December 2009

Don Belton

Don Belton, described by a friend as “a literary pathblazer and one of the important black gay writers to emerge in the 1980s”, was found dead Monday morning at his home in Bloomington, Indiana. He had been stabbed multiple times.

Michael J. Griffin, 25, of Bloomington was arrested Monday night and  held in the Monroe County Jail on a charge of murder, Indianapolis Star reports. At a Wednesday preliminary hearing, Griffin answered “not guilty” when a Monroe County judge asked him how he pleaded in the case. The judge ordered him held without bond in the county jail, Associated Press reports.

Griffin is a former Marine and Iraq veteran, according to press accounts.

Bloomington Police spokesman Lt. David Drake said that the victim’s journals led them to Griffin. Police discovered the journals throughout Belton’s house, detailing “pretty much everything that happened or that (Belton) thought about,” Drake said, according to the Star.

Police tracked down Griffin after finding a card near Belton's home computer that had his name, phone number, e-mail, and directions to his home, WISH TV reports.

Griffin’s girlfriend also called police to tell them she thought Griffin might be involved in the slaying, the Star reports.

“As far as motive goes, the only thing I can really say is that the two men were acquainted and that Griffin was apparently upset over an incident that had happened on Christmas Day between himself and Belton at Griffin's residence,” Drake said Tuesday.

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A Rutland, Vermont family court judge on Monday refused to delay an order that transfers custody of a child from a Virginia mother to her former lesbian partner in Fair Haven, Vermont, Brent Curtis reports for Rutland Herald.

Attorneys for the Virginia woman, Lisa Miller, had asked Judge William Cohen to delay an order he issued last month that requires Miller to turn over 7-year-old Isabella to Miller’s former partner Janet Jenkins on New Years Day.

But Cohen declined to stay the order, noting that Miller appears to have disappeared with Isabella and has not made contact with the court or with her attorneys.

In 2001, Miller and Jenkins were joined in a civil union in Vermont. Isabella was born to Miller in 2002. But the couple separated in 2003 and Miller moved back with the girl to her home state of Virginia. Since then, Miller and Jenkins have been engaged in a long-running legal dispute about visitation rights for Jenkins, who still lives in Vermont.

After the couple separated, Miller claimed to have become a born-again Christian and declared that she's no longer lesbian. She obtained legal help from right-wing activist groups in the legal dispute with Jenkins.

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Tiwonge Chimbalanga and Steven Monjeza were married over the weekend in a traditional ceremony in Malawi, a conservative southern African state where homosexuality is illegal.

But the gay couple didn’t have long to celebrate their new union. On Tuesday, they were arrested and will be charged with “gross indecency”, a police spokesman said. They were given separate cells in the city jail.

The ceremony was held at a guesthouse in Blantyre and spiced with traditional and hip-hop music, AFP reports. It attracted hundreds of curious onloookers, BBC and AFP report.

The couple wore traditional robes for the ceremony, according to AFP. But the BBC’s Raphael Tenthani in Blantyre says the pair have been seen relaxing at the police station with Tiwonge still wearing the dress he wore at the ceremony.

Blantyre is the Malawi’s largest city with a population of over 500,000 people.

Monjeza told the throngs gathered to watch the ceremony that he and Chimbalanga had been living together for five months, after meeting at the at church where they both worship.

“I have never been interested in a woman,” Monjeza told The Nation newspaper.

Finiasi Chikaoneka, one of the onlookers, told AFP, “I went there to see for myself a gay couple.”

“There were many people who were just curious about the whole affair because this was the first time that gays have come out openly,” he added.

Davie Chingwalu, a police spokesman, told AFP the two men would “appear in court soon to answer charges of gross indecency”. He added that police were still investigating the incident.

“We arrested them because they committed an offence; homosexuality in Malawi is illegal,”  Chingwalu told the BBC.

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Alex Freyer and Jose Maria proudly show off their marriage license after celebrating Latin America's first-ever wedding of a gay couple

Latin America’s first legally sanctioned same-sex wedding was officiated today in Argentina when Alex Freyre and José María exchanged vows at a registry office in the picturesque seaside resort town of Ushuaia, Tierra del Fuego, Buenos Aires Herald reports.

The couple, who were blocked by a court order last month from celebrating their marriage in Buenos Aires, told the press after the ceremony that they chose to be married in Tierra del Fuego because the province’s governor, Fabiana Ríos, “is strongly in favor of gay marriage”.

Rios overruled a civil registrar who initially refused to wed the couple and issued a special decree allowing the couple to get married there, AFP reports.

“As a couple, we have been dreaming with getting married for a long time,” Freyre told the press after the ceremony.

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Ill. GOP candidates Andy Martin (left) and Mark Kirk

Andy Martin, a minor Republican candidate for US Senate in Illinois, has released a radio ad charging that the front-runner in the February 1 GOP primary is “part of a Republican Party homosexual club”.

Martin paid for a political ad that ran on Chicago’s WBBM and other Illinois radio stations in which he says:

Today, I am fighting for the facts about Mark Kirk. Illinois Republican leader Jack Roeser says there is a, “solid rumor that Kirk is a homosexual.”  Roeser suggests that Kirk is part of a Republican Party homosexual club. Lake County Illinois Republican leader Ray True says Kirk has surrounded himself with homosexuals.

Martin—a far-right activist who helped push rumors that President Barack Obama was born in Kenya and that the Hawaiian birth certificate Obama posted on his website early in his campaign was a fake—is one of five candidates running against Kirk to become Republican nominee in the 2010 Illinois special election to fill the US Senate seat vacated by Obama.

True, who is quoted in the ad, disavowed Martin’s ad, Chicago’s CBS2 reports. In a statement, True said, “Mr. Martin did not contact me in any way before making his announcement. The comments attributed to me are completely false. I request through the media that Andy Martin cease and desist from making any additional statements that are incorrectly attributed to me.”

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Organizers of the Shanghai Pride events in 2009 Photo via China Daily

An article in China Daily calls 2009 the “year of gay China” because of the country’s increasingly active and visible LGBT communities, but several of the websites that have helped those communities grow have now been shut down down by their hosting providers, an advocacy group charged Wednesday.

According to a report in the English-language edition of People’s Daily, at least 10 LGBT websites in China have been shut down by the companies that host their servers.

The webmaster of a Beijing gay site said the company that had hosted his site told him gay websites might hold immoral information and pornographic literature.

“I would bet that most gay websites are more ‘clean and healthy’ than websites not closed by the government," said the webmaster, identified only by his surname, Chen, in the People’s Daily report.

“As a gay webmaster, we are more careful about all the information on the website, because we want to remove the prejudice on the gay group,” he is quoted as saying. “We want to let them know we are healthy.”

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