After spending his youth being coached by his mother, pro Scottish tennis player Andy Murray is turning to another woman to help him defend his Wimbledon title: former top-ranked Frenchwoman Amelie Mauresmo, according to ESPN.com . The tournament at the All England Club starts on June 23. Mauresmo, an out lesbian, won her first at the Australian Open in 2006, and followed that with the Wimbledon title a few months later.
Toronto is hosting World Pride 2014 from June 20 to June 29, but the Canadian city has already rolled out a welcome to the global LGBT community by painting crosswalks in the Gay Village with bright rainbows, according to NewNowNext.com . Located in the heart of the gayborhood at Church Street and Alexander and Church Street and Isabella intersections, the pedestrian paths are permanent additions to the landscape that the city council approved in February; the crosswalks join hundreds of banners announcing World Pride. Other cities with rainbow crosswalks including San Francisco, Vancouver and Sydney.
Several thousand people turned out for Cyprus' first gay-pride parade May 31, exceeding the expectations of organizers who said the event's popularity shows that Cypriots are shedding their conservative attitudes, according to The Toronto Star. One of the organizers, ACCEPT-LGBT Cyprus President Costas Gavrielides, said he was overwhelmed because he had expected just a few hundred people to attend the event in the heart of the capital, Nicosia. Cyprus—a European Union member and a largely Orthodox Christian society—decriminalized homosexuality a dozen years ago, but activists say the nation has much to improve on in terms of gay rights.
In an announcement that the United States has criticized, Uganda's foreign minister Sam Kutesa has been voted in by acclamation to serve as the next United Nations General Assembly president, replacing outgoing—and widely respected—John W. Ashe of Antigua and Barbuda, according to LGBT Weekly. The position, which is largely symbolic, fell this year to Africa to fill. However, it is Kutesa's stance on homosexuality ( once calling it something that the majority of Africans "abhor" ) that has caused controversy. On. Feb. 14, Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni signed into law the Anti-Homosexuality Act, which has some of the most punitive measures against the LGBT community in the world.
In the wake of intense criticism of Brunei's planned implementation of new laws that could lead to women and LGBT residents being stoned to death, the Dorchester canceled its annual fashion competition and gala, known as the Dorchester Collection Fashion Prize, LGBT Weekly noted. Recently, Vogue Editor-in-Chief Anna Wintour and Glamour Editor-in-Chief Cindi Leive joined François-Henri Pinault, the leadership of Yves Saint Laurent fashion house, and many other prominent voices in the fashion world in announcing they're avoiding the Dorchester Collection's global properties in protest of the Sultan of Brunei's new laws.
Almost half a million people listed themselves as "third gender" or transgender in India's most recent census—the first time the Indian government has sought to ask how many people identify as such, according to Gay Star News. More than 50,000 of those were under 6 and were thus recorded by their parents as being transgender. Among the other results was that transgender Indians were more likely to be out of work than the general population, with only 38 percent working, compared to 48 percent of Indians in general.
In Canada, the captain of the Edmonton Oilers hockey team marched in this year's Pride Parade through downtown Edmonton, according to CBC.ca. Ference walked as a delegate for the You Can Play team, which campaigns against homophobia and discrimination in sports. Ference was also be joined by members of the University of Alberta's Camp FYrefly youth leadership program. On Twitter, Ference praised the turnout for the parade.
Rhyian Anderson-Morley, a player in the Australian Rules Football league, has come out as gay, according to NewNowNext.com . A member of the Yarraville Seddon Eagles, the 23-year-old revealed in a recent column for The Age that, when he realized he was gay, he "withdrew into myself, stopped playing sport, and generally just lost myself in this person I thought I had to be." In the column, Anderson-Morely recounts responses from Australian sportscasters to U.S. football player Michael Sam kissing his boyfriend ( one called it "annoyingly gratuitous" ) and both positive and negative remarks about gay people from teammates.
The report "VIOLENCE: Through the Lens of Lesbians, Bisexual Women and Transgender People in Asia," documents the violence and exclusion LGBT people face in every sphere of their lives, according to an IGLHRC press release. While country contexts differed on the basis of culture, religion, legal systems and inherited colonial legacies, similarities include everything from government-endorsed intolerance to direct criminalization. This is the main finding from research coordinated by the International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission ( IGLHRC ) and conducted over a two-year period by women's-, sexuality-and gender-rights activists based in Japan, Malaysia, Pakistan, Philippines and Sri Lanka.
The Hong Kong government has refused to allow gay couples to marry at the British consulate, Gay Star News noted. Initially, the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office announced it would allow overseas missions to perform same-sex marriages for Britons and their partners in countries where it is illegal under local laws. However, Hong Kong has objected to the development. Gay marriage and civil partnerships are illegal in socially conservative Hong Kong, where homosexuality was only decriminalized in 1991.
The Slovakian parliament has amended the nation's constitution to ban same-sex couples from seeking marriage, according to MetroWeekly.com . The Slovakia National Council voted to alter the text of the constitution to define marriage as between one man and one woman. Of the 150 members of parliament, 123 took part in the vote, with final results standing at 102 for and 18 against. As the parliament requires a two-thirds majority to alter the constitution, the amendment passed by just three votes.
