This weekend, pride parades in Hong Kong, China and Taipei, Taiwan kick off what many lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgendered (LGBT) Asians hope will be a new era of tolerance.
Events like Taipei’s “Love Out Loud” parade October 31, the largest in Asia with a turnout last year of 18,000, are milestones in a continent where homosexuality can still be illegal.
“It is a platform from which to not only pressure legislators to push for LGBT rights, but also a venue to change the public’s consciousness and views about homosexuality,” said Oscar Atadero to Fridae Magazine when asked about his role in organizing the first gay pride march in Asia in 1994.
The social awareness raised by pride parades is a force in stopping the denial, ignorance and brutality against the LGBT community.
“You are what you are,” said sophomore Leorie Beriguete.
In some places progress has been made. Last month Indonesia overturned legislation that would have permitted public whipping, stoning and imprisonment of homosexuals and adulterers in the Banda Aceh province.
Aceh, known for the devastation it endured from the 2005 tsunami, is semi autonomous from the central government located in Jakarta. Aceh’s 69-seat house unanimously passed the legislation on September 14, but the local government then sent it to the Supreme Court for review; on September 22 the legislation was revoked.
This July India’s Delhi high court amended Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code, a colonial law instated 149 years ago by the British, because its description of same sex relationships as “unnatural offenses against the order of nature” violated fundamental rights to personal liberty (Article 21 of India’s constitution), equality (Article 14) and prohibition of discrimination (Article 15). Until this, homosexual acts were punishable with a 10 year prison sentence.
Most Asian countries, however, retain such laws.
Despite many references to homosexuality in ancient art and literature, homosexuals in Asia today have been withheld civil rights, abused or killed in a culture that often denies their existence.
China only ceased to consider homosexuality a disease in 2001, a move the US made in 1973, although it has a cultural legacy of homosexuality dating to 1027 BC in the stories of Mizu Xia, Pan Zhang, and Lord Yang, classic tales of love written during China’s Zhou period.
The Hwarang, elected leaders of a military group during Korea’s Silla Dynasty (BC 57- AD 953), celebrated same-sex love in vernacular poetry such as that found in the Sam-Guk-Yu-Sa. Yet, in 2002 when the Lesbian and Gay Alliance against Discrimination, the Lawyers for a Democratic society and Exzone.com sued the Korean government after its Information and Communications Ethic Committee classified homosexuality under “obscenity and perversion” in its “Criteria for Indecent Internet Sites,” the court took cue from 1997’s Youth Protection Act classifying “homosexual love” as “harmful to youth” – and ruled that freedom of speech and expression were not applicable regarding homosexuality.
“That’s ridiculous. They’re exactly the same thing,” said junior Talissa Rosario. “There’s no difference between gay sex and straight sex.”
In 2003 the Korean National Human Rights Protection Committee advised Korea’s Youth Protection Committee to amend the 1997 Youth Protection Act, removing anti-gay language, which had been the basis of the ruling in Exzone vs Korea.
Singapore is not as progressive. Its Media Development Authority fined a cable station $15,000 for showing a gay couple and their adopted child after consulting with the Programme Advisory Committee for English Programs, which agreed in a statement on its website “that a gay relationship should not be presented as an acceptable family unit.”
“We have to realize everyone has the same feelings; We have to care more for one another,” said Youth Development Worker Mrs. Hattie Slaughter, who has worked in every high school in Staten Island.
According to Fridae magazine’s article “Oscar speeches censored in 53 Asian countries?” on April 25, “… the words ‘gay’ and ‘lesbian’ in Milk writer Dustin Lance Black and actor Sean Penn’s Oscar speeches have been muted out during the recorded broadcasts.”
Accepting an invitation from university leader Lee C. Bollinger to speak at Columbia University. Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s official statement on the execution of gays in the Islamic Republic (some 2,000 in 2008) was that “In Iran, we don’t have homosexuals.”
But there are, and LGBT Asians, whose existences are denied, are victims of hate crimes. “There have been killings documented in Iraq and other parts of Asia. The Human Rights Watch is an excellent group on that,” said Mr. Kevin Cassidy, executive manager of communications and external relations for the UN’s International Labor Organization.
The UN proposed a gay-rights declaration in December, but it is still in limbo. Non-signatories were south Asians, and surprisingly, the United States under the Bush Administration – the only Western government that refused. In a quick turnaround, the Obama Administration is reversing this position.
LGBT rights are far from settled. The president of the United Nations, Ali Abdussalam Treki, opened its 64th General Assembly and responded to calls for the universal decriminalization of homosexuality but stated that, “As a Muslim, I am not in favor of it …. It is not accepted by the majority of countries. My opinion is not in favor of this matter at all . . . And there are some countries that allow that, thinking it is a kind of democracy . . . I think it is not.”
