held on-campus the night following Sunday’s assault.

Campus officials have sent a letter out to campus members addressing both attacks.

The findings came in a report by an 18-member panel of independent experts who urged the Kremlin to implement a number of legal reforms. They include narrowing the broad definitions of terrorism and extremism under Russian law, decriminalizing defamation cases against journalists and granting appeal rights to people forced into psychiatric hospitals by the courts.

The expert panel said it also was concerned about violence against lesbian, gay and bisexual persons, including reports of police harassment. It said it received reports of people being assaulted or even killed because they were gay or lesbian. The panel said it was concerned at the “systematic discrimination against individuals on the basis of their sexual orientation” in Russia.

Homosexuality was decriminalized in Russia in the 1990s, but many Russians are vehemently opposed to expansion of gay rights or gay-rights demonstrations. Moscow Mayor Yuri Luzhkov is an outspoken foe of gay rights and always has blocked attempts to hold gay pride marches in the capital, calling one a satanic gathering.

The U.N. panel – which this week assessed the compliance of Russia and four other countries with the U.N.’s 1966 international treaty on civil and political rights – receives its information from various U.N. agencies, non-governmental organizations and cases at the European Court of Human Rights.

Patrick was walking to a friend’s house around midnight when he was followed by two women and a man who he says were yelling homophobic threats.

Patrick ignored the group until they got closer. When he asked them why they were shouting at him, according to Tulsa World:

They started “beating, biting and slashing at Patrick with a blade, leaving him with several cuts on his head and body.

“I’ve never felt scared or feared for my safety before,” he said. “You brush it off and walk on. That’s what you’re taught to do.

“This time, it didn’t work.”

Patrick described them as a woman in her early 40s and another woman and man, both in their late teens or early 20s.

Oklahoma’s hate-crimes law makes it a crime to “intimidate or harass another person because of the person’s race, color, religion, ancestry, national origin or disability.”

Jenkins noted that the state law excludes sexual orientation from the qualifiers for a hate crime. As a result, police are investigating the case only as an assault and battery.

 

Read the story at Tulsa World.

The gathering was to be Serbia’s first gay pride march since 2001. The previous event received almost no police protection and was broken up by rightist groups.

The planned march was seen a major test for the current Serbian government, which has launched pro-Western reforms and pledged to protect human rights.

But organizers said Saturday authorities have informed them that the march in downtown Belgrade was too risky. Spokesman Dusan Kosanovic says police offered a different venue but organizers decided to cancel the march instead.

Several extremist groups had said they would attack the gathering.

A group of men kicked him and slashed him with knives for being a “batty boy” – a slang term for gay men – after he left a party before dawn in October 2006. They sliced his throat, torso, and back, hissed anti-gay epithets, and left him for dead on a Kingston corner.

“It gets like five, six o’clock, my heart begins to race. I just need to go home, I start to get nervous,” said the 36-year-old outside the secret office of Jamaica’s sole gay rights group. Like many other gays, Sherman won’t give his full name for fear of retribution.

Despite the easygoing image propagated by tourist boards, gays and their advocates agree that Jamaica is by far the most hostile island toward homosexuals in the already conservative Caribbean. They say gays, especially those in poor communities, suffer frequent abuse. But they have little recourse because of rampant anti-gay stigma and a sodomy law banning sex between men in Jamaica and 10 other former British colonies in the Caribbean.

It is impossible to say just how common gay bashing attacks like the one against Sherman are in Jamaica – their tormentors are sometimes the police themselves. But many homosexuals in Jamaica say homophobia is pervasive across the sun-soaked island, from the pulpit to the floor of the Parliament.

Hostility toward gays has reached such a level that four months ago, gay advocates in New York City launched a short-lived boycott against Jamaica at the site of the Stonewall Inn, where demonstrations launched the gay-rights movement in 1969. In its 2008 report, the U.S. State Department also notes that gays have faced death and arson threats, and are hesitant to report incidents against them because of fear.

For gays, the reality of this enduring hostility is loneliness and fear, and sometimes even murder.

Andrew, a 36-year-old volunteer for an AIDS education program, said he was driven from the island after his ex-lover was killed for being gay – which police said was just a robbery gone wrong. He moved to the U.K. for several years, but returned to Jamaica in 2008 for personal reasons he declined to disclose.

“I’m living in fear on a day-to-day basis,” he said softly during a recent interview in Kingston. “In the community where my ex-lover was killed, people will say to me when I’m passing on the street, they will make remarks like ‘boom-boom-boom’ or ‘batty boy fi dead.’ I don’t feel free walking on the streets.”

Many in this highly Christian nation perceive homosexuality as a sin, and insist violence against gays is blown out of proportion by gay activists. Some say Jamaica tolerates homosexuality as long as it is not advertised – a tropical version of former President Bill Clinton’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy for the U.S. military.

Jamaica’s most prominent evangelical pastor, Bishop Herro Blair, said he sympathizes with those who face intolerance, but that homosexuals themselves are actually behind most of the attacks reported against them.

“Among themselves, homosexuals are extremely jealous,” said Blair during a recent interview. “But some of them do cause a reaction by their own behaviors, for, in many people’s opinions, homosexuality is distasteful.”

Other church leaders have accused gays of flaunting their behavior to “recruit” youngsters, or called for them to undergo “redemptive work” to break free of their sexual orientation.

Perhaps playing to anti-gay constituents, politicians routinely rail against homosexuals. During a parliamentary session in February, lawmaker Ernest Smith of the ruling Jamaica Labor Party stressed that gays were “brazen,” “abusive,” and “violent,” and expressed anxiety that the police force was “overrun by homosexuals.”

A few weeks later, Prime Minister Bruce Golding described gay advocates as “perhaps the most organized lobby in the world” and vowed to keep Jamaica’s “buggery law” – punishable by 10 years – on the books. During a BBC interview last year, Golding vowed to never allow gays in his Cabinet.

The dread of homosexuality is so all-encompassing that many Jamaican men refuse to get digital rectal examinations for prostate cancer, even those whose disease is advanced, said Dr. Trevor Tulloch of St. Andrews Hospital.

“Because it is a homophobic society, there’s such a fear of the sexual implications of having the exam that men won’t seek out help,” said Tulloch, adding Jamaica has a soaring rate of prostate cancer because men won’t be screened.

The anti-gay sentiment on this island of 2.8 million has perhaps become best known through Jamaican “dancehall,” a rap-reggae music hybrid that often has raunchy, violent themes. Some reggae rappers, including Bounty Killer and Elephant Man, depend on gay-bashing songs to rouse concert-goers.

“It stirs up the crowd to a degree that many performers feel they have to come up with an anti-gay song to incite the audience,” said Barry Chevannes, a professor of social anthropology at the University of the West Indies.

Brooklyn-based writer Staceyann Chin, a lesbian who fled her Caribbean homeland for New York more than a decade ago, stressed that violence in Jamaica is high – there were 1,611 killings last year, about 10 times more than the U.S. rate relative to population – but that it is “extraordinarily” high against gays.

“The macho ideal is celebrated, praised in Jamaica, while homosexuality is paralleled with pedophilia, rapists,” Chin said. “Markers that other people perceive as gay – they walk a certain way, wear tight pants, or are overly friendly with a male friend – make them targets. It’s a little pressure cooker waiting to pop.”

In 1996, when she was 20, Chin came out as lesbian on the Kingston UWI campus. She said she was ostracized by her peers, and one day was herded into a campus bathroom by a group of male students, who ripped off her clothes and sexually assaulted her.

“They told me what God wanted from me, that God made women to enjoy sex with men,” recalled Chin, a poet, performer and lecturer who closes her just-published memoir “The Other Side of Paradise” with her searing account of the attack.

Even in New York City, anti-gay Jamaican bigots sent her hate-filled e-mails after a 2007 appearance on Oprah Winfrey’s TV talk show to discuss homosexuality.

Chin said she doesn’t know if she would have the courage to come out now as a lesbian in Jamaica.

“The tensions are higher now. People are feeling very much that they have to declare camps,” she said.

Jamaican nationalism has always been tied in deeply with bugbears about masculinity, making for a “potent brew” where those who violate accepted standards of manliness are easy targets, said Scott Long of Human Rights Watch.

Long, head of a gay rights program at the New York-based group, pointed out that most other English-speaking islands in the region have tiny populations, where gays don’t come out and visible activism is limited.

“(But) what stands out about Jamaica is how absolutely, head-in-the-sand unwilling the authorities have been for years to acknowledge or address homophobic violence,” he said. “Most notably, three successive governments have completely, utterly, publicly refused even to talk about changing the buggery law – which expressly consigns gay people to second-class citizens and paints targets on their backs.”

Prominent Jamaican political activist Yvonne McCalla Sobers noted that social standing still protects gay islanders, especially in Kingston, where a quest for privacy and the fear of crime has driven many to live behind gated walls with key pad entry systems, 24-hour security and closed-circuit television monitoring. People with power and money who are not obviously gay are often protected, she said.

“My thought is there are far more men having sex with men in this country than you would ever think is happening,” Sobers said.

Many gays from poorer areas in Jamaica say they congregate in private to find safety and companionship. Once a month, they have underground church services at revolving locations across the island.

Sherman, meanwhile, is simply trying to move on with his life. But he said he will always remember how, after his attack, patrolmen roughly lifted his bloodied body out of their squad car when a man admonished them for aiding a “batty boy.” A woman shamed them into driving him to a hospital; they stuffed him in the car’s trunk.

“Being gay in Jamaica, it’s like, don’t tell anybody. Just keep it to yourself,” he said evenly, with a half smile.

U.S. State Dept. spokesperson Ian Kelly, when questioned by reporters about anti-gay violence in Iraq, said:

Amnesty International says that said that “as many as 25 boys and men have been killed in Baghdad alone because they were either gay or believed to be amid concerns that religious leaders may be inciting violence against Iraq’s gay community,” The Times of India reports.

Moqtada Sadr made the call on Thursday during a seminar of clerics, police and tribal leaders.

There has been growing anti-gay violence in Iraq. Last month another Shiite cleric, Sattar al-Battat, repeatedly condemned homosexuality during Friday prayers, saying Islam prohibits homosexuality. Homosexual acts are punishable by up to seven years in prison in Iraq.

The following week, the bodies of two gay men were found in Baghdad’s Shiite slum of Sadr City. Several days later, a third man was found dead on the outskirts of Sadr City. By the end of the month, another three bodies were found and police said four other men were found tortured but alive.

Amnesty International said that in addition to the violence in Sadr City, 25 suspected gays had been killed in recent months in Baghdad.

A group calling itself “Brigades of the Righteous” has posted signs around Sadr City listing the names of alleged homosexuals and threatening to kill them.

Moqtada Sadr’s spokesperson on Friday said that the cleric’s call for the eradication of homosexuality was not an endorsement of the violence.

“Al-Sadr rejects this type of violence,” said Sheikh Wadea al-Atabi. “And anyone who commits violence [against gays] will not be considered as being one of us,” al-Atabi said.

“The only remedy to stop [homosexuality] is through preaching and guidance. There is no other way to put an end to it,” he said.

In addition to Al-Sadr’s remarks Thursday, another Shiite leader at the meeting said that homosexuality “is a disaster that has come to the community,” and a tribal leader from Sadr City, said: “Everybody has to work to preserve the morals of young people from the corrupt phenomena of the West.”

The stocky 27-year-old, sporting stylish glasses and a silver stud in his right ear, grew teary-eyed as he told his story at a rally against homophobia held in Montreal.

He was arrested for homosexuality in 2006 in the African country when he was denounced by a former boyfriend. Yousse says he was beaten by police and held in jail for three days before going to trial.

“They thought of me as an extraterrestrial,” he said. “I had a trial and was convicted of homosexuality and sent to prison for a year. That year was horrible. I lived with discrimination, I was almost raped more than once, I was physically abused, my family abandoned me.”

After his release, he still encountered constant harassment and his family denied his existence. Yousse spent a brief time in Tunisia before coming to Canada on a student visa five months ago.

He recently applied for refugee status.

“I’m less scared in Canada, I feel safer,” Yousse said. “But I have dreams where I’m still abused. I hope with time they’ll fade but it won’t happen overnight. It’s a deep wound.”

Yousse’s case is extreme, but members of sexual minorities face discrimination in many countries and within immigrant communities in Canada.

Members of Quebec’s gay and lesbian communities, along with representatives of the ethnic minority communities, are trying to change the face of homosexuality in the province.

On Sunday, they launched an awareness campaign with the support of the Quebec government aimed at making Canadians of all backgrounds more aware of the issues surrounding sexual diversity.

“Our role is to be the bridge,” said Robert Rousseau, an organizer. “Often, these men come to Quebec with a lot of baggage that leads them to developing a poor perception of themselves.

He says gays and lesbians who’ve developed an internalized homophobia are more vulnerable to having risky sex. His organization is reaching out specifically to religious leaders of ethnic communities to get their help in demystifying homosexuality.

Alexis Musanganya, 35, president of gay rights organization African Rainbow, is an activist who himself endured silent discrimination in his native Rwanda. He says he lived in the closet, believing himself to be the only gay man in his country.

“In many countries it’s condemned, it’s criminal to be gay to be lesbian,” he said, noting that many Africans want to believe that homosexuality doesn’t exist within their nations.

“In some countries you face a death sentence. In places like Cameroon, Senegal, you might get six months to five years in jail and fines.”

And even where anti-homosexuality laws are mostly unenforced, the fact that they’re on the books is problem enough.

“It can be used to tarnish reputations and it affects work against HIV and AIDS,” Musanganya said.

“That’s what these types of laws do. It doesn’t just affect homosexuals, it can affect the whole society in certain ways.”

Musanganya added that homosexual immigrants who arrive in Canada expecting a more open society often run into discrimination within the expat communities here.

“When we get here, we still find ourselves living in hiding,” he said. “We still have to pretend, talk about women while we think of men. I see that a lot. We help people get out of isolation, to know they aren’t alone. They’re not alone wanting to live their dreams and it’s _ happily _ beginning to change. It’s being talked about more.”

A recent survey published by Fondation Emergence, a Quebec gay rights lobby group, gives some support to his theory.

It suggests second-generation immigrants have are much more accepting of homosexuality than their parents.

Almost half of the first generation respondents said they felt that homosexuality was an illness or a deviant behavior, a feeling shared by only 24 per cent of their children.

But the survey of 500 Quebec residents also suggests that the perception of homosexuality was more negative in African and Asian communities than in Western European ones.

State representatives voted overwhelmingly Thursday to bar any mention of homosexual relationships in the new program for middle and high school students. The move was pushed by lawmakers who said they don’t want schools teaching about gay relationships and said they doubt those partnerships have high levels of abuse.

“I do not want the Department of Education or school districts teaching our children in grades six through 12 about same-sex relationships,” said Rep. Greg Delleney, a Chester Republican who pushed to make the violence prevention program apply only to heterosexual relationships. “I’m sure it would develop into that.”

The measure, which was swiftly condemned by gay rights advocates passed the GOP-dominated House 75-25 and should head to the Senate next week. It initially was intended to curb youth violence in a state that consistently ranks high in the number of women killed by men.

Steve Ralls, national spokesman for Parents, Families & Friends of Lesbians & Gays, said he had not heard of another state with an anti-dating violence program that excluded same-sex relationships.

“We are astounded that there are those who would prioritize their own homophobia ahead of the safety of the young people of South Carolina,” he said. “Lesbian and gay young people are often doubly vulnerable when they are in environments where they are disrespected and adults are sending clear messages that their well-being isn’t as important.”

Bill sponsor Rep. Joan Brady said excluding gay relationships is fine and declared that, “Traditional domestic violence occurs in a man-woman, boy-girl situation.”

“The fact is, this is a gender-specific, abusive behavior. The overwhelming predominance of dating abuse occurs in a traditional or heterosexual relationship,” said Brady, R-Columbia.

However, a 2004 Journal of Adolescent Health study found that youths involved in same-sex dating are just as likely to experience dating violence as those in relationships with members of the opposite sex.

Brady later said she was comparing total numbers of violent relationships – of which there are more between partners of the opposite sex. She also said her information came from the South Carolina Coalition Against Domestic Violence & Sexual Assault. Group spokeswoman Rebecca Williams-Agee said while sheer numbers show most dating violence cases involve boys abusing girls, all groups need to be considered, especially gay teens who may already be facing issues with their sexual orientation in a conservative state.

“When it comes to advocating for people, you don’t get to choose who to advocate for. No one deserves to be hurt or violated in any way,” Williams-Agee said.

One lawmaker who opposed the measure said his colleagues were making a terrible mistake.

“For those people that are truly trying to stomp out abuse in South Carolina, to suggest that people that are in nontraditional relationships don’t deserve help is asinine,” said Rep. Todd Rutherford, D-Columbia.

Meanwhile, the mother of a gay man who was killed outside a Greenville County bar two years ago said South Carolina lawmakers shouldn’t decide to protect some children and not others. Her son’s assailant pleaded guilty to involuntary manslaughter.

“It’s kind of scary, especially when we start talking about, ‘Well, let’s see, let’s pick and choose which kids we’re going to protect.’ Are they going to make a difference between black and white, too?” said Elke Kennedy. “We cannot stand by and continue to let them pass laws based on bias.”

Irina Fedotova and Irina Shipitko were handed a written rejection from an official in a registry office in central Moscow on Monday.

The office director, Svetlana Potamoshneva, said Russian law recognizes a marriage “only” between a man and a woman. Despite the rejection, the couple said they would not give up.

“We won’t stop in midstream,” Fedotova told journalists later, adding that she and her partner plan to get married in Canada. She said Russia recognizes marriages registered abroad, thus allowing the couple to formalize their relationship.

Despite the rejection, the couple – wearing suits and bow-ties and holding flowers – held hands and kissed, and said they would continue to fight for recognition of gay rights in Russia.

“This is delayed justice,” said Nikolai Alexeyev, Russia’s gay rights movement leader.

Russia decriminalized homosexuality in 1993, but opposition to gay rights remains widespread. Russian spiritual leaders have claimed that homosexuality threatens the country’s traditional values.

The marriage attempt precedes a gay pride parade Saturday, scheduled to coincide with the finals of the Eurovision Song Contest. Gay rights activists hope that the European media gathered for the event will help them draw attention to their cause.

Moscow authorities have banned the gay pride parade, and anti-gay rights religious and nationalist groups have threatened to stage street demonstrations.

“The gay parade is … an act of spiritual terrorism,” Mikhail Nalimov, chairman of the Union of Orthodox Christian Youth.

His deputy, Dmitry Terekhov, said the parade was in part aimed at converting people to homosexuality.

In 2006, gay activists who tried to lay flowers at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier just outside the Kremlin wall were arrested by riot police and harangued by religious and ultranationalist group members.

Last year, at least one gay rights activist was assaulted during a small protest in Moscow while uniformed police officers stood by and watched.