FRANCE PLEDGES TO LEAD ON GAY DECRIMINALIZATION

I wrote the following article for this week's Gay City News:

This year's observance of the International Day Against Homophobia (IDAHO) on Sunday, May 17 was marked by key victories for the global campaign when it was officially endorsed by the governments of France, Cuba, and Costa Rica.

Significantly, France's minister of human rights, Rama Yade (right), convened a  meeting with gay activists on Sunday to announce that France would push for "a European initiative calling for the universal decriminalization of homosexuality," according to a statement released by the minister afterward.

Yade said Paris would submit the initiative to the United Nations after it takes over the rotating six-month European Union presidency in July - during which time France will speak for all EU member states at the UN General Assembly, according to Agence France Presse.

The conservative French government's unprecedented action followed year-long negotiations with it led by Louis-Georges Tin, president of the International Committee for IDAHO, and the meeting with Minister Yade came just hours after a "die-in" at the Elysée Palace, the presidential headquarters and residence, in which Tin and a dozen other LGBT activists were arrested and briefly detained. The protestors at the die-in wore T-shirts with the names of some of the 86 countries in which, according to an International Lesbian and Gay Association study released earlier this year, homosexuality is still considered a crime.

"It was rather amusing," Tin told me by telephone from Paris. "Just as the police were arresting me and bundling me away, I got a call on my cell phone from the minister's office asking me, 'Can you come to the Elysée right away?' 'Well, I'm already here!' I replied."

Police told Tin he had no right to use his telephone while being arrested, but when he told them, "I'm on the phone with the minister for human rights," they relented.

The International Day Against Homophobia was the brainchild of Tin (left), a remarkable young French university professor born in the overseas French department of Martinique, in the Antilles chain in the Caribbean. Tin, 33, is not only one of the most creative gay leaders internationally, he is also a rising star of France's emerging black activist community.

IDAHO's founder also launched France's Representative Council of Black Associations. Created in November 2005 during the ghetto riots that shook 150 French cities and towns, CRAN - an alliance of roughly 120 associations - gave French blacks their first national organization, and since its founding has been recognized by the political establishment as a force to be reckoned with.

Tin, CRAN's spokesman, is the author of a number of scholarly books, and of  a "Dictionary of Homophobia" published in translation here in the US earlier this year. (A link to this reporter's May 4-10, 2006 profile of Tin, "Going Global on Gay Rights" appears in the web version of this story.)

"We had had numerous conversations over the past year both with top counselors to President Nicolas Sarkozy and with Minister Yade, whom I know because she'd been a member of CRAN, and with her staff," Tin told this reporter. "But we kept being told that it was 'not possible' for the government to endorse IDAHO. But after we were arrested on Sunday morning at the Elysée Palace, there was a flurry of protests from members of parliament quickly broadcast on the radio, and the arrests became an embarrassment for the government's claims to be fully supportive of human rights. So, by the time later on Sunday that we were called to the meeting with Minister Yade, we were told to expect a surprise. So, instead of the symbolic meeting with champagne and petit-fours, which we thought were all we'd get, we were informed that the government would not only endorse IDAHO but press for global decriminalization of homosexuality at the UN by using its EU presidency to do so."

In addition to the International Committee for IDAHO, other French organizations represented at the meeting with the minister included ACT-UP, Solidarité Internationale Lesbiennes, Gays, Bi et Trans, l'Intersyndicale LGBT (which organizes the huge Gay Pride in France every year), Homosexualités et socialism (the LGBT arm of France's Socialist Party, the nation's second largest), and GayLib, the organization of gay conservatives affiliated with Sarkozy's ruling Union pour un movement populaire (UMP).

Tin specifically credited the gay conservatives: "The GayLib lobbied hard and well, their work was very effective, and we might well not have achieved the results we did without them."

The French government has been embarrassed by recent European Court of Human Rights decisions criticizing it over its refusal to allow same-sex adoptions and recognize gay marriages performed in other EU countries. French Foreign Minister Bernard Kochner recently sent an official memorandum to all embassies and consulates advising them not to perform PAC ceremonies, the French version of civil unions, for citizens living in countries where such unions are not recognized.

The Sarkozy government undoubtedlyhopes the initiative will help it skirt thornier issues, like equality in adoptions and marriage, which would raise the hackles of the more conservative and devout Catholic portions of its political base.

In Cuba on May 17, hundreds of gay men and women gathered at an outdoor cultural center for a rare display of public solidarity in support of IDAHO as the culmination of a week-long festival of LGBT events, including film screenings, lectures, debates, and book fairs. The Cuban IDAHO events were organized by President Raul Castro's daughter, Mariela (left), director of the Cuban National Center for Sex Education. She is considered the country's premier sexologist, and her Center fights both for acceptance of LGBT Cubans and for AIDS prevention.

"This is a very important moment for us, the men and women of Cuba, because for the first time we can gather in this way and speak profoundly and with scientific basis about these topics," said Ms. Castro, who insisted that defending equal rights for Cubans of all sexual orientations is a key principal of the her uncle's 1959 revolution.

"The freedom of sexual choice and gender identity [are] exercises in equality and social justice," she proclaimed, according to the Los Angeles Times.

Cuban National Assembly President Ricardo Alarcon (right) said he supported the  IDAHO celebrations. "I think that it's a good initiative," he said. "It's an issue that raises concern around the world and I think it's good that in Cuba it is also marked in a proper way." Alarcon told reporters that the government needs to do more to promote gay rights, but said many Cubans still need to be convinced. Things "are advancing, but must continue advancing, and I think we should do that in a coherent, appropriate, and precise way because these are topics that have been taboo and continue to be for many."

The day before the IDAHO Havana rally, Cuban TV gave prime-time play to the film "Brokeback Mountain."

When Tin launched the first IDAHO in 2005, he chose May 17 for the annual event because it was on that date in 1990 that the World Health Organization removed homosexuality from the International Classification of Diseases. Coincidently, on the same day in 2004, the same-sex marriage ruling by the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court took effect.

IDAHO's international campaign for a United Nations decriminalization resolution was launched in November 2006 with a petition campaign endorsed by five Nobel Prize winners, ten Pulitzer Prize winners, six Academy Award winners, and two former French prime ministers. (A link to this reporter's November 21-27, 2006 article, "Bold Move for UN Action" appears in the web version of this story.)

Other governments that previously endorsed IDAHO include the European Parliament, Belgium, the United Kingdom, Mexico, and several provinces of Canada, Brazil, and Spain. The day is now observed in more than 60 countries worldwide.

The UK held the most extensive IDAHO observances this year. The Trades Union Congress, the Communications Workers, and other large British unions joined in, and the effort was even endorsed by the UK Football Association, which included an article about homophobia in its program for the FA Cup Final at Wembley Stadium.

"Football has already waged a positive war on racism in the game and the FA are now hoping that a similar campaign to ban homophobic behavior from grounds across the country will also make its mark," the article read.

"One of our key messages is football for all and our aim is to confront aggressive issues such as homophobia and making the game family-friendly," the FA's equality manager, Lucy Faulkner, told the UK Gay News.

And for the first time, the New York-based International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission this year endorsed IDAHO. Noting that 2008 is the 60th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, IGLHRC said it will employ IDAHO in two of its "top priorities" - challenging violence and discrimination targeting lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered women and ending the criminalization of homosexuality and abuses resulting from arbitrary arrests.

The US, however, remained one of the world's few democracies in which leading LGBT groups failed to organize even one single public IDAHO event.


IDAHO's web site is at http://www.idahomophobia.org/. The IDAHO UK web site is idaho.org.uk/.