Germany: Chancellor Angela Merkel Tells Pro Soccer Players To Come Out

Pink News UK reports:

Germany’s Chancellor Angela Merkel has become the latest high-profile figure to tell gay footballers that they should not have anything to fear in being open with their sexuality.
Speaking yesterday at a sports forum in Berlin,Football.co.uk reports Mrs Merkel saying:
“I am of the opinion that anyone who sums up the strength and bravery – and we have a long tradition of this behind us in politics – should know that they live in a land where they have nothing to fear”.
She continued: “The fact that there are still fears for some people for their own situation means we need to send out a clear message: you must not be afraid.”
Bayern Munich president Uli Hoeness said it is only a matter of time before a Bundesliga player comes out.
“It will happen, sooner or later. All clubs are advised to prepare for this topic, so they will have good answers,” said Hoeness, speaking at the same event as Merkel under the slogan “Go your own way”.
The remarks come just a day after an anonymous Bundesliga player said he feared attacks from fans and even by other footballers, if he went public about his sexuality.
The mystery player also believes media attention about his private life would have a detrimental impact for him on the pitch.
Last year, Germany striker Mario Gomez said openly gay footballers “would play as if they had been liberated. Being gay should no longer be a taboo topic.”
But national team captain Philipp Lahm advised against it in his autobiography.
Back in 2009, former German Football Federation president Theo Zwanziger first said footballers should be supported if they want to come out and he repeated the call when he left office in January of this year.
York City FC player Clarke Carlisle recently told the UK’s Gay Football Supporters’ Network (GSFN) that gay footballers were “frightened” to come out due to “media” pressure.

Timothy Ray Brown, “Berlin Patient” & His Doctor Are Convinced HIV Cure Is Real

The Huffington Post reports:

The first person reportedly cured of HIV said Wednesday he is hopeful that medical advances will allow others suffering from the virus that causes AIDS to be cured, too.
Timothy Ray Brown of San Francisco is known as “The Berlin Patient” because of where he was treated. He and the doctor who treated him, Gero Hutter, made their first joint appearance in the U.S. on Wednesday when Hutter spoke at a symposium on gene therapy at Washington University in St. Louis.
Scientists are studying whether gene therapy can be used to rid the body of HIV. Some doctors remain skeptical that Brown, 46, is cured. His case was first reported in the media in 2008 and described in the New England Journal of Medicine in 2009.
Brown and Hutter, in an interview with The Associated Press during the symposium, said the passage of time is further proof that Brown is cured. Hutter cited the same five-year standard after which some cancer patients are said to be cured.
Brown was diagnosed with HIV in 1995. In 2006, he also developed leukemia while living in Germany. Hutter performed a blood stem cell transplant using a donor with a rare gene mutation that provides natural resistance to HIV. Hutter said that resistance transferred to Brown.
Brown said he feels great, has not needed HIV medication since the 2007 surgery, and is now active in a foundation named for him that seeks a cure for HIV.
Brown grew up in Seattle and moved to Germany in 1993. After the HIV diagnosis, he started on medication to prevent him from developing full-blown AIDS.
He was attending a wedding in New York in 2006 when he became unusually tired. An avid cyclist, within weeks he could barely ride the bike and eventually was diagnosed with leukemia.
Brown underwent chemotherapy but needed a blood stem cell transplant and turned to Hutter, a blood specialist at Heidelberg University.
Hutter suggested they seek a donor with a certain cell feature that gives them natural resistance to HIV infection. Only about 1 percent of the northern European population has this feature. Hutter theorized that a transplant from such a donor could make the recipient resistant to HIV.
Hutter said no one apparently had tried this, and his idea received mixed reaction from other doctors. “Some were very excited, but many were skeptical,” he said.
But within weeks, Hutter said, tests showed promise that Brown was cured.
“I don’t know if I really believed it was cured” until the case was described in the New England Journal of Medicine, Brown said.
Earlier this year, doctors in California found traces of HIV in Brown’s tissue, leading to speculation that the disease had returned. But Hutter said the traces are remnants of the disease that can’t replicate or cause a recurrence.
The symposium in St. Louis was hosted by the university’s Biologic Therapeutics Center, which seeks to advance the use of gene therapy. Speakers said gene therapy has helped treat cancer, hemophilia and other diseases.
So far, Brown is the only person believed to have been cured of HIV. Hutter began procedures in 2008 with 12 other people who had both HIV and cancer, but some were too sick to undergo treatment, and others couldn’t find matching donors or ran into other roadblocks.

Germany: Cool Dad Nils Pickert Wears Skirt In Solidarity With His 5-Year-Old Son 

The Huffington Post reports:

When it comes to supporting his son’s unconventional wardrobe, Nils Pickert talks the talk and walks the walk.
The German dad explains in Emma magazine that he wears women’s clothes (including nail polish) to help his 5-year-old son feel good about going out in dresses and skirts.
A picture of Pickert and his little boy, sporting matching red clothes — dad in a long skirt, son in a spaghetti-strap dress — has been making the Internet rounds, inspiring enough positive feedback to cancel out a thousand sideways looks and gender marketing fails.
Pickert says that in the small town where he lives, his son’s dress choices are seen as everybody’s business — and when it comes to standing up for his son, he’s determined to show, not just tell. He writes (according to Tumblr user steegeschnoeber’s translation):
Yes, I’m one of those dads, that try to raise their children equal. I’m not one of those academic daddies that ramble about gender equality during their studies and then, as soon as a child’s in the house, still relapse into those fluffy gender roles: He’s finding fulfilment in his carrier and she’s doing the rest.
Thus I am, I know that by now, part of the minority that makes a fool of themselves from time to time. Out of conviction.
Pickert is not the only parent to speak up for a child whose dress preferences stand out from the norm. American mom Cheryl Kilodavis, who wrote a picture book called “My Princess Boy” about her son Dyson, went on The Today Show in January 2011 to discuss the importance of accepting children for who they are — no matter what they wear. “Sooner or later my hope is that the world will embrace the uniqueness that is really within all of us,” she told Meredith Vieira.

In Emma, Pickert says that he chose to become the “role model” he knew his son needed. Chances are his actions will set an example not just for kids, but for parents, too.

Germany: Last Gay Jewish Holocaust Survivor, Gad Beck, Dies

The Jerusalem Post reports: 

Gad Beck, an anti-Nazi Zionist resistance fighter and the last known gay Jewish survivor of the Holocaust, died on Sunday in Berlin. He passed away in a senior citizens’ home six days before his 89th birthday, which would have been on June 30.

Beck was a pioneering gay activist and educator in a severely anti-homosexual, repressive post-World War II German society. He was famous for his witty, lively style of speaking.

On a German talk show, he said, “The Americans in New York called me a great hero. I said no… I’m really a little hero.”

Perhaps the single most important experience that shaped his life was the wartime effort to rescue his boyfriend. Beck donned a Hitler Youth uniform and entered a deportation center to free his Jewish lover Manfred Lewin, who had declined to separate himself from his family.

The Nazis would later deport the entire Lewin family to Auschwitz, where they were murdered.

Speaking about his life as a gay Jew, Beck invoked a line frequently cited about homosexuality: “God doesn’t punish for a life of love.”

He was featured in the film The Life of Gad Beck and the documentary Paragraph 175. (The notorious Paragraph 175 of the German Penal Code outlawed homosexuality before Adolf Hitler became chancellor in 1933, and the Nazi party radically intensified the enforcement of the anti-gay law, including deportations to extermination camps.) “Only Steven Spielberg can film my life – forgive me, forgive me,” Beck quipped.

He had immigrated to Israel in 1947. After his return to Germany in 1979, the first post-Holocaust head of Berlin’s Jewish community, Heinz Galinski, appointed Beck director of the Jewish Adult Education Center in Berlin.

In a telephone interview on Monday with Judith Kessler, editor of the Berlin Jewish community’s monthly magazine, Juedisches Berlin, she told The Jerusalem Post that Beck would organize gay singles meeting in the center. “He was open, sweet and would speak with everybody,” she said. Kessler, who knew Beck since 1989, added that he would attend the annual Christopher Street Day Parade for gay pride in Berlin and wave an Israeli flag.

Beck’s father was an Austrian Jew and his mother converted to Judaism.

The Nazi racial laws defined Beck as mischling (half-breed), and he and his father were carted off to a holding compound in the Rosenstrasse in central Berlin. After the non-Jewish wives of the prisoners launched a massive street protest in 1943, Beck was released. There were “thousands of women who stood for days… my aunts demanded ‘give us our children and men,’” he said.

The Rosenstrasse demonstration helped debunk the widespread myth in post-Holocaust German society that resistance against Nazism was futile. “The Rosenstrasse event made one thing absolutely clear to me: I won’t wait until we get deported,” said Beck.

Following his release, Beck joined Chug Chaluzi, an underground Zionist resistance youth group, and played a key role in securing the survival of Jews in Berlin. According to the entry about him at the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, he noted that “as a homosexual, I was able to turn to my trusted non-Jewish, homosexual acquaintances to help supply food and hiding places.”

Shortly before the end of the war in 1945, a Jewish spy working for the Gestapo betrayed Beck and some of his fellow resistance fighters.

He was held captive at a Jewish transit camp in Berlin. After the defeat of Nazi Germany, Beck continued his Zionist work and helped Jewish survivors emigrate to Palestine. He remained in Israel between 1947 and 1979.

Beck is survived by his partner of 35 years, Julius Laufer.

Berlin Man “Cured” Of HIV May Not Be Cured

Joe.My.God. reports: 

The famed Berlin man who was said to be cured of HIV after undergoing blood transplants for leukemia may still have the virus in his body.

• [N]ew research presented on 8 June at the International Workshop on HIV & Hepatitis Virus “challenge[s] these results,” asserts Alain Lafeuillade of the General Hospital in Toulon, France, a well known HIV/AIDS cure researcher. Lafeuillade issued a press release, “The So Called HIV Cured ‘Berlin’ Patient Still Has Detectable HIV in His Body,” that questions whether Brown was reinfected and may still be infectious to other people. Lafeuillade also posted a blog item, “The Weird Story of the Berlin Patient,” raising similar questions. The scientists who conducted the new study strongly object to Lafeuillade’s interpretation of their results. “We weren’t trying to say HIV was still there or he hadn’t been cured,” says virologist Steven Yukl of the University of California, San Francisco, who gave the talk.

(Tipped by JMG reader Nicholas)

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Islamic Cleric: Execute All Homosexuals

Joe.My.God. reports:

Somehow we missed this story when it happened, but last year Germany banned Muslim cleric Bilal Phillips following this speech calling for the executions of homosexuals. 

• German police officials announced on Wednesday that Abu Ameena Bilal Philips, a hardline Islamic preacher from Jamaica who defends use of the death penalty for homosexuality, had been ordered to leave the country and asked never to return. The officials said that immigration authorities had issued an order - prior to Philips’ address to some 2,000 spectators in Frankfurt - instructing the 60-year-old Islam convert to leave Germany within three days, claiming his professed beliefs infringed on federal laws. German law allows for the expulsion of visitors who “incite hatred against parts of the population” or advocate the use of violence against them.

Germany: Trans Girl To Be Institutionalised

Pink News UK reports:

News that an 11 year old trans girl in Berlin, Germany, is about to be committed to a mental institution by local authorities – following intervention by her absent father – has prompted grave concern by the International LGBTQ Youth and Student Organisation (IGLYO).
A petition has also been started on change.org.
According to a statement released by IGLYO yesterday, the girl, elsewhere identified only as “Alex” (Alexandra) lives with her mother, who supports her gender expression. However, the girl’s father, divorced and separated from her mother, strongly rejects this view of his daughter’s gender identity and wants to force her to grow up as a boy.
If all else fails, there is a real and present possibility that pressure from her father, supported by the Youth Welfare Office in Berlin, means that Alex will shortly be confined in a closed ward of a psychiatric institution to ensure that “he” returns to “normality”.
This is despite the fact that Alex claims, in an interview published earlier this month in online lifestyle magazine taz.de, that she has identified as female for as long as she can remember. She is accepted as female at school, and has been registered as such from her earliest days there.
This led to conflict with her father, who insisted on calling her “Alexander” and forcing her to wear boy’s clothes. When Alex reacted negatively, he accused her of being badly behaved. Her parents split over the matter of Alex’s gender.
Now, with puberty fast approaching – and Alex claiming she would rather die than go through the changes it is likely to bring about – her father has besieged the Youth Office with written submissions.
His motives are unclear: what is clear is that the child has not been examined by independent experts – but a new member of staff in the Berlin Youth Office believes him and claims that the correct response to Alex’s suicide threats if she does not receive treatment for gender dysphoria is for her to be committed to a mental institution.
Alex should be encouraged to identify with male role models and to follow male pursuits: female preferences would be discouraged. Thereafter, according to a proposal that has shocked Professor Udo Rauchfleisch, a recognized expert in the care and treatment of transsexuality with the University of Basel, she should be separated from her mother and placed with foster parents.
There are clear similarities between this and approaches adopted by John Money in respect of David Reimer and David Rekers with Kirk Murphy: both cases ended badly with the subsequent suicide of the individuals – Reimer and Murphy – who were the target of this reparative therapy.
This is echoed by a statement from IGLYO. They write: “The board of IGLYO strongly advocates the rights of transgender youth and are concerned with the institutionalization of this happy and healthy child. We would like to highlight the endangerment of forced “therapy” to make children fit into the gender roles the society thinks are right for them. IGLYO follows the wealth of research that shows that reparative therapy regarding sexual orientation or gender identity can be seriously harmful to the child.
“The Board of IGLYO declares our solidarity with the girl and her mother. Moreover, we ask the authorities of Berlin to intervene with the actions of the Youth Welfare Office and stop the removal of the child from her mother. We find it extremely irresponsible and unacceptable to remove any child from a loving and supportive home without thorough research and consultation with experts.
“In line with international human rights standards, IGLYO advocates for the best interests of the child. The institutionalization of this child violates many human rights instruments, including the Convention on the Rights of the Child, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and the European Convention on Human Rights.”
The case is now being referred upward to Germany’s supreme court.

Germany: Theo Zwanziger, German Soccer Chief, Calls For Gay Players To Come Out

The Huffington Post’s Gay Voices reports:

The outgoing German soccer federation president says it’s time for gay players to come out.
Theo Zwanziger called on gay players “to have the courage to declare themselves,” although he conceded it was surely difficult to acknowledge one’s homosexuality within a team. He pointed to the example of Berlin Mayor Klaus Wowereit, who came out years ago.
Speaking at a discussion on the subject organized by the federation, Zwanziger said Tuesday that society was more understanding than a few years ago. Germany captain Philipp Lahm, however, disagrees as far as soccer goes.
“Football is like being the gladiators in the old times,” Lahm said in an interview published Monday. “The politicians can come out these days, for sure, but they don’t have to play in front of 60,000 people every week.”
“I don’t think that the society is that far ahead that it can accept homosexual players as something normal as in other areas,” he added.
Zwanziger, who will leave his job in March, said Lahm is a tolerant person “and if that’s how he sees the situation, I am not going to be the one to criticize him.”
No player in Germany’s professional leagues has so far acknowledged his homosexuality.

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