Coming Out

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We invite all the inhabitants of Saint Petersburg to come to a series of single pickets which will be the conclusion of the Week against Homophobia campaign.

The picket will take place on April 11, 2010, from 14.00 to 16.00 on Malaya Sadovaya street.

Together we can clearly declare our stand: the unacceptability of homophobia, of insults to human dignity and discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity.

We expect support from EVERYONE who is not indifferent to the position of various social groups in the society and who understands that homophobia hurts everyone and concerns everyone.

Our project “Parenthood” continues to hold scheduled meetings and seminars. You can keep track of the event if you sign up for our group “Coming Out” in Vkontakte: http://vkontakte.ru/club2352211

On March 22 and 27, two meetings with LGBT parents who have adopted children took place.

The issue of adoption, as well as parenthood problem in LGBT families, is still being silenced in our society. Very often we face the absence of necessary information even on the Internet, and not everyone has friends who can help or give some advice. This event gave me the opportunity to compare the experience of parenting in gay and lesbian families, which I’m studying at the moment. It seems important to me that both gay and lesbian families face the same problems and challenges in upbringing children which means they can team up for solving these problems together.

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Dear friends!

Today, April 5, started the Week Against Homophobia. This year our campaign involvs 17 cities (Vologda, Izhevsk, Petropavlovsk-Kamchatskiy, Saint Petersburg, Tyumen, Petrozavodsk, Arkhangelsk, Voronezh, Omsk, Chelyabinsk, Yekaterinburg, Moscow, Tomsk, Kemerovo, Kazan, Chelyabinsk, Kaliningrad). This is the largest number of participants since 2007. Attention of the mass media this year is also unprecedented - even before the week we got so many publications, as there was at the end of previous campaigns. For the first time in the preparation of the Week Against Homophobia evolved the initiative groups of LGBT activists in such cities as: Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky, Voronezh, Samara, Yekaterinburg, Vologda.

Since April, 1st in Saint Petersburg and Moscow on the bars Fly Cards, which are in the halls of restaurants’ and café’s system, beauty salons and fitness centres, clubs and bars, cinemas and entertaining centres, the cards of interregional social movement «The Russian LGBT Network» have appeared. The release of the cards is timed to the beginning of information campaign «Week against homophobia» which will be going off from April 5 till April 11 in more than ten regions of our country.
The main idea of the card, where two pairs are represented, consists in expression of love independence from sexual orientation. Love may be different: between man and woman, between two women, between two men. “Any love is lawful, if it is a true love”, the writer Rudolf Erich Raspe spoke. This remarkable phrase became the card motto.

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Russian LGBT Network invites you to work together!

Very soon our organization will announce the beginning of a new project “Russian LGBT Network Hotline”.

We invite volunteers to be trained and work in the field of consultation services, information support and basic psychological services.

St. Petersburg organisation of lesbians, gays, bisexuals and transgenders “Coming Out” has filed an appeal to the General Prosecutor’s office of Russian Federation, in which it asks to initiate a criminal case against vice-speaker of the Legislative Assembly of St. Petersburg, “United Russia” deputy Sergei Andenko in connection to his slanderous statements expressing discriminatory attitude towards the social group of gays and lesbians.

In the applicants opinion while commenting St. Petersburg Ombudsman Aleksei Kozyrev’s statement on the impossibility of discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation in regards to the issue of granting permissions for public actions of February 8, 2010 on ZakS.ru website Sergei Andenko expressed himself in a way that was humiliating human dignity of homosexual people and that provoked hatred against them…