A recently passed law in St. Petersburg, Russia, makes it a criminal act to take any “public action aimed at propagandising sodomy, lesbianism, bisexualism, and transgenderism among minors.”

Madonna, who is set to perform in the Russian territory Aug. 9, has given notice that she plans to be an outlaw.

“I will come to St. Petersburg to speak up for the gay community and to give strength and inspiration to anyone who is or feels oppressed,” the Material Girl announced in an e-mail to fans Tuesday. “I will speak during my show about this ridiculous atrocity.”

Violating the “gay propaganda” ban could lead to a fine ranging from 5,000-50,000 rubles, or $170-$1,705.
Madge isn’t worried about the punishment.

A group of gay business owners want to wake up Atlanta from the almost decade-long slumber it’s been in since the city shortened bar hours in 2003. The city that once partied until 4 a.m., with a couple of gay bars in Midtown open and pouring 24 hours a day, now goes to bed at 2:30 a.m., and members of G.R.E.A.T. Atlanta think the city has been sapped of its vibrancy.

But Atlanta City Councilmember Alex Wan had sobering news for the Gay Retail, Entertainment and Tourism Atlanta coalition, whose goal is to get city officials to roll back the hours that bars can serve liquor, as well as allow bars to open on Sundays.

“Definitely not within the next 12 months,” Wan, who is gay and represents District 6, home to many gay bars in Midtown and along Cheshire Bridge Road, said about Sunday bar sales. “There is no appetite [among city council members], and part of it is that no one wants to touch that going into an election year.”

He had a similarly bleak outlook on extending bar hours back to 4 a.m.

“This is where the neighborhoods are very well organized and know how to raise enough objections on the right issues to prevent that from happening,” Wan said. “What they’re going to play is the public safety situation, and that extending the bar hours can only make the crime worse. That’s the argument that they’re going to put forward and it’s going to be hard to argue that, or convince [people] with the right soundbites to overcome that.”

At the G.R.E.A.T. meeting Tuesday, Wan identified as an alum of the former 24-hour gay club Backstreet, which closed after 30 years due to organized pressure on city officials from neighborhood activists. The shuttering of the gay institution was one of the pinnacle battles between Midtown’s gay businesses and its neighborhood association, and quickened the area’s evolution from a gay party district into an upper-class residential neighborhood.

Wan said he feared “a wave of anti-gay-bar activity” remains in District 6, as evidenced by several e-mails he recently received about Gilbert’s Cafe possibly extending into the area that formerly housed Outwrite Bookstore & Coffeehouse.

“They said, ‘What we need to do is to make sure we don’t have any more gay bars at that intersection,” Wan said. “The sentiment is out there still, and just know that I’ll do what I can and I’m doing what I can to make sure that doesn’t get any momentum or legitimate traction.

“If the neighborhoods had their way, it would be impossible for any establishment to do business,” Wan said. “The neighborhoods don’t wield as much power as you think. I’ve been very impressed by my colleagues that there is a leveling, a tempering of what we hear from the neighborhoods.”

Robby Kelly, owner of the Atlanta Eagle, noted that the city has lost out on numerous corporate conventions since shortening bar hours.

“Through that, you’ve lost a buttload of money that they spend at hotels and everything else,” Kelly said.

“It does seem kind of silly that an international city would not have extended bar hours,” Wan said.

David Kent, a native Atlantan who owns the gay bar Felix’s on the Square, voiced a familiar grievance that gay bar owners have expressed in their extended tensions with carpetbagger-esque neighborhood associations.

A diva is about to attempt a comeback in Atlanta’s gay social scene, as Positive Impact’s M.I.S.T.E.R. project prepares to install free condom dispensers in gay bars, nightclubs and restaurants.

A ubiquitous presence in gay establishments during the late 1980s and ’90s, bowls of condoms have gone the way of parachute pants and glow-in-the-dark club jewelry. But with HIV/AIDS rates inching up in recent years, the folks at M.I.S.T.E.R. hope that latex and safer sex can again become a casual as grabbing peppermints on the way out of a restaurant.

“I think we’ve lost a lot of the visibility of safer sex,” said Chandler Bearden, community outreach coordinator for M.I.S.T.E.R. “It’s kind of fallen to the wayside. People don’t really talk about it, people don’t really think about it because it’s out of sight, out of mind.

“Maybe if we get these back out, get it visible and get the message in peoples’ heads, maybe they’ll start thinking about it a little more,” he said.

“Most gay clubs used to actually have bowls of condoms out and it got to be too cost-prohibitive because people were just grabbing handfuls, and handfuls and handfuls of condoms, and the bars constantly had to put them in there,” Bearden added. “So we came up with this idea. It’s a single dispenser, so if somebody’s going to steal a whole bunch, they’re going to have to stand there awhile.”

Bearden has been pitching the dispensers to gay bar and restaurant owners, and plans to start installing them in the next few weeks.

Part of America’s tolerance of gay people has always depended on our willingness to censor our affection for one another.

I think everyone should be equal, but I don’t want gay people to shove their lifestyle in my face.

America’s open-mindedness is now facing a new threshold: two men kissing.

For many people, male-on-male intimacy is a harbinger of the apocalypse, an invitation for the Lord to unleash his wrath upon America as he did in Sodom. It’s enough to make even the most liberal folks squeamish, for it violates the sacredness with which Americans view masculinity.

Whereas our nation tends to fetishize affection between two women, we recoil when we see a male “sacrificing” his manhood by engaging in a tender moment with another male.

But America has gotten a mouthful of manly lip-locking in recent weeks, including two guys seemingly risking their lives to kiss at a Rick Santorum rally this weekend. Their smooching was an attention-grabbing protest of Santorum’s anti-gay policies, and it resulted in the men being booted from the rally while the crowd chanted “U-S-A.”

This public display of homo-affection comes on the heels of several well publicized photos of gay members of the military returning to a post-Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell America and being unafraid to show their love for their partners.

Dharun Ravi, the former Rutgers student who used a webcam to spy on his gay roommate days before the roommate killed himself, now faces 10 years in prison and deportation after being convicted of a majority of 15 counts Friday.

A New Jersey jury took three days of deliberation to conclude that Ravi was guilty of invasion of privacy, witness tampering, hindering arrest and bias intimidation. The latter charge, which is essentially a hate crime, carries the stiffest penalty and was sought by prosecuters who said Ravi harassed his roommate, Tyler Clementi, because Clementi was gay.

The jurors’ nuanced verdicts – they acquitted Ravi of invading Clementi’s privacy with the purpose to intimidate Clementi because of his sexual orientation, but convicted Ravi of “knowing that the conduct constituting invasion of privacy would cause Tyler Clementi to be intimidated because of sexual orientation” – reflected the complexity of the issues that have arisen around the case.

The gay Republican coalition known as GOProud released its 2012 platform yesterday, and the group offered a “unique” solution to dealing with anti-gay bullying in schools.

“The answer to the serious problem of bullying is not more federal intervention in education,” the GOProud agenda states. “Instead, we support empowering parents and families by supporting school choice initiatives and protecting the right of parents to home school their children.”

While resisting federal involvement into local school matters is a natural conservative position, it’s less clear how vouchers and home schooling – both pillars of conservative education policy – would do anything to make schools safer for LGBT students.

“It allows parents who have kids who are bullied to make sure they go to school in a safe environment,” Jimmy LaSalvia, executive director of GOProud, told Fenuxe Thursday. “If they decide that their school isn’t safe, they can take the child to a school of their choice.

“We have taken the position that big government solutions, government-mandated curriculum, is not the solution,” he added.

LaSalvia characterized anti-gay bullying as a widespread epidemic that must be confronted.

“I think first and foremost, bullying is a problem,” he said. “I certainly know, personally, and I know that many, many, many gay people across the world know personally, what it’s like to be bullied because of their perceived sexual orientation. It’s important for all of us to make it known that it’s not OK.”

LaSalvia countered the notion that GOProud’s “Education Reform” plank does more to promote tenets of conservative ideology than address anti-gay bullying.

President Barack Obama looked to the front lines of the domestic AIDS epidemic when selecting a new director for the White House Office of National AIDS Policy, tapping a San Francisco doctor who has worked in the department of public health while maintaining his role as a physician in the country’s first HIV/AIDS specialized clinic.

Dr. Grant Colfax, the former director of the HIV prevention section at the San Francisco Department of Public Health, will now lead efforts to implement Obama’s national strategic plan to reduce HIV infections.

“Grant Colfax will lead my Administration’s continued progress in providing care and treatment to people living with HIV/AIDS,” Obama said in a prepared statement. “Grant’s expertise will be key as we continue to face serious challenges and take bold steps to meet them. I look forward to his leadership in the months and years to come.”

Colfax’s roots in the field as a primary care provider and public health worker contrast to the expertise of his predecessor in the White House AIDS office, Jeffrey Crowley, who came from a research and epidemiology background.

“Colfax, while he’s a scientist, works in an AIDS clinic and services clients,” said Tracy Elliott, executive director of AID Atlanta.

“These are two things that he brings to the table that his predecessor didn’t.”

Other AIDS activists were also encouraged by Obama’s appointment of someone with hands-on experience in the epidemic.

“His unique blend of experience serving on the front lines of the epidemic, implementing the national strategy at the local level, working as a direct service provider within the Ryan White CARE system, and conducting cutting-edge research makes him the right person at the right time to lead the Obama administration’s efforts to end HIV/AIDS in the United States,’ said Neil Giuliano, CEO of the San Francisco AIDS Foundation.

Colfax will be tasked with implementing Obama’s national AIDS strategy, which was developed in 2010 and represents the first comprehensive effort to combat AIDS by a White House administration in the 30-year history of the disease.

“It was a promise Obama made during his campaign, and it was a promise delivered,” said Elliott from AID Atlanta. “And they did it based on input from the community. I think they’ve really been responsive to the community in terms of how to fight the disease.”

While President George W. Bush concentrated most of his anti-AIDS efforts on the global epidemic (some say to avoid the tricky politics that are attached to HIV/AIDS in the U.S.), activists laud Obama for drawing more attention to the struggle to reduce HIV/AIDS domestically. In addition to developing a national AIDS strategy, Obama has also protected domestic AIDS agencies from draconian cuts that would have curtailed service, treatment and prevention efforts.

The U.S. Embassy in Iraq has issued a statement condemning a wave of recent killings of gay men in the Middle East country, with estimates ranging from six to 40 murders in the past two weeks. The violence has been directed at homosexuals and young Iraqis who have adopted the “emo” look of dark colors, tight T-shirts and skinny jeans.

“We are monitoring this situation closely on the ground and in Washington, and have expressed our concern to the Government of Iraq,” embassy officials announced in a prepared statement. “These acts of intolerance have no place in democratic societies.”

As the New York Times pointed out in a weekend report, gay Iraqis have been living in peril for the last half decade, noting that, “For at least six years, gays have been bullied and harassed by security forces and beaten and killed by reactionary Islamist militias in Shiite areas of Baghdad.”

However, the campaign of intimidation and terror has been amped up in recent weeks:

“It’s the miltias with the support of the Iraqi government,” Ali Hili, leader of Iraqi LGBT told gay radio personality Michael Signorile on his Sirius program. “The goverment has declared war on sexual minorities. They are trying to rally the streets of Baghdad. Yesterday and the last six or seven days – we have videos and films of those patrols – with a megaphone they’re saying, ‘If anyone who has any information about anyone who is a pervert, an infidel, part of the homosexual network, you have to declare it or you face consequences.’ Anyone who harbors anyone who is, according to them, an illegal citizen, will face consequences.”

Supporters of the Atlanta Gay Men’s Chorus are letting their voices ring in an online contest to help the agency win $25,000. Voting continues through this week in the Southwest Airlines LUV Grants for Good poll, which is awarding $75,000 to Georgia charities.

“We are the only LGBT organization that is represented, and so we’ve been getting a lot of help from the community,” said AGMC Executive Director Crystal Anderson. The chorus has been using Facebook, Twitter and e-mail blasts to rally folks to vote online, and supporters can cast a vote each day until March 18.

In its pitch to Southwest, AGMC noted that most grantors tend to donate to service-oriented non-profits instead of arts organizations, and added that winning a grant would aid the chorus and Atlanta’s gay community.

“I think some of it will obviously go toward general operating expenses, but it would also, in the next one to three years, help us implement our strategic plan,” Anderson said. The chorus is hoping to build partnerships with metro school districts such as the Atlanta Public Schools to work on issues such as bullying and homelessness among gay youth, and is developing plans to establish a women’s ensemble to compliment the AGMC.

In addition to building support for the Southwest grant competition, AGMC is also prepping for its spring show, “Gleeful Noise: Celebrating Glee Clubs, Then & Now,” which takes place March 30-31 at the Cannon Chapel at Emory University.

Social media networks were saturated last week with a short film entitled “Kony2012,” which shone a global spotlight on Ugandan warlord Joseph Kony’s merciless treatment of citizens of the African nation over the past three decades. [See video below article]

The documentary and its massive social media campaign – coordinated by the San Diego-based charity Invisible Children – was intended to offend people’s sense of justice to the point that they would want to intervene in the Ugandan crisis. However, offensive information is arising about the source of Invisible Children’s funding, as its supporters have donated heavily to stop gay marriage in the U.S., and to advocate for the death penalty for homosexuals in Africa.

The U.K.’s Daily Mail identifies Terry and Barbara Caster as chief benefactors of Invisible Children, as is the Georgia-based National Christian Foundation: