International Gaze

International human rights groups continue to monitor the situation in Malawi, where police have conducted a series of sweeps to arrest gays and lesbians.

A spokesman for the police in Blantyre, Malawi, told the press that investigators had uncovered a network of high-profile people who engage in same-sex activity and “we will arrest them all.”

Moscow Mayor Yury Luzhkov announced earlier this month that he will prohibit organizers from holding an LGBT pride parade in May.

“For several years, Moscow has been under unprecedented pressure to hold a gay pride parade, which cannot be called anything but a Satanic act,” Luzhkov stated. “We have prevented such a parade and we will not allow it in the future. Everyone should take this as an axiom and not a theorem.”

They had to travel to the ends of the Earth to do it, but two Argentine men succeeded in becoming Latin America’s first same-sex married couple.

After their first attempt to wed in December in Buenos Aires was thwarted, gay rights activists Jose Maria Di Bello and Alex Freyre took their civil ceremony to the capital of Argentina’s Tierra del Fuego province, where a sympathetic governor backed their bid to make Latin American history.

Portugal’s parliament passed a bill Jan. 8 that would make the predominantly Catholic nation the sixth in Europe to permit gay marriage.

Conservative President Anibal Cavaco Silva is thought unlikely to veto the Socialist government’s bill, which won the support of all left-of-center parties. His ratification would allow the first gay marriage ceremonies to take place in April — a month before Pope Benedict XVI is due on an official visit to Portugal.

He was convicted of a crime more than half a century ago in England, but what he did in 1959 - have consensual sex with another man -would be legal today.

So John Crawford, 70, wants his criminal record cleaned up for good, so that he doesn’t have to disclose his conviction when he seeks volunteer work, and because of a deeply held belief that he should not be punished for his sexual orientation.

Mexico City Mayor Marcelo Ebrard vowed to defend the capital city’s law legalizing marriage for gays and lesbians.

The measure, scheduled to take effect in March, faces opposition from conservative forces in the city and the nation, especially the Roman Catholic Church.

The Ugandan lawmaker who proposed a bill that would give some gays the death penalty said he will refuse any request to withdraw the legislation after a minister said the government would ask him to.

Lawmaker David Bahati said he felt the bill is necessary in the conservative East African country. Minister of State for Investment Aston Kajara had said the government would ask Bahati to scrap the bill because they fear backlash from foreign investors.

Officials in Malawi say they have arrested two men for celebrating their engagement to each other in the conservative southern African country.

Malawi Attorney General Jane Ansah says the men were charged with indecency. Those convicted under the law can be sentenced to 5-14 years in jail.