Cate Simpson

Uganda may soon follow Nigeria in making homosexuality an offense punishable by death. The proposed legislation was apparently sparked by a visit from American members of the ex-gay movement, who believe homosexuality can be cured through therapy. Most of these groups though have since denounced the bill, which is perhaps a mark of how extreme it is. (The list of crimes introduced in the text include “attempted homosexuality,” which is almost funny until you realize it carries a sentence of seven years.

The bill hasn’t seen as much press coverage as you might expect, but it has spawned some headlines I hope never to see again. The BBC wins the prize for most alarming, with “Should homosexuals be executed?” as if the prospect was merely thought-provoking and ripe for discussion.

The headline, from a post on the BBC website, actually turns out to be part of a show broadcast on the BBC World Service called Have Your Say. The episode—which aired on Wednesday and is still available online)—makes for powerful listening. A woman calls in from Zambia to say she can’t understand how a female can look at another female in a sexual way. When the host presses her on whether she would actually support the death penalty for doing so, she says, “Being executed for being something sinful, it’s okay.” From her tone of voice as she utters those final two words you could easily imagine she was talking about a vegetable she doesn’t like, but that she’d be willing to eat if it ended up on her plate.

The debate over this bill should be a warning to every casual homophobe the world over: this is where revulsion for your fellow man leads you. This is what happens when communities let their intolerance go unchecked, when governments refuse to step in to defend the rights of minorities. And let’s be clear: this bill would government-stamp the elimination of a group of people based on a particular attribute. We have a word for that: it’s genocide.

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In a case before the Ontario Superior Court this month, an Ottawa man is challenging the ban on blood donation by gay men. Currently, any man who has had sex with another man since 1977 is “indefinitely deferred” from giving blood. Not only is this ban unnecessarily broad, it does a disservice to the very people it is supposed to protect.

The reasoning behind the ban is that gay men in Canada account for 60 percent of HIV-positive people, and for nearly half of new infections. All blood collected by Canadian Blood Services is screened for HIV, but the justification for the indefinite deferral of gay men is that the virus is not immediately detectable after infection—it can be several weeks before it shows up on a blood test. Clearly, these are compelling arguments for caution.

Toronto sexual health clinics deal with the issue of detection by waiting three months after a risky sexual encounter to confirm a negative result. Blood agencies in some countries subject gay men and other high-risk groups to a six- or twelve-month deferral period after last sexual contact to make sure the results of screenings are accurate. So why have CBS and Health Canada refused to rethink the total ban?

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A provision governing hate speech in Canada is under the microscope this week, after a tribunal of the Canadian Human Rights Commission concluded that it violates the right to freedom of expression guaranteed in the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. This body doesn’t have the power to strike down Section 13(1) of the Human Rights Act, but the tribunal’s reluctance to apply the section against freedomsite.org webmaster Marc Lemire has set an interesting precedent and kicked up renewed debate over the right to free speech.

Queer people being one of the groups that anti-hate speech laws are supposed to protect, the outcome of this debate could have consequences for LGBT advocacy organizations. Queer activists are divided on the subject of hate speech. Some believe that the kind of homophobic and racist rhetoric that appears on websites like Marc Lemire’s contributes to an unsafe environment for the groups it targets, and should be proscribed. Others, wary of censorship, are willing to let the haters say whatever they like and hope that in the process they expose themselves as irrational and crazy.

This has tended to be the approach of LGBT equality campaigners Egale Canada. In 2005, they refused to endorse a complaint before the Alberta Human Rights Commission against conservative pastor Stephen Boissoin, the author of a letter to the Red Deer Advocate newspaper denouncing the “homosexual agenda.” Egale’s Executive Director said at the time that the organization wanted Boissoin’s assertions “aired, debated and subjected to public scrutiny.”

On the face of it, the director’s statement sits a little uneasily with Egale’s ongoing campaign against “Murder Music,” Jamaican dancehall music that features violently homophobic lyrics. A letter Egale sent to HMV and iTunes asking them to cease sales of music by particular dancehall artists last year made specific reference to the Section 13 provision against hate speech.

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Several people were injured in Rome yesterday when two letter bombs were thrown into a gay neighbourhood bar. The attack wasn’t an isolated incident, but part of a pattern of escalating violence against gay people in Italy which some speculate has been fuelled by the election of Rome Mayor Gianni Alemanno, a member of the post-fascist National Alliance party.

It is hard to see these attacks as anything short of terrorism. Something pre-meditated like a letter bomb attack is in a different category from spontaneous acts of street violence. The intention behind it is to make gay people in the region feel under siege.

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The other day I stumbled across a petition asking that the British government apologize to Alan Turing for “the tragic consequences of prejudice that ended [his] life and career,” and formally acknowledge the significance of his work.

Here’s some background. Alan Turing is most readily associated with the Turing Test, which sought to demonstrate whether a machine could think. The test, basically, involves a text-based conversation a human conducts with another human and with a machine. If he can’t tell whether he’s conversing with a human or computer, the machine passes the test.

The 1950s paper in which Turing laid out the test, and the conception of intelligence that it embodied, became one of the most influential in philosophical literature. It is still essential to most philosophical discussion of artificial intelligence and the essence of human consciousness.

Even more significantly, Turing was a codebreaker during the Second World War, ultimately devising a machine that could decipher the Germans’ Enigma Code. The Enigma Machine was so useful that some historians claim the information it intercepted hastened the end of the war by as much as two years.

Turing was also gay, a crime for which he was criminally prosecuted and chemically castrated. The conviction ended his career, and at the age of 41 he committed suicide.

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Gay men must be suffering an image crisis this summer. First the spandex disaster that was Brüno assaulted our movie theatres, now Perez Hilton is on the front cover of The Advocate. How embarrassing.

I haven’t seen Brüno, because I’m trying to pretend it doesn’t exist—an attitude which seems to have caught on, judging by the film’s box office nosedive. Perez Hilton, however, just refuses to disappear.

For those of you blessed with selective memory, Hilton made a minor splash at this year’s MuchMusic Awards after getting punched in the face by the Black Eyed Peas’ manager—it turned out, because Hilton called the manager “a faggot.” Add this incident to Hilton’s habit of drawing semen and penises on the faces of male celebrities pictured on his blog, and he’s made a career out of being a 12-year-old boy.

Hilton is not just incidentally homophobic—I think it’s part of his success.

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