Sydney Mardi Gras
biggest ever
Organizers said Sydney's 30th gay Mardi Gras parade held March 1 was the biggest ever.
The 1-mile ( 1.6 km ) spectacle attracted 10,000 participants, 150 floats and hundreds of thousands of spectators.
A contingent of 200 '78ers,' people who marched in the first parade in 1978, drew raucous applause. That first parade ended in a clash with police and 50 arrests.
Other contingents of note included official entries by the New South Wales Police Force and the Australian Defence Force, and a group of some 100 Christian pastors who marched to 'apologize' for past treatment of LGBT people by Christian churches.
Mardi Gras pumps an estimated $45 million ( US$42 million ) into the local economy.
Brit Tory MP to
enter civil partnership
A senior member of Parliament for Britain's Conservative Party will be the first Tory MP to enter a same-sex civil partnership.
Alan Duncan, who has been in Parliament since 1992, will tie the knot with James Dunseath, spokesman for London's financial futures exchange, this summer at the Westminster register office in London.
The couple met 14 months ago at a dinner party and Duncan, 50, asked Dunseath, 39, to marry him this past Valentine's Day as the couple vacationed in Oman.
'You could not find two more conventional people to enter into a civil partnership,' Duncan told local media.
Dunseath told The Daily Telegraph: 'Our friends say we are inseparable. He may be a politician but he's great fun. We both feel it's so right and we're very lucky.'
Tory leader David Cameron said he was 'thrilled' to learn of the couple's engagement and plans to attend the ceremony.
In 2002, Duncan became the first Tory MP to publicly come out of the closet.
'Living in disguise as a politician in the modern world simply isn't an option,' he said at the time. 'The Tory view has always been, 'We don't mind, but don't say.' Well, that doesn't work anymore. The only realistic way to behave these days is to be absolutely honest and upfront, however inconvenient that may be at first.'
In a new interview with the Telegraph on March 5, Duncan added: 'I knew that one day I would have to say something, because I believed honesty to be the best policy. But I wanted to do it when I was sufficiently well-established as an MP for it not to be my only label thereafter. I didn't want to be known just as 'the gay MP Alan Duncan.' To me, I'm an MP who happens to be gay.'
Duncan also noted: 'This is not a wedding. You really just go into the register office and sign. There will be no Elton John-style stuff: no white suits, no John Inman, no flouncing about.'
The United Kingdom's Civil Partnership Act, which took effect in December 2005, grants registered same-sex couples all rights and obligations of marriage.
Nearly 500 Czech
gay couples have registered
By the end of last year, 487 same-sex couples had taken advantage of the Czech Republic's registered-partnership law, the Czech News Agency reported Jan. 28.
Gay-male partnerships outnumbered lesbian couplings 353 to 134.
Eight of the couples later cancelled their registrations.
The law took effect in July 2006 after the Chamber of Deputies overrode President Vaclav Klaus' veto of it.
The statute grants many of the rights and obligations of marriage but withholds equality in the areas of adoption, pensions, taxation and joint ownership of property.
Argentine couple seeks
recognition of
Spanish marriage
Argentine gay activists César Cigliutti and Marcelo Suntheim got married in Spain on Jan. 21 and plan to demand that Argentina recognize their marriage.
The Argentine capital of Buenos Aires and the province of Río Negro have same-sex civil-union laws, but there is no established mechanism anywhere in the nation for recognizing same-sex marriages from the six countries that allow them.
Anyone from the European Union can marry in Spain. Suntheim and Cigliutti were able to tie the knot because Suntheim has dual Argentine and German citizenship.
Same-sex marriage also is legal in Belgium, Canada, the Netherlands, South Africa and the U.S. state of Massachusetts. Canada has no citizenship or residency requirements for getting married, and foreign same-sex couples often accomplish the deed in a one-day visit.
Kuwaiti cross-dressers
arrested, abused
At least 14 cross-dressers have been arrested under a new Kuwaiti law that criminalizes 'imitating the appearance of the opposite sex ... in public.'
They are being held in a special ward of Tahla Prison, where guards have shaved off the detainees' hair and subjected them to other psychological and physical abuse, Human Rights Watch said Jan. 17.
'Transgender people in Kuwait tell Human Rights Watch that they are now afraid to leave their homes—even for work or to meet basic needs—for fear of arrest and ill-treatment,' the organization said in a statement.
'The wave of arrests in the past month shows exactly why Kuwait should repeal this repressive law,' said Joe Stork, deputy director of the group's Middle East division.
Article 199 of the Criminal Code, approved by the National Assembly on Dec. 10, states, ' [ A ] ny person committing an indecent act in a public place, or imitating the appearance of a member of the opposite sex, shall be subject to imprisonment for a period not exceeding one year or a fine not exceeding one thousand dinars,' which is about $3,680.
HIV cases set record
in Japan
Japan saw more than 1,000 new HIV cases in 2007, the first time the tally has crossed that threshold.
The Ministry of Health and Labor counted 1,048 new infections, bringing the total for all years to 9,392, according to Gay Japan News.
Ninety-three percent of the new cases were in men, and at least 70 percent involved gay sex.
'It is urgent that we should develop our support, counseling and medical care systems further ... in accordance with local needs and situations,' said Aikichi Iwamoto, chair of the ministry's AIDS Trends Committee.
—Assistance: Bill Kelley