Italy: 100,000 attend Milan Pride in support of marriage equality

On Saturday 100,000 people took part in Milan Pride: walking through the city in support of gay rights in Italy. Dario Davanzo, who manages the event, told La Repubblica: ‘This is the first Milan Pride where we can see such a powerful synergy going on between city and government.’

Participants waved fliers which read: 'Sì’ (‘yes’) in support of the fight for marriage equality in Italy. The streets were said to be ‘dense’ with rainbow flags. The mayor of Milan Giuliano Pisapia marched in the procession and participated by handing out the fliers. He said: ‘We [will] defeat prejudice: and we say "yes" to love and the marriage.' Read More 

Italy: LGBT pride to demand respect for human rights

Twenty floats, a procession and thousands of participants--the 21st annual Roma Pride was a parade full of color, music and fun. A party with a serious message: the recognition of the rights, as recently happened with the referendum in Ireland. Organizers said over 250,000 attended the event. Leading the march, the mayor of Rome, Ignazio Marino , who commented: "We are here to celebrate. Rome, the host city, the city that believes in love, has made romises and kept them all. In Rome love counts." Read More 

UK: Bisexual asylum seeker in Home Office battle has deportation flight cancelled

Immigration authorities have cancelled the deportation flight of a Jamaican asylum seeker who faced removal from the UK after the Home Office refused to accept he was bisexual. Orashia Edwards, 34, had been told he could be deported at any time from 5 May, but Edwards was instead detained for nearly a month before being released pending a further appeal against his rejected claim for refugee status – the latest in a series of prolonged periods in detention.

He has been involved in a protracted battle with the Home Office after an asylum tribunal rejected his application, saying that he had been dishonest about his sexuality. But Edwards criticised the decision, claiming he had been the victim of institutional bias because of his sexuality.

“I think they are prejudiced against bisexual people,” Edwards said. “They say I have choices, that I could choose to be with a woman. Maybe if I had lied and said that I was gay things would have been different, but I’m just being honest. For years I was in denial about my sexuality, it took me so long to be honest with myself – I like men and I like women." Read More

US: Trans, queer immigrants demand ICE release LGBTQ detainees

More than 50 transgender and queer immigrants rallied in front of Immigration Customs Enforcement (ICE) headquarters in Washington D.C. demanding the release of LGBTQ immigrants from ICE detention centers. The demonstration was part of Operation Break the Cage—a multi-organizational effort to raise awareness of the horrendous psychological and physical abuses suffered by immigrant transgender women currently detained in ICE facilities, many who are ignored and completely isolated without the personal or legal resources to find help.

Calling itself the largest immigrant youth-led organization in the nation comprising 100,000 immigrant youth and allies from 26 states United We Dream's operation in partnership with the Washington D.C. based LGBT advocacy organization Casa Ruby and the nationally renowned Trans Women of Color Collective intends to "expose ICE's human rights violations against the undocumented LGBTQ community." Read More 

Pride in London 2015: Ukip rejected from pro-LGBT parade 'to protect participants'

Ukip has been banned from joining marchers at London’s world-famous gay pride parade to “ensure the event passes on safely and in the right spirit”. Almost 2,400 people had signed an online petition to exclude the political party, calling Ukip “inherently homophobic, transphobic, xenophobic, racist and misogynistic”.

It cited Nigel Farage’s comments on HIV treatment, the party’s opposition to same-sex marriage and other “controversial views” voiced by members. The directors said they had “wrestled with the difficult issue” of whether to allow the application over several days, adding that the intention was to unite, rather than divide, people with an event that serves the whole community.

“This decision has been made after careful consultation in order to protect participants and ensure the event passes off safely and in the right spirit, it has not been made on a political basis,” a spokesperson added. "Of paramount concern to us is the experience of all participants at Pride, most especially the position we would be putting our volunteer stewards in."  Read More

Slovakia’s annual LGBTI pride parade has been cancelled until 2016

What would have been only the 6th annual Duhovy PRIDE march will not take place this year after organizers cancelled the event.

Duhovy PRIDE has often been targeted by far right extremists and the organizers fear that the climate is not right in the country after opponents of LGBTI rights in Slovakia forced a referendum to try to strengthen the country’s constitutional ban on same-sex marriage. Read More

Cape Verde: The search for real equality

This year, for the 3rd consecutive year, the protest march for equality returns to pound the pavement of Mindelo,Cape Verde to conjoin the week for equality for Lesbians, Gays, Bisexuals and Transsexuals of Cape Verde.

LGBT week commences the June 19th with activities at the Cultural Center of Mindelo with training activities on Human Rights through the Arts, a conference on sexual and reproductive health of LGBT persons along with the Third Festival of Cinema and Human Rights focused on all different people in addition to a video and photography expedition; not to mention a photography and drawing competition, on behalf of the organization where everyone is welcome to participate regardless of sexual orientation. On June 27th Mindelo will receive the LGBT parade with the slogan "Real equality in Cape Verde for Lesbian, Gays, Bisexuals and Transsexuals. Do not be afraid to come out, we are with you." Read More

South Korea: Court Rules Police Cannot Ban LGBT Pride March

A court in the South Korean capital Seoul ruled Tuesday that police violated the law when they banned a pride march to be held June 28 as the culmination of the Korean Queer Cultural Festival. Police had denied permits to hold the march, citing conflicting applications for events that overlapped the parade route. These applications were filed as the result of a showdown between Christian conservative activists and LGBT activists, who had both camped out in front of the police station processing applications for more than a week in May. The conservatives managed to get their public use applications in first.

On Tuesday, the court ruled this violated the LGBT activists’ right to protest. “Unless there is a clear risk of danger to the public, preventing the demonstration is not allowed and should be the absolute last resort,” the court ruled, according to a local news report. Read More

Russia: Police hold gay activists at unauthorised rally, including Pride parade organizer

Russian police held around half a dozen activists for attempting to stage an unauthorised gay pride rally in central Moscow, AFP journalists witnessed. Police officers detained the activists and loaded them into waiting vans as around 30 nationalist counter-demonstrators in camouflage clothing and football fans hurled eggs at the activists and attacked them.

Several religious counter-demonstrators were also detained by police as a large crowd of Russian and international journalists looked on.

"Arrested and beaten at 10th Moscow Pride. We are arrested! They probably broke my left hand finger," leading gay rights activist Nikolai Alexeyev wrote on Twitter, posting a photo of himself in detention. Alexeyev, a prominent LGBT activist and lawyer and main organizer of Saturday's gay pride parade in Moscow was sentenced to 10 days in jail for "disobeying police orders" by a city court Monday. Read More

Ukraine: Assault on Kiev Pride

Kiev Pride organizers had been in negotiations with police for a month. According to the event’s executive director, Anna Sharygina, in the days leading up to the march they were meeting daily—still, the police would give no promises. Late into the night, the organizers were making contingency plans for “what we would do if we showed up and there were three cops there,” Sharygina told me. When they showed up, they found several buses full of police in riot gear—but also a number of young men and at least one woman wearing black T-shirts with the logo of Right Sector, the ultranationalist coalition that had threatened violence.

“Right now, during the war with Moscow,” the Right Sector leader Dmytro Yarosh wrote on his Facebook page on the eve of the march, we “will be forced to be distracted from other things in order to stop those who hate the family, break morals, and destroy morality and the traditional concepts of humankind.” He went on to say that the West is exercising too much influence over Ukraine “in order to force them to introduce the ideology of LGBT people.” 

During the event, at least a dozen people were injured, including police, and more than 20 others arrested as scuffles broke out between members of a rare Ukrainian gay pride march and their nationalist opponents.  Read More 

Brazil: Big turnout for Sao Paulo’s gay pride march

Participants gyrated through the heart of Brazil's business metropolis, letting their hair down at the 19th Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender (LGBT) parade, whose slogan this year is "I was born this way, I grew up so I will always be like this: respect me."

The parade, which saw around 20 themed floats replete with dancers join the party, dwarfed the first, held back in 1997 and attended by only around 2,000 people who professed on that occasion that "we are many, and we are in all professions.” Since then, the LGBT community has increasingly secured rights in a mostly Roman Catholic and socially conservative country of 202 million and where there is widespread discrimination on grounds of sexual orientation.

Organisers said they expected upwards of two million people to attend the event, the largest of its kind anywhere in the world.  Read More 

Cyprus: Thousands turn out for 2nd Gay Pride Parade

The parade is the highlight of the city’s Gay Pride week and is expected to be Tel Aviv’s largest-ever pride event, with 180,000 participants including 30,000 tourists. This year’s celebration features Eurovision winner and LGBT rights representative Conchita Wurst and focuses on supporting the transgender community.
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