Out in the World: LGBTQ news from Europe and Asia

QATAR

A British Mexican man who was arrested in a Grindr sting operation has been given a six-month suspended sentence and will be deported — although the state has 30 days to launch an appeal, during which he is not allowed to leave — the BBC reports.

Manuel Guerrero Aviña, 44, was arrested on what his family are calling trumped up drug charges in Doha in February, after being lured to a fake meeting on the gay cruising app Grindr. This week, he was handed his sentence, which includes a fine of approximately $2,700.

Guerrero, who has lived in Qatar for seven years and works for an airline, has told the BBC he is considering an appeal. 

His family has previously told the BBC that he was approached online by a man named “Gio,” who also used the screen name “Mike” on both Grindr and Tinder. Guerrero invited “Gio” to his apartment, but when he went to the lobby to let him in, police were waiting and arrested him. 

Police searched his apartment and allegedly found amphetamine and methamphetamine. They later administered a drug test which they say show evidence he had used the substances. 

Guerrero says the drugs were planted as part of a sting operation targeting queer people. Under threat of torture and without a translator or lawyer, he was coerced into signing a document written in Arabic, a language he doesn’t read, admitting his possession of the drugs.

He spent 42 days in pretrial detention before being given provisional release, during which time police attempted to coerce him into naming other queer people. 

Complicating his situation is the fact that he lives with HIV. While in detention, guards frequently withheld his medication, which could have enabled the virus to build up a resistance to it. He ran out of his prescription, which is not available in Qatar, in April, and has had to use a local substitute.  

Several human rights groups have criticized the lack of due process in Guerrero’s case, the evidence that he was targeted for his sexual identity, and the implication that a wider crackdown on queer people is in the works. 

“This has been about his LGBT status from the start and his desire to express that status and his identity, and that’s what this case is about,” James Lynch, co-director of the human rights organization Fair Square, told the BBC. “He’s an LGBT person and he was targeted through a dating app. You don’t do that, unless that’s the thing you are focused on.”

Qatari officials deny that Guerrero was targeted for any reason other than the possession of illegal substances.

Following Guerrero’s arrest, Grindr began displaying a warning to users in Qatar that “police are known to be making arrests on the app.”

Same-sex intercourse between men is illegal in Qatar, with potential sentences of up to three years. The law also allows a death sentence to be imposed for unmarried Muslims who have sex regardless of gender, though there are no records it has ever been carried out.

UKRAINE

The Kyiv City Council denied a organizers of Kyiv Pride a permit to hold the annual human rights demonstration on the city’s metro system, citing security concerns and the need to maintain service on the subway network, the Kyiv Post reports.

Kyiv Pride organizers say they still plan to go ahead with their march in the metro on June 16 even without a city permit. 

Kyiv has not held a Pride festival since the latest Russian invasion began in February 2022. The organizers of Kyiv Pride say they were inspired to hold their march on the metro system by a similar event held in the war-torn eastern city Kharkiv in 2022, where the metro was the safest place to gather during Russian bombardment.

It’s partly because the metro is used as a bomb shelter during Russian attacks that the city denied a permit for the event. The city released a statement on June 3 calling on organizers to find another venue.

“In order not to endanger the participants and passengers, and to avoid possible provocations, the city authorities cannot allow the Equality March to take place in the metro,” it said.

Organizers expect up to 500 people to take part in the Pride march this year. They’re asking participants to register in advance in order to limit the number of participants who show up at metro.

In a lengthy post on Kyiv Pride’s Facebook page, the organizers underscore the importance of holding a highly visible Pride festival, even during the upheaval of wartime. 

“It is our obligation before Ukrainian queer soldiers who are also supporting the March to ensure that they return from the frontlines to a more just legal environment,” the post says.

“Backed by society, the historic same-sex partnerships law and the law on hate crimes dropped from the parliament’s priority list. We must seize the opportunity to remind the government that ensuring dignity and equality for all Ukrainian citizens is not a second-tier priority. Organizing an LGBTQ+ civil rights march in Ukraine amid the ongoing Russian [sic] invasion is a complex and courageous endeavor.”

ITALY 

An Italian couple is planning to challenge social conventions even as they challenge the bonds of the earth itself, by becoming the first gay couple to get married in outer space.

Alessandro Monterosso, a 33-year-old health software entrepreneur, and Alec Sander, a 25-year-old recording artist, will exchange vows in 2025 aboard a private spaceflight offered by the U.S. company Space Perspective. 

Space Perspective is not yet in commercial operation, but its website says it will offer bespoke experiences aboard a luxury capsule that is lifted to the edge of space by a hydrogen-filled balloon at a speed of 12 miles per hour.

Monterosso and Sander have booked a whole capsule for them and six guests at a cost of $125,000 per person, an even $1,000,000 total. They say they are not seeking sponsors.

Monterosso and Sander first met in Padua in 2017, and they dated for four years until Sander broke it off because it was difficult to date while Monterosso was still in the closet. A year later, they met up again and Monterosso asked Sander to marry him. Sander agreed, but he didn’t immediately know that his fiancé wanted to hold the wedding in space.

“I was planning the trip as a civilian, to fulfill my childhood desire to become an astronaut. When I came into contact with the aerospace agency we relied on, it came naturally to me to ask: but can I also get married in space?” Monterosso told the Corriere della Sera newspaper.

“It seemed like such a romantic idea. I had struggled so much to accept myself as homosexual, not because I wasn’t sure, but because of the social context, and I told myself that now I would have to tell the whole world how I felt. Firstly because I know that there are many people who experience what I experienced, and then to confirm the infinite love I feel for Alec,” he says. 

But Monterosso and Sander have a political message behind their space wedding as well. Same-sex marriage is not legal in Italy, and its current far-right government has cracked down hard on same-sex parents.

“Couples like us are not always well regarded in Italy. In other places in the world, they are even illegal. In Russia we are considered terrorists. Well, we just want to say that it’s time to normalize everything and amplify this message as much as possible. And if it is therefore so difficult to get married on Earth, then we are going to do it in space, with a galactic wedding whose aim is precisely to normalize these loves,” Monterosso says. “The message is aimed at people, because even today we still feel eyes on us if we hold hands while walking down the street. But if people normalize, politics must adapt.”

Monterosso and Sander already have their sights set on more distant shores.

“For our 20th anniversary, we are aiming for Mars,” Monterosso says. 

AUSTRALIA

The government of New South Wales issued a historic apology this week to queer people who were persecuted under old laws that criminalized same-sex intercourse.

New South Wales decriminalized same-sex intimacy in 1984, one of the last Australian states to do so. Forty years later, it has become the last state to issue an apology for criminalizing queer people, after all other states did so in 2016 and 2017.

Delivering a speech in the state parliament, New South Wales Premier Chris Minns said he “recognizes and regrets this parliament’s role in enacting laws and endorsing policies of successive governments’ decisions that criminalized, persecuted and harmed people based on their sexuality and gender.

Minns’s apology acknowledged people were harmed by these laws even if they weren’t directly charged or convicted under them.

“To those who survived these terrible years, and to those who never made it through, we are truly sorry. We’re sorry for every person convicted under legislation that should never have existed. For every person that experienced fear as a result of that legislation.

“Everyone who lost a job, who lost their future, or who lost the love of family and friends. We are very sorry for every person, convicted or otherwise, who were made to live a smaller life because of these laws,” he said.

People who had been convicted under New South Wales’s old sodomy laws have been eligible to have the convictions expunged since a law change in 2014.

Minns’ government recently passed a ban on conversion therapy in March, making New South Wales the fourth jurisdiction in Australia to do so.

The state’s only openly gay MP, Independent Alex Greenwich, says that the apology has to be followed by more action to promote equality.

He’s put forward his own bill that would close a loophole in anti-discrimination law to ban discrimination by religious schools against LGBTQ students and teachers, and would allow trans people to change their legal gender without having to undergo a medical procedure.

“I rise as the only openly gay member of the Legislative Assembly to contribute to this apology,” Greenwich said in the state parliament. “I am one of only two in this chamber’s 186-year-old history. This in itself shows how much work we need to do.”