NewsWrap for the week ending September 27th, 1997 (As broadcast on THIS WAY OUT Program #496, distributed 09-29-97) [Compiled & written by Cindy Friedman, with thanks to Jason Lin, Brian Nunes, Bjoern Skolander, Martin Rice, Graham Underhill, Rex Wockner, Lucia Chappelle and Greg Gordon, and anchored by Tory Christopher and Jean Freer] Bill Clinton will become the first sitting U.S. president to attend a gay and lesbian civil rights event, the national group Human Rights Campaign announced this week. It's HRC's annual black-tie fund-raising gala scheduled for November 8th. It's likely that the president's remarks will address homophobic violence, since his White House Conference on Hate Crimes is scheduled two days later. He's also expected to discuss the federal Employment Non-Discrimination Act, or ENDA, to establish a national ban on workplace discrimination based on sexual orientation. Vice President Al Gore' s appearance at an awards dinner given by the National Gay & Lesbian Task Force a week before the announcement now looks to have been an administration "trial balloon". The President's previous closest encounter with "a gay and lesbian civil rights event" was the videotaped message he supplied for the OutVote conference HRC organized in conjunction with the 1996 Democratic National Convention. He has also met with groups of gays and lesbians at the White House on several occasions. Zimbabwe's first post-colonial president Canaan Banana began his long-awaited trial this week for 11 counts relating to sexual harassment and forced sex with other men. As the trial opened, Banana's attorney asked that prosecution be delayed indefinitely on the grounds that pre-trial publicity had made it impossible for him to get a fair trial. After a day's consideration of the motion, Harare High Court Judge Feargus Blackie referred the question to Zimbabwe's Supreme Court, where one side or the other would surely have appealed whatever decision he might have made himself. Prosecutors claimed that publicity was inevitable for a public figure like Banana but that the court was staffed by professionals who would not be swayed by it. The defense also cited prevailing public sentiment against homosexuality as a source of prejudice against Banana -- and that's rather ironic, since no one has done more to stir up that homophobic prejudice than Banana's long-time political ally, Zimbabwe's current President Robert Mugabe. Mugabe has been studiously silent on the charges against Banana. Those charges surfaced in February at the murder trial of Police Constable Jefta Dube, who testified that he'd been drugged and raped by Banana while serving as an aide de camp during Banana's 1980's presidency. Once Dube's story was out in the open, other alleged Banana victims came forward, and eight individuals' claims were chosen for prosecution. The prosecution has lined up a total of 37 witnesses, including former military and police leaders and Vice President Simon Muzenda. Even consensual acts between adult males can result in a ten-year prison sentence in Zimbabwe. U.S. health officials are concerned by an increase in gonorrhea cases among gay men recorded from 1993 through 1996. Although the actual numbers of new cases among gays are rather small, especially by contrast with the thousands diagnosed each year during the epidemics of the early 1980's, it's a trend moving against the general population's continuing decrease in gonorrhea, which reached an all-time low in 1996. It's a concrete indicator that some gay men are slipping in their practice of safer sex, and there's an additional AIDS-related danger as well. About one-fourth of the men clinics diagnose with gonorrhea are also HIV-positive, and those with the dual diagnoses are believed to be two to five times more likely to infect a partner with HIV. People with gonorrhea are also more easily infected with HIV. The greatest increases in gonorrhea among gay men were seen in Seattle, Washington; Portland, Oregon; and San Francisco -- and a number of those cases could be traced to specific sex clubs. Brazil will be providing male-to-female gender reassignment surgery free of charge, the Federal Council of Medicine announced this week. Previously, the operations there had cost about $15,000. The change came as the Council reclassified the surgery as experimental, even though such operations have been performed elsewhere for some 40 years now. Council spokesperson Dr. Julio Cezar Meirelles told the press, "We don't want this to be just a money-earner. We must develop the technique, which though rather simple, is little understood." Candidates must be at least 21 years old and have undergone two years of hormone treatments and counseling. There was immediate enthusiastic response from numerous transgendered Brazilians. A ruling this week in a heterosexual case before the Ghent Court of Appeal has made mild sadomasochism legal in Belgium for the first time. Belgian precedent had not previously recognized that anyone could legally give consent to what was viewed as "deliberate and premeditated assault and injury," but the Ghent Court noted that injuries are routinely consented to in such situations as cosmetic surgery and contact sports. The ruling said, "The Court in Ghent does not wish to make a ruling about sado-masochism in general, but merely to deal with each case on its merits. In this case there was indeed a justification: the slight degree of sadomasochism was considered to be a sexual game. The adult participants who had granted their consent had no intention of breaking the law. And in the absence of a criminal intent they did not commit the offense of assault." However, for providing a commercial facility for the purpose of sadomasochism, the manager of the sex club where the acts occurred was convicted of "exploiting a house of prostitution or debauchery." Earlier this year, in Britain's notorious Operation Spanner case involving gay men at a party in a private home, the European Court of Human Rights had decided that it was entirely within a national government's authority to determine what level of S&M activities it would tolerate ... which in Britain's case was none at all. When organizers arrived to set up for the opening of the first Seoul, South Korea Queer Film & Video Festival this week, they found an official notice on the door advising them of three-year jail sentences, large fines and the seizure of all their equipment and materials if they proceeded. If that hadn't been enough to stop them, the university site they were using for the festival threatened to turn off the building's electricity. Although the organizers are still determined to stage a festival sometime in the coming months, the closure was a bitter pill to swallow, because so many efforts had already been made to stay within the bounds of official restrictions. For example, the festival originally scheduled for two larger, easily accessible commercial theatres had been moved to a smaller and rather obscure site on the grounds of Yonsei University, while most of the 85 films planned for the festival were going to be shown in video form to avoid official seizures. Three of four films the festival paid to have screened by officials were banned from public viewing. While the South Korean government has been quick to ban gay-themed materials, festival organizers believed that the recent Puchon International Film Festival had been given more leeway than they had, in being allowed to show Tsai Mingliang's "The River" and Stanley Kwan's "As Times Go By" despite their gay elements. Israel's supreme court, the High Court of Justice, this week ordered the Ministry of Education to allow a student-made show about young gay men to air on educational television. The program had originally been approved through the usual channels to air almost a year ago as part of a youth-oriented series called "Klafim P'tuchim" or "Cards on the Table." But Minister of Education Zevulun Hammer of the right-wing National Religious Party personally stepped in to block the broadcast. He claimed that the show is inappropriate for the educational channel because no professionals appeared in it and it might encourage youth to engage in homosexual acts. Three leading civil rights groups joined in the legal challenge of that decision, which the High Court has now declared to have been "unjustified". The program merely showed two young gays and one of their mothers talking about their lives and then taking questions from a youthful audience. One justice wrote how impressed he was at the way "the big picture which emerged from the encounter was that gays and lesbians were just like other young people, and that the characteristics which nature imbued in them did not remove them from the mainstream." While the plaintiffs accused Hammer of having imposed his own religious beliefs on educational TV, other National Religious Party members were quick to accuse the judges of having based their ruling on their own personal philosophies instead of the law. It was a big week for gays and lesbians in mainstream media as well. ABC's "Ellen" opened its new season with an episode that won praise from critics, in which U.S. TV's only openly lesbian (or gay) lead character resisted the temptation to backslide into involvement with a former boyfriend. Elton John's tribute to the late Diana, Princess of Wales, the benefit single "Candle in the Wind 1997", was officially declared eight times platinum on its first day of release in the U.S., doubling the previous record for a single. The song has already become Britain's best-selling single of all time, and it continues to fly off the shelves all over the world, with total sales having reportedly passed 20 million. And, finally, the $35-million gay-themed mainstream movie "In and Out" ended its first weekend in general release in the U.S. as the runaway number one at the box office, pulling in more than $15-million from almost 2,000 theatres. That should allay the concerns of those who feared mainstream audiences weren't yet ready for what Reuters declared to be "the longest gay kiss in a major-studio release, ever." That crucial smooch lasts about a minute, and it's between Academy Award winner Kevin Kline and Tom Selleck, best known for his years on television as "Magnum, P.I." But someone felt that the kiss openly gay screenwriter Paul Rudnick hoped would be "a real Hollywood kiss, something romantic and sexy with a full choir swelling beneath it," required flashing the heterosexual credentials of the actors involved. "Buzz" magazine's Robert Hofler observed that the film's production notes said nary a word about the personal lives or partners of anyone in the cast ... except for Kline and Selleck, who are identified as being married to Phoebe Cates and Jillie Mack, respectively. Wrote Hofler, "There hasn't been this much spousal publicity since the original playbill of 'The Boys in the Band'." -----------*------------- Sources for this week's report included: AEGIS, Agence France Presse, Arutz 7 (Israel), Associated Press, Binnenlands nieuws (Antwerp), Boston Globe, Cape Argus (South Africa), Entertainment Weekly, Fairfax (VA) Journal, Ha'aretz (Israel), Hollywood Reporter, Independent (London), Korea Herald, Los Angeles Times, Mail & Guardian (South Africa), National Enquirer, New York Times, Pan African News Service (Dakar), Reuters, San Francisco Chronicle, San Francisco Examiner, San Jose Mercury News, South Africa Press Association, Telegraph (London), TV Guide, USA Today, Variety, Washington Post, ZIANA (Zimbabwe); and cyberpress releases from PopcornQ/PlanetOut, ACT UP/Washington DC, First Seoul Queer Film & Video Festival, Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation, Gay Lesbian Straight Education Network, Human Rights Campaign, and the International Lesbian and Gay Association.