FEBRUARY 1, 2008
Gay Nursing Home
Opens in Berlin
• Facial
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• Waxing
out, and this exhibition will
help them to understand
their own identity and to
begin to live their own lives,”
she told Radio Prague.
The first gay nursing home in
Europe opened in Berlin this month.
The state-of-the-art facility will
house 28 patients, who will be
allowed to bring their own furniture
Protester Found
and sundries.
Guilty in Riga Pride
Jiri Hromada is coordinating a
The man behind the home, activist
Attack
government-curated exhibition
that documents and
and architect Christian Hamm, told
An assistant to Latvian
celebrates Czech gay history.
the German Press Agency that gay
MP Dainis Turlais was found
people often feel ostracized in ordinary
guilty of gross public disor-
nursing homes. “When you are old, the last thing
derliness Jan. 15 for throwing what was likely a bag
that you want to do is to have to hide,” he said.
of feces at celebrants attending the 2006 Gay Pride
The home is the first piece of a planned com events in Riga.
plex that wilt include apartments, a cafe, function
Janis Dzelme was sentenced to 100 hours of
rooms, a gym and a health care center with doctors
compulsory labor by the Vidzeme District Court for
and therapists, the report said.
demonstrating what the court called an obvious
Traveling Government Exhibit
Celebrates Czech Gay History
A government-curated exhibition documenting
and celebrating Czech gay history has opened in
Prague and later will travel around the nation, includ
ing to small towns, Radio Prague reported Jan. 9.
The exhibition’s curator is the government’s
minister for human rights and minorities, Dzamila
Stehlíková, and its coordinator is veteran Czech
gay activist Jirii Hromada.
“Twenty years ago homosexual citizens were the
first group who began to speak about human
rights,” Stehlíková said. “Now, after 20 years of gay
and lesbian development, we have a registered
partnership law, and the homosexual minority is
part of democratic society, with its own structure
and with a very interesting cultural and social life.”
The exhibition, now at the capital’s House of
National Minorities, includes gay magazines, old
photos and videos of a disturbing debate in the
Chamber of Deputies concerning the registered
partnership law.
Openly gay singer Pavel Vitek told Radio
Prague: “What I have been most taken by is the
history, which you now forget, of the period at the
end of the 1980s and the start of the ’90s. And I
have also really been struck by the discreditable
language used by our politicians, both men and
women, when registered partnerships were being
discussed. It’s certainly worth hearing Justice
Minister Parkanová and others again!”
Stehlíková is excited about taking the exhibit
on the road.
“In some small towns many people with homo
sexual orientation have complications with coming
lack of respect toward the public by ignoring uni
versally accepted norms of behavior.
“This is an enormously important precedent
which will send very strong signals to those people
in Latvia who believe that freedom of assembly and
freedom of speech should be limited with vio
lence,” said Kristine Garina, chairwoman of the
Pride organizing group Mozaika.
Turlais is among the Parliament’s more anti-gay
members. He reportedly has called gays “faggots”
and “scum.”
Last year’s Riga Pride went relatively smoothly,
but in 2005, when activists first attempted to march,
the 150 people were heavily outnumbered by around
1,000 anti-gay protesters who hurled insults, bottles
and rotten eggs; blocked the streets; and forced the
parade to be rerouted. The protesters chanted “No
sodomy” and “Gays fuck the nation.”
Then, in 2006, the City Council banned the
parade. Organizers responded by holding a religious
service at a church and meetings at a hotel.
Attendees at both were attacked by Christian,
ultranationalist and neo-Nazi protesters who pelt
ed them with eggs, rotten food and feces.
Last year, armed with a court ruling that the
2006 ban was unconstitutional, more than 500 queer
people marched around a fenced-in park under
heavy police protection, dodging only a paint bomb,
an ice cream cone and a few firecrackers. Police out
numbered the marchers and the approximately 100
jeering anti-gay demonstrators. ©
R ex WOCKNER has reported for the gay press since
1985. He has a bachelor's degree in journalism from
Drake University and started his career as a radio
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