Always A Bridesmaid, Never a Groom, a one woman comedy show by
Robin Tyler

Canadian born Robin Tyler, made history as the first out lesbian or gay comic. In this workshop, she does a reading of her award-winning New York Play, “Always A Bridesmaid, Never A Groom.” The reading will be a multi-media presentation, with photographs and videos of the US gay movement, including the Marches on Washington, where Robin produced the main stages. The play, a camp comedy, will follow

Robin’s coming out,to her countless romances, and her attempts for decades, to get married (not to the same woman).  Robin, an historic political activist, has been a keynote speaker at gay prides around the world, and has appeared in her own one woman show at the Bloomsbury Theater in London’s West End. She has recorded 4 comedy albums, and was the first open lesbian or gay comic on National Television. Women, Men, Transgender, Bi, Straight, questioning, Feminists, and everyone who is just fed up with the fighting within our movement, come to have fun, as you laugh your way through history. Yes, this absolutely NOT politically correct workshop is for you.

English

Queer Theory, science and strategy

Queer Protection and LGBT Rights

The workshop will consider the concrete elements of challenges associated with the emergence and regulation of queer citizenship in Canada in this century. It will do so by examining geographic areas, criminal codes and ongoing projects that seek to ‘clean-up’ the social, political and physical bodies of sexual identities.

Queer theory or queer studies is an increasingly visible component of university teaching and scholarship in a number of Western countries, particularly the United States. Queer theory emphasises social-constructionist over biological explanations for homosexuality, celebrates nonconformity, and stresses the potential of non-normative genders and sexualities to serve as the locus for a radical transformation of society. What can the LGBT rights movement learn from queer critiques of the globalisation of “Gay Pride,” and what can queer theory learn from the LGBT rights movement’s emphasis on the material reality of sexual and gender minorities globally?

One of the speakers will also address the content of his book, entitled “The Hidden Assault on Our Civil Rights”, which discusses the three generations of gays’ rights: conversion, passing and covering.

Doreen Fumia, Assistant Professor, Ryerson University (Canada)
Dona Yarbrough, Ph.D. Director, LGBT Center (USA)
Kenji Yoshino, Deputy Dean for Intellectual Life and Professor of Law, Yale Law School (USA)

Room:
512-F
Language:
English

Queer Theory, science and strategy

Intersections, Imperialism and Gender Borders: Iran, Israel and the UN

This presentation will look at the trial of Hen Alkobi. Alkobi was convicted (in plea-bargain) in 2003 of “impersonating another person” and of attempting to have a sexual relation to which consent was given based on “deception regarding the actor”. This followed complaints from four girls who were in different sorts of relationships with Alkobi (only one of them argued she actually had sex with him), thinking he was a man, and not knowing he had female genitalia. The workshop will also use examples from urban sites and religious rituals, to shed light on the contemporary accommodation of sexual diversity, embracement of gender fluidity and queerness in Iranian cultural and social settings. Another part of the workshop will explore how photography has been employed by socially, culturally, and economically marginalised black lesbian women as a site of resistance to not only return the gaze of the colonisers, but to develop what bell hooks has called a ‘critical gaze’ into dominant heteropatriarchal and imperialist constructions of black women’s bodies and their sexualities in South Africa.

Aeyal Gross, Faculty of Law, Tel-Aviv University (Israel)
Amir Baradaran, Masters Student, Department of Communications, Concordia University (Canada)
Anick Druelle, Postdoctoral Student, Institute for Women’s Studies (United Kingdom)

Room:
512-H
Language:
English

Successful strategies against oppression

Strategies for Equality in Québec, Switzerland and Belgium

The Québec Gay and Lesbian Council, the former Table de concertation des lesbiennes et des gais du Québec, will draw a portray of the political strategies use to realise juridical equality in Quebec and Canada (for example, civil union and marriage of same sex couples). This part of the workshop will also describe the challenges faced by the Conseil to succeed this level of social equality.

Claude Côté, Vice-President to political affairs, Conseil québécois des gais et lesbiennes (Canada)

Switzerland was the first country ever to vote on a nationwide referendum about same-sex legislation in June 2005. Due to this special circumstance, the Swiss LGBT organisations had to convince not only the parliament but the majority of the Swiss inhabitants of the partnership-law, which was a great chance to increase awareness of LGBT issues. This part of the workshop will provide knowledge on how this could be achieved, highlight positive possibilities of social change and giving information about the actual situation.

Simone Brander, Lesbenorganisation Schweiz LOS (Switzerland)

In conclusion, under the name ‘It’s not my type!’ another segment of the workshop will be dedicated to the ways of using gender analysis (sexism, homophobia and heterosexism) as a consensual factor in social change towards equality, education and health.

Rosine Horincq, Magenta (Belgium)

Room:
513-C
Language:
French

Building Strategic Alliances

Democratic Movements in Eastern Asia and Our Struggle to Mainstream LGBT Rights in Socio-Political Change

From the mid-1980s up to the present, East Asian countries have been struggling to widen, or to maintain, the democratic space that their people have gained through against dictatorships by popular uprising and/or revolts. As we have seen, LGBT people were part of the post-dictatorship activists who tried to create working and people-responsive governments.

This workshop seeks to look at the process by which LGBT rights have been made public by LGBT activists, and assess how successful they have been in “mainstreaming” LGBT issues –- thus initiating political, cultural and social change. This workshop also seeks to present a possible module for LGBT people in East Asia involved in socio-political change in their countries.

Rosanna Flamer Caldera, Co-Secretary General, ILGA-Word (Sri Lanka)
Anna Leah Sarabia, Executive Director, Women’s Media Circle Foundation (Philippines)
Aung Myo Min, Director, Committee for Lesbigay Rights (Burma; Thailand)
Djoni Agus Suparta, Board Member, GAYa Nusantara (Indonesia)
Anaraa N. Olhonuud, Founder and Coordinator, Mongolian Lesbian Information and Community Centre (Mongolia)

Room:
511-A
Language:
English

Public edication and policies to combat homophobia and discrimination

LGBT Challenges in Québec: Homophobia at School, Invisibility in the Workplace, Conjugal Violence and the Multiple Identities of Immigrants

This workshop will be a forum to treat important questions for gays and lesbians. In the first part, the workshop will concentrate on geographic mobility and gay and lesbian identities. The various possibilities of gay and lesbian identification, opened by international or inter-regional migration, based on reports of individual and family trajectories of gays and lesbians, born outside of Canada or into an immigrant family and now living in Montréal, will be analysed.

Another segment of the workshop will be dedicated to the pairing of homosexuality and the school environment. A questionnaire distributed before and after the meeting will collect statistics relating to the perception of homosexuality. The workshop will also bring to light the response of the lesbian community, as well as its roles and responsibilities, with regards to conjugal violence.

In conclusion, the last part entitled ‘To come out or not to come out: a map of gay and lesbian visibility in the workplace’ will present the accomplishments of the research group, Homosexuality and the Work Environment.

Karol O’Brien, GIVCL (Canada)
Stephan Giroux, Training Coordinator, GRIS Montréal (Canada)
Frédérick Gagné, Doctoral Candidate, Université Laval (Canada)
Mathieu Latour, Université du Québec à Montréal (Canada)

Room:
515-C
Language:
French

Public education and policies to combat homophobia and discrimination

New Media Outreach for Non-Profit Organisations and Corporations

Late in the summer of 2005, reports began circulating on the World Wide Web of gay men being tortured by the government in Iran. The author of the initial report circulated the story to a number of online citizen journalists (bloggers) who wrote about it and linked to the original source from these reports, alternative newspapers around the United States. In September, the online news outlet PageOneQ obtained exclusive photographs of a victim of Iran’s gay beatings which it posted online—garnering global attention for the issue, featured in gay newspapers from London to Los Angeles and even pushing it into the mainstream press.

Workshop presenters will draw upon their experiences to educate attendees on using the Internet to expand their audience and generate activism from around the globe to support local causes.

Scott Schmidt, Editor, Boifromtroy.com and BlogCabinCA.org (USA)
Daniel Garcia, Advertising Sales, Hyperion Interactive Media (USA)

Room:
515-A
Language:
English

This workshop will discuss the examples of certain African countries in relation to LGBT rights. In the first part, the presentation will share with the LGBT global community on the ongoing debate on whether LGBT rights should be protected in the new constitution that is being debated in Kenya, and will present how the Kenyan LGBT community continues to struggle against politically instigated homophobia as a result of the constitutional debate. Then, a Kenyan LGBT activist will discuss the question of HIV/AIDS in Kenya. The last part of the workshop will address essential rights for LGBT people with reference to HIV, illustrated through the situation of Botswana.

Tom Abongo, Director, Equality NOW (Kenya)
Monica Tabengwa, LeGaBiBo (Botswana)
William O’Duor, Identity Network for East & Central (Kenya)

Room:
512-B
Language:
English

Violent actions committed by those whose very objective is to minimise it, that being police officers, civilians and the military, are easily discernible. Minorities are vulnerable to such arbitrary violence; transgenders in particular. This workshop will introduce a study on this population which is subject to such political violence and how the judiciary system reacts to and finally renders judgement in such cases. The second speaker will deal more particularly with the common good in relation to rights and equality as well as possible avenues of action for government and civil society. The third part of the workshop will provide several examples of actions and programmes through which the Brazilian government has contributed to the LGBT movement.

Luis Gustavo Bezeril de Menezes, Technical Coordinator, Assistant Coordinator of the Project “Libertas”, SOMOS – Comunicação, Saúde e Sexualidade (Brazil)
Welton Trindade, President, Estruturação - Grupo LGBT de Brasilia (Brazil)
Silvanio Mota, President, GIAMA (Brazil)

Room:
521-B
Language:
Portuguese

Accounts of Lesbian Life: Diversity, Rights and Lesbophobia

This workshop aims to report on and to compare the experiences of two major projects detailing lesbian life. The first was executed in Southern Africa, and involved 9 researchers from 6 African countries. This project led to the establishment of the Coalition of African Lesbians, which is currently expanding such research to more African countries. The resulting book Tommy Boys, Lesbian Men and Ancestral Wives, co-authored by Ruth Morgan and Saskia Wieringa , is an influential tool in the movement to fight the homophobia of post-colonial leaders in Africa. The second project is related to the Asian Network of Activists and Academic, Kartini, and investigates women’s marginal sexualities, which includes lesbian sexualities. It is a comparative research project between India and Indonesia.

Saskia E. Wieringa, Scientific Director, European Sexuality Resource Center
(The Netherlands)
Sri Agustine, KPI (Indonesia)
Abha Bhaiya, Program Director, Jagori (India)

Room:
516-A
Language:
English

LGBT Human Rights in Africa

The Situation of Black LGBTs from an International Perspective: From Decriminalisation to Marriage

What are the conditions for Black LGBTs at the national level? International? Is it possible to envision or even talk about coming out at these different levels? What is the process? How is it perceived in countries where homosexuality is still considered a crime (the case in Cameroon), or in countries where homosexuality isn’t a crime but where the taboos of society prohibit the development of sexual diversity (the case of the Ivory Coast)? Finally, what happens to Black LGBTS of African or Caribbean origin once they are outside of their country? Will they relish this newfound freedom and take advantage of what their new country has to offer? Is coming-out easier for them in these new conditions?
During this workshop, three activists from the four countries mentioned above will speak about their own experiences.

Alexis Musanganya, President, Arc en Ciel d’Afrique (Rwanda; Canada)
Idibouo Carlos Toh (Côte d’Ivoire)
Alice Nkom, Lawyer (Cameroon)

Room:
511-C
Language:
French

LGBT HUMAN RIGHTS IN ASIA

The Emergence of the Tongzhi (LGBT) Community in China

The workshop will address the emergence of the LGBT community in China. A short documentary film about lesbians in China will be shown at the beginning of the workshop.

Dan Zhou, Lawyer (China)
Bin Xu, Director, Common language (China)

Chung To, Chi Heng Foundation (China)

Room:
513-A
Language:
English

LGBT Human Rights in Asia

The Queer Movement in India

The objective of this workshop is to show how the Indian queer movement has struggled to articulate the most effective and representative language of protest in India. It seeks to share information, as well as challenge long-standing assumptions about sexuality and movements in the global South. The first part of the workshop will present an overview of lesbian rights’ organising in India. Next, speakers will share how the Power of One can enable an individual to start an LGBT movement, as it was the case for the Indian-based organisation, The Humsafar Trust. The last part of the workshop will be dedicated to voicing marginalised desire and dialogue, rights, identities and activism in the LGBT movement of India.

Pramada Menon, Creating Resources for Empowerment (India)
Shruti Chakravarty, Humsafar Trust (India)
Ashok Row Kavi, Humsafar Trust (India)
Sumit Baudh, AMAN Trust ñ (India)

Room:
516-E
Language:
English

LGBT HUMAN RIGHTS IN CENTRAL AND EASTERN EUROPE AND IN CENTRAL ASIA

LGBT Lived Realities in the Caucasus

Report from a fact-finding mission to three countries in 2006.

Vanja Hamzic
Maxim Anmeghichean, Programmes Director, ILGA-Europe (Moldova)

Room:
512-A
Language:
English

LGBT Human Rights in Latin America

LGBT Human Rights in Mexico and Peru

First, a speaker will feature photography that illustrates the richness of gay cultural diversity found in Mexico. Then, a presentation will discuss three GALF projects implemented in Peru. Finally, the last speaker will present research results on elements that help or hinder the establishment of lesbian identities in Mexican women.

Antonio Marquet, Professor, Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana (Mexico)
Violeta Barrientos Silva, Coordinator, GALF (Peru)
Karla Grazziella Porras Varela, Universidad Nacional Autonoma De Mexico, El Closet de sor Juana (Mexico)

Room:
513-B
Language:
Spanish

LGBT Human rights in the Muslim and Arab worlds