Badpuppy Gay Today

Thursday, 3 April, 1997

CHINESE GAY BAR RAIDED
Police raided the only gay club in GuanGZhou, China, March 22, according to first-hand reports posted on-line. At least 10 local cops stormed into Nanfangzhiye (Southern Nights) and ordered the patrons who were dancing to squat on the dance floor, the reports said. The officers then interrogated several of the customers on video tape.

"After a long show of force with police strutting around the crowds, a few obviously foreign-looking patrons in the disco were singled out and told to leave," one report said. "When they insisted on staying with their Chinese friends the police relented. Immediately thereafter the raiding party left as suddenly as they had come."

The police took about 20 customers with them--"those who had been dancing, or who were wearing colorful clothes," one patron said.

"Unconfirmed reports indicate these people will be detained for 15 days on charges of hooliganism," one of the cyberposts said. "For a gay community which had grown comfortable with a harassment-free police policy in the past few years, so long as you were not overtly 'out', the Saturday night incident came as a shocking reminder that life in China is still very repressive and quixotic.

"And, even if there are no laws against same-sex dancing or against homosexuality, for that matter, just socializing with friends....now apparently is a big problem for gays in GuangZhou."

BRITISH SCOUTS WELCOME GAYS
Homosexuals can now be Boy Scouts and Scout leaders in Britain.

The organization said last week it will not discriminate based on sexuality, gender, marital status or ethnicity. Atheists will still be barred, however.

Betty Clay, 79, daughter of Scouts founder Lord Robert Baden-Powell, was aghast at the news.

"He was against any exceptionally unnatural ways of living," she told UPI.

However, according to Patrick Higgins' 1993 book, "A Queer Reader": "In recent years two authors have suggested that Baden-Powell may have been homosexual. Neither offered any evidence, and both based their supposition entirely upon a shared suspicion that his relationship with (his longtime friend) Kenneth McLaren might have been a physical one."

On Nov. 15, 1919, McLaren wrote in his journal: "(We) stayed with Tod. Tod's photos of naked boys and trees, etc. Excellent."

Three days later, in a letter to A.H. Tod, Baden-Powell wrote, "Possibly, I might get a further look at those wonderful photographs of yours?"

Leigh W. Rutledge's 1992 book "The Gay Decades" says that the 1990 Baden-Powell biography "The Boy-Man" by Tim Jeal "concludes that the founder of the Boy Scouts was a repressed and often tormented homosexual who subjugated his secret sexual longings to the dictates of Victorian and Edwardian society."

CANADA'S NASTIEST MP DEFEATED
Canada's most aggressively anti-gay member of the federal Parliament, Nova Scotia Liberal Rosanne Skoke, lost her primary election March 23.

Skoke was defeated by Francis LeBlanc, the Liberal incumbent for Cape Breton Highlands-Canso, after redistributing put them in the same riding.

The nomination meeting pulled in 1,900 voters including many who registered Liberal for the first time solely to oppose Skoke because of her attacks on homosexuals.

Skoke says she now may run against LeBranc as an independent.