At least four villas in Bali, Indonesia, are being investigated for “marketing themselves specifically for the gay community”, amid increasing anti-LGBT+ sentiment on the island.
Although the island of Bali has historically been seen as one of the most tolerant places in country, in general discrimination and violence against LGBT+ people is on the rise in Indonesia.
Gay sex is currently legal in most regions of the country, including Bali, but there are no discrimination protections for LGBT+ people and same-sex relationships are not recognised.
In 2018, an Indonesian province where LGBT+ people face rife persecutionannounced that it wanted to introduce beheadings, and in 2019 new laws were proposed to ban sex between unmarried couples and make it illegal for unmarried couples to live together.As same-sex relationships are not recognised under Indonesian law, it will be illegal for same-sex couples to live together and gay sex will be effectively criminalised.
According to Coconuts Bali, a villa in the beach resort Seminyak first received attention on social media, which alerted authorities.
The Facebook page of a villa under the name “Angelo Bali Gay Guesthouse”, which has since been taken down, made headlines for catering to the gay community.
Some of the photos shared on the page by the guesthouse reportedly featured photos of gay male couples, and on TripAdvisor it is described as “a small, luxurious, all-men, clothing-optional gay guesthouse”. According to its website, the villa stopped operating on January 9 with no explanation.
I Gusti Agung Ketut Suryanegara, head of Bali’s Public Order Agency (Satpol PP), said: “We received a report, including the one on social media about this villa, accommodation or a guesthouse marketing themselves specifically for the gay community… Here in Bali we don’t recognise that culture.”
The head of the Badung regency’s cultural agency, I Made Badra, also said the existence of the villa was “tainting Bali’s tourism” reputation.
Since then, authorities have said that three other villas in Seminyak and Kerobokan are also catering to the LGBT+ community.
AA Oka Ambara Dewi, a Badung regency Satpol PP officer, said that the agency had summoned the owners of the guesthouses to check their documents.
He said: “We will do it according to our standards of procedure so we will check their permit documents and whether or not they match what they are allotted for, if there is proof that it [caters to the gay community] then we will temporarily seal the property.” It is unclear what the next steps would be, or whether the businesses would be permanently closed.
Two transgender women filed a lawsuit against the state of Florida on Monday over its ban on transgender-related health care for state workers, arguing it violates the U.S. Constitution and Title VII of the Civil Rights Act.
“We brought this lawsuit because all people need access to medical care. This is not about special treatment; this is about equal treatment,” said lead counsel Simone Chriss. “Transgender state employees are singled out and explicitly denied coverage for one reason: They are transgender. That is discrimination, and it cannot stand.”
Jami Claire.ACLU Foundation of Florida
The suit, which was brought by Southern Legal Counsel, the ACLU of Florida and Eric Lindstrom, an attorney, seeks to end Florida’s State Plan Exclusion, a rule that prohibits state employer-provided health plans from covering “gender reassignment or modification services or supplies.”
The plaintiffs, Jami Claire and Kathryn Lane, both state employees, have had to delay their transition-related care, which their suit argues worsened their gender dysphoria.
In part because many of the same private insurance plans provided by Florida to its employees would cover transition-related care if the plans were provided by nonstate employers, the suit argues that the State Plan Exclusion “constitutes unlawful sex discrimination in violation of Title VII and the Equal Protection Clause.”
“As a result of the State Plan Exclusion, nontransgender employees receive coverage for all medically necessary health care, but transgender employees do not,” the suit states.
For example, if a cisgender Florida state employee required an orchiectomy as treatment for testicular cancer, it would be covered by his state-provided plan. However, if a transgender woman sought the same surgery to eliminate testosterone production and alleviate gender dysphoria, it would not.
The plaintiffs are both employees of the state of Florida — Claire is a researcher at the University of Florida’s College of Veterinary Medicine, and Lane works in a Tallahassee public defender’s office. Both are covered by employer-sponsored health plans, but since the plans are provided by the state, they are banned from any coverage for transition-related health care.
The suit claims the plaintiffs have also faced additional financial burdens due to the state’s trans health care ban.
Claire began her transition in 1997, but was forced to pause in 2002 after her divorce affected her finances. Claire said she then attempted suicide three times.
“I literally couldn’t see a way financially forward,” she explained. “I went through 10, 14 years of hell.”
She resumed her transition 16 years later, and in 2016 fully transitioned socially. Although she has paid for her private insurance premiums through her employer, the University of Florida, Claire has been barred from any coverage of her transition-related care, and has therefore been forced to pay out of pocket for all of transition-related expenses.
Claire’s experience with her employer has been positive — Claire said the university has been understanding as she has worked through her mental health challenges. However, she said her health plan’s ban on trans-related care has made her feel like “a second-class employee.”
“I pay for my health insurance for 30 years now, but I can’t use all of it,” she said. “Everybody else pays for their insurance and they get to use it like they want, but I don’t get to use mine.”
Billy Huff.ACLU Foundation of Florida
One of the original plaintiffs in the case, a transgender man, Billy Huff, will be called as a witness instead. Huff said he left Florida for a job in Illinois, since staying in the state while subject to the State Plan Exclusion was having too great an impact on his gender dysphoria.
“Part of the impact was having to leave,” Huff told NBC News. “I left my home and my friends.”
Huff was the director of the University of Florida’s LGBTQ center, where he said he promised students that he “would be their best advocate.”
“Knowing that a lot of students that I worked for would go on to work for state offices in Florida, I thought I should try to change it if I could do something,” Huff said of his efforts to start the lawsuit.
“When I was looking to leave, I only applied at universities that were in states that covered transition-related health care,” Huff said. “That was one of my main qualifications.”
In addition, the U.S. Supreme Court is currently reviewing the question of whether Title VII of the Civil Rights Act — which “prohibits employment discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex and national origin” — affords protections to LGBTQ people through its ban on “sex” discrimination.
For years, Ugandan refugee Mbazira Moses has been typing out emails to dozens of international humanitarian organizations and United Nations officials with a message: LGBTQ refugees at the Kakuma Refugee Camp in Kenya need your help.
The Kakuma camp and nearby Kalobeyei Integrated Settlement, both operated by the U.N. Refugee Agency, or UNHCR, are together home to nearly 200,000 refugees from dozens of countries. Many, if not most, have fled overland from Kenya’s conflict-stricken neighbors: Uganda, South Sudan and Somalia.
A protected section of Kakuma refugee camp in northwest Kenya, which is home to LGBT refugees in Turkana County on Oct. 14, 2018.Sally Hayden / SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images file
But according to Moses and experts on refugees and migration, the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer refugees in Kakuma — many of whom fled homophobic and transphobic violence in nearby Uganda — continue to face threats and violence from locals and other refugees for the simple reason that they are LGBTQ. While the situation for sexual and gender minorities may generally be more dire in neighboring countries, Kenya is still among the nearly 70 nations that criminalize homosexuality.
On Tuesday night, Moses sent out another such email: Over 50 queer refugees camped outside the UNHCR reception center at Kakuma for safety reasons were again attacked, this time by Turkana-speaking locals and other Kakuma refugees.
“They were kicked out by the UNHCR and forced into the homophobic community with other refugees,” and then local residents from the area, the Turkana, “attacked them some time ago,” Moses wrote in the email sent to human rights officials and journalists.
“They fled to the reception center where they were denied entry,” he wrote. “The two groups hate them badly.”
Kakuma camp refugee injured with what appears to be a bloody nose.
Moses alleged that the refugees were attacked with “knife stabs, stones and clubs,” and included images of people with head injuries. Police hesitated, the ambulance was slow, and the refugees fled through holes and over fences, Moses said. The Turkana locals allegedly blamed the gay refugees for a local drought. Seven refugees were injured.
Kakuma camp is “very hard to administer,” said Bruce Knotts, director of the Unitarian Universalist United Nations office, who has for decades worked in refugee advocacy and relief — including a visit to Kakuma years ago.
“You have got a handful of UNHCR officials, so bad things can happen, and bad things do happen in refugee camps — not only to LGBT people, but women and other people as well, so it’s unfortunately not surprising,” Knotts said.
In June 2018, Moses and Refugee Flag Kakuma, an LGBTQ rights group he leads at the camp, hosted its first gay pride event. The march attracted hundreds of Kakuma onlookers, but soon after it finished, a series of murderous threats were posted around the camp: Leave or be killed “one by one.”
Participants hold rainbow flags during an LGBTQ pride event at the Kakuma Refugee Camp in Kenya on June 16, 2018.Refugee Flag Kakuma
The dire situation at the camp worsened in December 2018, when an attack on LGBTQ refugees at Kakuma injured 20 and was so brutal that UNHCR officials relocated hundreds of refugees to a gated school compound 450 miles south in Nairobi, where some remain today. And yet, according to Moses, new lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer refugees continue to arrive for registration at UNHCR offices in Kakuma and Nairobi.
In a WhatsApp message sent to NBC News on Friday, Moses said he and other members of Refugee Flag Kakuma question “the logic of returning and housing LGBT refugees in a place where others had been withdrawn because of insecurity.”
“Some of the 200 LGBT refugees who were relocated from Kakuma camp last year were arrested and returned to camp,” Moses said. “At the same time, some new ones have been reporting both in Nairobi and Kakuma. Those who report in Nairobi are always sent to Kakuma refugee camp.”
LGBTQ refugees also routinely accuse the camp’s administrators of turning a blind eye — due to homophobia and transphobia — to their plight and to the continued violence they face.
UNHCR did not respond to NBC News’ request for comment on reports of repeated violence against LGBTQ refugees at the Kakuma camp. However, in an interview with NBC News after the attack on the camp’s June 2018 pride event, Yvonne Ndege, a UNHCR Kenya spokesperson, said, “The community can sometimes feel isolated.”
“UNHCR and the government of Kenya with other relevant stakeholders are striving to promote the rights of all asylum-seekers and refugees and are ensuring partners are trained on how to work with LGBTI in a displacement context,” Ndege said. “Their rights as human beings shall be considered as such.”
While the process of getting a refugee application approved by UNHCR can take years in Kenya and other countries, including the United States, the average stay for a resident of Kakuma camp is 17 years, according to the UNHCR.
More than 25 million people worldwide are currently refugees, according to Amnesty International, and a third are living in the world’s lowest-income countries. The Kakuma Refugee Camp in northwestern Kenya was recently the world’s largest refugee camp — outstripped in late 2019 by Rohingya refugee camps in Bangladesh.
Knotts said UNHCR is “overwhelmed by Syrian refugees, by Rohingya refugees; there are massive refugee situations around the world, and when you are talking about LGBTQ refugees, you’re talking about a small number and nobody wants to talk about that.”
Even so, “the UNHCR has an obligation to do better than this,” Knotts said.
A federal judge has ordered the Department of Homeland Security to return a gay asylum-seeker who was deported to Chad, ruling that the government had not properly considered his asylum claim based on his status as a gay man before deporting him.
Oumar Yaide arrived in the U.S. in 2009 and requested political asylum because he was a member of “a disfavored group,” a Chadian ethnic group called the Gorane. His asylum application was denied in 2014, and in December 2018 a judge denied his final appeal.
In October, however, two months after officers from Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, removed him from his San Francisco home and sent him to California’s Yuba County Jail, Yaide filed a motion to reopen his asylum case. This request for relief was based upon new information: Chad criminalized homosexuality in 2016 — years after Yaide arrived in the U.S. — and Yaide came out as gay in 2019. This combination, according to court documents, led Yaide to fear “torture and death” if he returned home to the central African nation.
But in early December, while Yaide’s new case was waiting to be seen by an immigration judge, ICE agents removed him from the Yuba County Jail, processed his deportation and sent him to the Sacramento airport, where he and two ICE agents boarded a flight to Chad. Yaide was in handcuffs until a layover in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. His lawyers said they had no idea where he was during the trip.
While Yaide was making the long journey back to Chad, his attorneys filed an instant habeas petition and temporary restraining order requesting that the government return him to the U.S. Last month, U.S. District Judge Charles R. Breyer granted the request and ordered Homeland Security to return Yaide to the U.S., ruling the “deportation violates his procedural due process right to pursue his motion to reopen.”
“Obviously, imprisonment or death would foreclose Yaide’s ability to pursue his motion to reopen,” Breyer wrote in his order, referring to the possible punishment Yaide could face as a gay man in Chad.
Returning Yaide to the U.S., however, is not without complications. He has an expired Chadian passport, and Homeland Security says it has no jurisdiction to retrieve him from Chad without a valid passport. It is unknown whether Chad’s government will issue him a new one.
Breyer’s ruling directed the U.S. government to work with Yaide’s lawyers to “formulate a mutually agreeable plan to return Yaide to the United States as soon as practically possible.”
Edwin Carmona-Cruz, co-director of Pangea Legal Services, the group representing Yaide, told NBC News on Wednesday that his organization is now “working with federal elected officials to assist in this process.”
Tanya J. Roman, an ICE spokesperson, said the agency is “unable to comment due to pending litigation.”
Chad is one of 68 U.N. member states where consensual same-sex activity is illegal, according to ILGA World, an international LGBTQ advocacy organization. In the United States, asylum-seekers have been successful with claims of potential persecution because of membership in a “social group,” namely the LGBTQ community.
In 1994, Attorney General Janet Reno ordered that the ruling in the case of a Cuban gay asylum-seeker, Fidel Armando Toboso-Alfonso, should be the guidance for future cases, thus cementing an earlier decision finding that Taboso-Alfonso was eligible for asylum because of his membership in the LGBTQ “social group” and the threat of political violence he would face if he were forced to return to his home country of Cuba.
Aaron C. Morris, executive director of Immigration Equality, a nonprofit LGBTQ immigrant advocacy group, said Yaide’s case will have no clear impact on other LGBTQ asylum-seekers. However, he noted that “it’s pretty common” for LGBTQ asylum-seekers, like Yaide, to first seek asylum with a claim other than their sexual orientation or gender identity.
“A lot of our clients, often before they meet Immigration Equality, for various reasons, put forward meritorious claims that aren’t successful, whether that is a religion-based claim or political opinion claim like in this case,” Morris said. “That could be a young person whose parents are paying for a lawyer and involved with their case, a person who is from anti-queer country but living with relatives or living within that community — there are a lot of reasons that are really compelling why someone might only bring a claim based on sexual orientation later in the life of a case.”
From Monday, same-sex couples will be able to register to marry, meaning the first ceremonies will take place in February. For couples who are already married, their marriage will now be legally recognised in Northern Ireland.
However, those who are already in a civil partnership will not be able to convert it to a marriage at this stage. The Northern Ireland Office is set to begin a consultation later this year about converting civil partnerships and the role of churches in same-sex marriages.
Same-sex marriages have been allowed in England, Scotland and Wales since 2014, but Stormont did not legalise them. In November 2015, a vote on the issue in the devolved assembly resulted in a numerical majority in favour of same-sex marriage for the first time. However, the DUP blocked a change in the law by using a veto known as the Petition of Concern.
A man has pleaded guilty to using Craigslist, among other sites, to extort hundreds of thousands of dollars from Santa Monica and Los Angeles men who responded to ads offering gay sex services.
28-year-old Tyler Buchanan pleaded guilty Wednesday to federal felony charges using an interstate facility to facilitate an unlawful activity, transmitting threatening communications with intent to extort, receiving and disposing of proceeds of extortion and criminal forfeiture.
Buchanan, who remains in federal custody due to being deemed a risk to flee, faces up to 10 years in federal depending on the outcome of a sentencing hearing set for May 11.
Buchanan reportedly bought over 1300 hooker ads on Craigslist and blackmailed respondents with their text messages agreeing to hire him for sex. Some apparently paid him thousands per month.
Surprise surprise, Donald Trump has appointed a campaign advisor who promotes conversion therapy and thinks HIV in gay men is “God’s moral law.”
Anti-LGBT+ extremist Jenna Ellis is a right-wing news pundit and former constitutional law attorney. She does nothing to hide her strongly homophobic views and has a long history of tirades against “the homosexual lifestyle” and the “LGBT agenda.”
Trump appointed her for the senior role as he was impressed by Ellis’ TV appearances, Axios reported. He also indicated that he wanted to give her a bigger job, and his team briefly discussed bringing her into the White House.
Ellis is a vocal Christian who believes gay and bisexual men have higher rates of HIV because “we cannot escape God’s moral law and His supremacy.” She has also claimed that Christians cannot follow God while they accept, condone, or participate in homosexuality.
She attacked the out Democratic candidate Pete Buttigieg for being a gay Christian, writing on Facebook: “If Pete Buttigieg is going to invoke the name of his Creator, he should read for himself what his Creator says about homosexuality in the Bible. Truth doesn’t change, regardless of the culture or the Dems’ identity politics.”
When same-sex marriage was legalised in the US, Ellis lamented that the decision “told the LGBT community that their homosexual lifestyle was not just legal privately, but morally validated openly through government recognition and social celebration and therefore equally as valued as heterosexual unions.”
And after the mass shooting at Pulse LGBT+ nightclub in 2016, she responded with a column entitled ‘Two Wrongs Do Not Make an LGBT Right,’ which bemoaned the fact that the massacre was being used to “embrace” homosexuality.
“Let me be clear – the Orlando shooting was absolutely terrible and tragic. But the response to this tragedy should not be embracing and advocating for gay rights,” she said.
Not content with merely making vile comments, Ellis has actively worked against conversion therapy bans, testifying in 2019 at a Colorado House committee hearing against a bill protecting youth from the harmful and discredited practice.
“She gets it,” Donald Trump reportedly told a Daily Beastsource.
Sunday February 2 @ 2 pm. Occidental Center for the Arts. HERSTORY IN THE MAKING features four compelling female artists in a matinee performance of original monologues expressing the very heart of the feminine. In a world where women have limited stages, venues and audiences, performance artist Sherry Glaser presents a fascinating Sunday afternoon buffet of comedy, epiphanies and intimate drama by four unique and talented women Kym Trippsmith, Julie Drucker, Ricci Dedola and Sherry Glaser. Sherry is the author and star of award winning solo shows Family Secrets, Taking the High Road, and Oh My Goddess. $15 Adv./ $20 at the door. OCA is wheelchair accessible. Fine refreshments; Art Gallery open.www.occidentalcenterforthearts.org. 3850 Doris Murphy Ct.Occidental, CA. 95465.
California Republican Rep. Duncan Hunter sent his formal letter of resignation on Tuesday to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Gov. Gavin Newsom, effective next Monday, Jan. 13.
The longtime anti-LGBTQ representative from San Diego County’s 50th Congressional District pleaded guilty in U.S. District Court last Dec. 3 to one count of conspiracy to misuse campaign funds. In August 2018, Hunter and his wife, Margaret, were indicted on 60 federal counts of using campaign funds in excess of $250,000 for personal use from paying for their children’s tuition to plane fare for their pet rabbit to paying for hotel rooms and other expenses for Hunter’s five mistresses.
During the three-year investigation, Hunter pointed out that his wife was responsible for handling the campaign’s finances. Eventually Hunter and his wife each pleaded guilty to a single count of felony conspiracy rather than face trial in the District Court for the Southern District of California starting on Jan. 22.
Hunter will be sentenced on March 17. He faces up to a maximum of five years in federal prison. However, the Alpine Republican, who was sworn into office Jan. 3, 2009, has garnered at least 11 years in office which goes toward an annual congressional pension of $32,538 once the 43-year old turns 62.
Hunter succeeded his equally anti-LGBTQ father Duncan Hunter Sr., who held that seat for 39 years.
Hunter Jr. was re-elected in 2018, despite being federally indicted, barely escaping a take-down by Obama administration official Ammar Campa-Najjar who is running again in 2020. The Democrat’s GOP opponents in the hotly contested 50th CD race include former California Congressman Darrell Issa and out former San Diego city council member Carl DeMaio.
In his two-page resignation letters to Pelosi and Newsom, Hunter did not mention the scandal, nor apologize. Instead he outlined his accomplishments and thanked his constituents. “It has been an honor to serve the people of California’s 50th District, and I greatly appreciate the trust they have put in me over these last 11 years,” he wrote.
Newsom has yet to announce if he will call for a special election to fill Hunter’s seat or leave it vacant until the elections in 10 months. Carl Luna, a political science professor at the University of San Diego told KPBS last month that if a special election were held, election results history shows that Republicans in the race would have the advantage.
“On special elections, you have a smaller turnout and usually the smaller the turnout the better it is for Republicans. Democrats need a whole bunch of people to show up…to win elections in contested districts,” Luna said. – Karen Ocamb contributed to this report.
The Trump administration’s latest bid to have two HIV-positive airmen discharged from service has been blocked by courts for a second time.
The two men, referred to by the pseudonyms Roe and Voe, were given discharge orders in 2017 on the basis that they couldn’t be deployed to the Middle East due to their HIV-positive status.
Both men are on antiretroviral treatment, have no symptoms, and have been pronounced physically fit to deploy by their doctors.
Their discharges were blocked by a preliminary injunction in February last year, which the Department of Defence and the Air Force appealed.
On Friday, January 10, a federal court moved to uphold the injunction, judging that the ban on deployment was based on an “obsolete understanding” of HIV/AIDS.
“[It] may have been justified at a time when HIV treatment was less effective at managing the virus and reducing transmission risks. But any understanding of HIV that could justify this ban is outmoded and at odds with current science,” said Judge James A. Wynn Jr.
“Such obsolete understandings cannot justify a ban, even under a deferential standard of review and even according appropriate deference to the military’s professional judgments.”
The servicemen, like other HIV-positive people with undetectable viral loads, have no symptoms of HIV. They take a daily medication which means they cannot transmit the virus through normal daily activities, and their risk of transmitting the virus through battlefield exposure is extremely low if at all possible.
“But the Government did not consider these realities when discharging these servicemembers, instead relying on assumptions and categorical determinations,” the ruling stated.
“As a result, the Air Force denied these servicemembers an individualised determination of their fitness for military service.”
Roe and Voe were represented by Lambda Legal, a civil rights organisation that fights on behalf of LGBT+ people. Scott Schoettes, Lambda Legal’s HIV Project director, said that the government was unable to give a reasonable justification for the servicemen’s “discriminatory treatment”.
“This is the second federal court to find that the Trump administration’s attempt to discharge these individuals is unlikely to pass legal muster,” he said in a press release.
“At the root of these discharge decisions and other restrictions on the service of people living with HIV are completely outdated and bigoted ideas about HIV.
“Today’s ruling clears the way for us to definitively prove at trial that a person living with HIV can perform the job of soldier or airman as well and as safely as anyone else.”
