Finland Equalizes Age of Consent

Finland's parliament June 15 lowered the age of consent for gay sex from 18 to 16, the legal age for straight sex, and repealed a law that prohibited promotion of homosexuality.

No one spoke against the changes, which were part of a larger crime bill.

Zimbabwean Gay Leader Charged with Sodomy

The program manager of Gays and Lesbians of Zimbabwe, Keith Goddard, has been charged with sodomizing a young man at gunpoint.

The accuser, Siphephule Vuma, 20, has been charged with extortion for sending Goddard letters demanding money.

Goddard went to police first to report the letters and Vuma then accused Goddard of sexual assault. Goddard denies having sex with Vuma.

The two men will testify against each other in separate trials.

The incident occurred as former President Canaan Banana's gay-sex trial continues. He is charged with 11 counts of sodomy, attempted sodomy and indecent assault on seven aides, a cook, a gardener and a bodyguard. The flood of alleged victims came forward after the bodyguard murdered a fellow cop for allegedly having teased him with the nickname "Banana's wife."

Current President Robert Mugabe is aggressively homophobic. He has called homosexuals "repugnant to my human conscience ... immoral and repulsive," declared gay sex "an abomination" and "sub-animal behavior," and urged citizens to "hand [gays] over to the police."

"I don't believe they have any rights at all," he stated in 1995.

In April, Mugabe added: "Animals in the jungle are better than these people [homosexuals] because at least they know that this is a man or a woman."

An Australian First: Gay Father Wins Custody

For the first time in Australian history a gay man has won custody of his child.

The man's ex-wife was found to have falsified evidence that the man sexually abused the boy, and the court said the mother's new household was dysfunctional, hysterical, stressed and crisis-ridden.

The parties in the case were not named.

Contributing to this week's report: John Hein, Kent Sproule.

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.