Zhirinovsky, head of the Liberal Democratic Party, the nation's third-largest, recently visited a gay bar in St. Petersburg with a TV crew in tow.

"I came to have a look," he said during his two-hour stay. "It is normal. It is part of the city's cultural life, and that's why I came here. ... Children are not born from relationships between boys, but it is part of erotic culture."

Zhirinovsky gave autographs and embraced patrons as he exited.

Zhirinovsky is popular among Russians who dislike both the former communist rulers and the current capitalist government. He has criticized President Boris Yeltsin for reaching out to the West and has been a vocal supporter of Iraqi President Saddam Hussein and former U.S. Presidential candidate Pat Buchanan, a right-wing Christian.

ISRAELI CIVIL SERVICE EXTENDS BENEFITS

Israel's Civil Service Commission has extended spousal benefits and pensions to gay employees' partners.

That leaves the Israeli Defense Forces and the Defense Ministry as the only employers in Israel that do not recognize same-sex spouses.

Private employers have been required to acknowledge gay families since a 1992 court ruling.

COLOMBIAN HIGH COURT TO HEAR GAY TEACHERS CASE

Colombia's Constitutional Court will hear a challenge to a law that bans homosexuals from being teachers.

Gay activist German Rincon Perfetti filed suit against the 1979 statute arguing it violates "all the postulates of contemporary science."

In March, the Constitutional Court ruled that private religious schools cannot ban gay students -- in a case where two effeminate teenage boys had been prohibited from re-enrolling in a school in Ginebra after they had dropped out for financial reasons.

"Homosexuality is a condition of the human person that implies the choice of a life option equally as respectable and valid as any other," the court said. "The rector of the school that was sued was operating from a discriminatory and intolerant attitude that is unacceptable in a person who has as his charge the direction of the educative process, whose principal objective is precisely the integral formation of children and youths."

In other Colombian news, more than 20 local gay groups will stage a pride parade in Bogota May 17.

"The parade will go north along Carrera 7 and up the mountain on Calle 86 on the road to La Calera to the Alto San Antonio Lookout [where] each group will have their own tent or stand or table," said correspondent David Olson. "There will be food and drink, information, [and] Triangulo Negro's 'lesbianita preguntona' [the little lesbian with a question] will be there to test your sexual identity."

In addition, June 21-28 has been proclaimed the "First International Carnival -- Second Colombian Week for Sexual Diversity." Package tours to the events are available from Bogota's Antinoo Travel Agency.

Rex Wockner's weekly international news reports dating back to May 1994 can be searched at http://www.wockner.com. The reports in their original form are archived at http://www.qrd.org/qrd/www/world/wockner.html, which also archives Wockner's Quote Unquote column and some of his longer gay-press articles.