GERMANY: Far-Right Party Calls For Russian-Style Gay "Propaganda" Ban

Gay Star News reports:

A German right-wing party has demanded for LGBTI "propaganda" to be banned. The national conservative Alternative für Deutschland’s (Alternative for Germany, AfD) Baden-Wuerttemberg faction unanimously decided on a "gender motion" during their faction conference last weekend. "The Alternative for Germany strictly rejects any and all governmental propaganda – in schools, mass media or the public space – for certain sexual orientations or behaviors," the motion reads. "Exempt is the promotion of the classic family." The document is a milder-worded version of a motion proposed in April, in which party members also spoke out against abortion and birth control. "The Alternative for Germany considers the political-bureaucratic and legal promotion, or rather the active mass media advertising for birth control, abortion and homosexual behavior to be contradictory to the Germans’ vital interests," the April version read.

Alternative für Deutschland formed in 2013 and presently holds seven of Germany's 96 seats in the European Parliament. They also hold dozens of seats in Germany's state legislatures. The party operates a youth wing called Junge Alternative.

GERMANY: Upper Parliament Chamber Approves Resolution Backing Gay Marriage

Via the Associated Press:

The German Parliament's upper house is calling on the government to embrace full-fledged marriage for gay couples, an attempt to step up pressure on Chancellor Angela Merkel's conservative party. The upper house represents Germany's 16 state governments and has a left-wing majority — unlike the lower house. The resolution approved Friday doesn't force the government to take any action, as the state governments stopped short of sending a draft law to the lower house for a possible vote. Same-sex couples in Germany have been able to enter civil unions that fall short of marriage since a center-left government introduced them in 2001. Merkel's conservatives are refusing to go further though their coalition partners, the center-left Social Democrats, back gay marriage.

More from Gay Star News:

In its resolution, titled "Marriage for everyone – resolution for full equality of same-sex couples," the assembly proposes changing the German Civil Code to include marriage equality; the proposed changes to the Civil Code would also grant same-sex couples equal adoption rights. ‘Nothing is more powerful than an idea whose time has come,’ said Malu Dreyer, minister president of Rhineland-Palatinate, in discussions today, before stating Ireland’s landslide referendum result had shown there was no reason not to grant full equality. The assembly approved the resolution with 40 – 29 votes, due to the higher number of states governed by Labor / Greens or Labor / Left coalitions. Although the German government is obliged to react to a resolution, it does not bind them.

Two weeks ago a spokesman for Chancellor Angela Merkel declared that same-sex marriage "is not a goal of this government."

Adidas Celebrates Pride Month

Memo to Brian Brown: Germany-based Adidas Group is the second-largest sportswear manufacturer in the world with annual sales over $15 billion. Other brands under the Adidas Group umbrella are Reebok, Rockport, TaylorMade, and Stella McCartney. New Avenues For Youth is a DC-based group working to end youth homelessness.

GERMANY: Chancellor Angela Merkel Spokesman Says Same-Sex Marriage Is "Not A Goal Of This Government"

Via Reuters:

Chancellor Angela Merkel's coalition agreed on Wednesday to make small changes to same-sex civil partnership rules but staunch opposition from conservatives in her party means Germany will not follow Ireland in allowing gay marriages any time soon. Although there are growing divisions within the party, Merkel's Christian Democrats are still overwhelmingly opposed to same-sex marriages partly due to fears it could upset voters on the right. However, polls show 75 percent of Germans are in favour of legalising gay marriages, as are the Social Democrats (SPD) and all opposition parties. The overwhelming "yes" vote in Ireland for same-sex marriage had triggered a discussion in Germany about the lingering gap in rights between registered partnerships and marriages. "Today was an important milestone in dismantling discrimination and the chancellor is pleased about that," her spokesman Steffen Seibert said. "But same-sex marriages are not a goal of this government." "Every country makes its own laws - some countries go one route while others go another," said Seibert, when asked about Ireland. "In Germany we'll take a path that suits Germany."

Merkel was elected to a third term in 2013.

Headline Of The Day

Details. (Tipped by JMG reader TJ)

UPDATE: Vice has posted a not work-safe clip.

You Knew This Was Coming

British and German tabloids are claiming that the Germanwings pilot was "tormented" about being gay. From Britain's Daily Star, which has more than twice the circulation of the Guardian:

Lubitz’ relationship with his girlfriend is said to have broken down and it has been claimed that he was secretly homosexual. He was even taunted by pilot pals for previously being a “trolley dolly” airline steward and dubbed Tomato Andy – a derogatory gay slur. It also emerged the David Guetta fan enjoyed partying at a German nightclub which holds boozy, circus-themed events involving drag queens and dwarves. The lively Agostea club in Koblenz lies 20 minutes from the home he shared with his parents in the German town of Montabaur. The revelations came as German airline Lufthansa, which owns Germanwings, announced it would pay up to e50,000 “immediate financial assistance” to relatives of every victim of the horror crash.

From The Mirror tabloid:

Former colleagues told how Lubitz was mercilessly taunted over his cabin crew past. He was nicknamed “Tomato Andy” because they believed he didn’t know if he was a “fruit or veg” – a reference to his sexuality. One ex-workmate said it was slang term for a “straight who was really gay”. Another added: “Everyone thought it strange that he kept on going back home to his mum and dad at weekends. "He had a nice car, a good job, and good prospects, but he seemed to spend all his time by himself.” Lubitz bought two top-of-the-range Audi cars earlier this month. One was said to be a present for himself and the other for his girlfriend. Habibalah Hassani, 53, who runs a pizza restaurant near the killer pilot’s Dusseldorf home, said he had often seen him with his lover. But neighbours in Montabaur claimed she had not been seen there recently.

Rumors about the pilot's sexuality have even been picked up by the reputable Independent:

Mass-murdering Germanwings co-pilot Andreas Lubitz had had a “serious relationship crisis” with his girlfriend, investigators told Germany’s Bild newspaper yesterday, and according to one report last night he split with her the day before the crash. An ex-girlfriend told Bild that Lubitz had once told her he wanted his name remembered and that he planned to go down in history by doing something to “change the whole system”. "People all over the world will know my name." Other theories concerned his sexuality. There was speculation yesterday that he may have been gay and felt forced to keep it secret, after it emerged that a male friend had sent a message to Lubitz’s personal website after the crash. It read: “We were only talking yesterday about what we would do together when you came back. You always made me smile.” It was suggested to The Independent that “Tomato Andi” was a joke gay term used to describe someone who repressed their homosexuality, a tomato being commonly referred to as a vegetable despite being a fruit. In any case, it now seems certain that Lubitz had serious psychological problems which he kept secret.

Meanwhile American crackpots like Pam Geller and Jim Hoft are predictably claiming that the pilot was a recent convert to Islam.

Headline Of The Day

Via the London Standard:

The co-pilot who deliberately crashed a plane into a mountainside in the French Alps was suffering from depression and 'a personal life crisis,' according to reports. Andreas Lubitz, 28, had deliberately put the Germanwings airliner into a descent after the captain left the cockpit, French prosecutors said after analysing evidence from the recovered cockpit voice recorder. 150 people were killed, including babies, 16 schoolchildren and the flight's cabin crew and pilot. The head of Lufthansa, Germanwings parent company, admitted Lubitz had taken a long break from pilot training, while German media reported he had been battling mental health issues. Investigators are focusing on his "personal, family and professional environment" to try to determine why he locked his captain out of the cockpit and reset the autopilot to take the doomed plane from 38,000 feet to just 100ft. According to German newspaper Bild, Lubitz was going through a "personal life crisis", while the Der Spiegel newspaper said he had taken a break in training because of "burnout-syndrome".

More from the Daily Mail:

Yesterday, the boss of Germanwings admitted Lubitz had slipped through the ‘safety net’ and should never have been flying. It was also revealed that the fitness fanatic had suffered from depression and ‘burnout’ which had held up his career. He reportedly received a year and half of psychiatric treatment and was at one point recommended to be examined by a doctor before flying. But, incredibly, he passed his psychological assessments and was later considered fit to fly. Germany’s Federal Aviation Office confirmed this morning that Lubitz had a medical condition noted in his pilot’s records which required him to have a regular examination. It was reported this morning that during his education at the Lufthansa Flight School in Phoenix, Arizona, he was listed temporarily as 'unfliable'. It was suggested today that Lubitz - who had worked for Lufthansa as a cabin attendant for nearly a year before being accepted for flight training - may have been teased by other pilot's over his previous role. A friend said: 'His nickname was "Tomato Andy" - a reference to his past employment as a flight steward'.

And from Sky News:

Prosecutors investigating the Germanwings crash have said there were indications the co-pilot hid his illness from his employers. In a news conference on Friday, the prosecutors said that Andreas Lubitz hid a sick note on the day the Airbus A320 crashed into a mountainside during a flight from Barcelona to Dusseldorf. The torn-up note, dated on the day of the crash on Tuesday, was found in the 27-year-old's flat in Dusseldorf. The prosecutors added that documents showed he was receiving medical treatment, but that no suicide note or claim of responsibility for the crash was found.

FRANCE: Prosecutor Says Airliner Was Crashed Deliberately By Co-Pilot

Via ABC News:

A Marseille prosecutor says the co-pilot of the Germanwings flight that crashed in the French Alps appeared to have crashed the plane deliberately. Prosecutor Brice Robin said the action of manipulating "what is called the flight monitoring system in order to embark on the descent of the plane", could "only be deliberate". "I repeat, when he was alone, in charge of the Airbus, the co-pilot started the flight monitoring system to get the plane to descend," he said. "The action on this altitude selector can only be voluntary, I repeat action on this altitude selector can only be deliberate."

The German citizen, left in sole control of the Airbus A320 after the captain left the cockpit, refused to re-open the door and pressed a button that sent the jet into its fatal descent, Mr Robin said. He said that "one can then hear several calls from the commander asking to be allowed into the cockpit", but there was no answer. "He knocked on the door and there was no answer from the co-pilot either," he said. "One can then hear the noise of human breathing within the cockpit, and that human breathing noise can be heard until the final impact which means that theoretically the co-pilot was alive.

German Jetliner Crashes In Southern France, All 148 Aboard Feared Dead

Via the New York Times:

A German plane carrying at least 142 passengers and six crew members to Düsseldorf from Barcelona crashed on Tuesday in southern France, the French civil aviation authority confirmed. The wreckage of the aircraft, an Airbus A320 operated by Germanwings, a budget subsidiary of Lufthansa, was located by a French military helicopter near the town of Prads-Haute-Bléone, according to Eric Héraud, a spokesman in Paris for the aviation authority, the Direction Générale de l’Aviation Civile. The pilots declared an emergency at 10:47 a.m. and descended rapidly to around 5,000 feet from a cruising altitude of 38,000 feet, while flying over the town of Barcelonnette in the Alpes de Haute-Provence region, Mr. Héraud said. President François Hollande of France said that many of the victims were German. “The conditions of the accident, which have not yet been clarified, suggest that there might not be any survivors,” he said.

Germanwings is owned by Lufthansa.

BERLIN: Court Fines Family For Trying To Force 15 Year-Old Gay Boy Into Marriage

Via the Associated Press:

A Berlin court has fined three Lebanese men on allegations they seized a 15-year-old relative against his will in what he says was an attempt to force him into marriage because he’s gay. State Court spokesman Tobias Kaehne said Thursday the boy’s father and two uncles were each fined 1,350 euros ($1,430), or 90 days in jail, if they don’t pay. According to the complaint, in 2012 they took the boy, now 18, and forced him into a car and set off for Turkey. They were stopped at the Romania-Bulgaria border, and the boy was returned to Germany. There are few other details in the complaint, but the boy told Berlin’s Tagesspiegel newspaper he had come out as gay and his father decided to force him into marriage.

The report doesn't say why the story took three years to come to light.

UPDATE: More on the story from Pink News:

The father of then 15-year-old Nasser El-Ahmed beat him, poured boiling water on him and threatened to ram a knife into his throat after he came out. One of the uncles also doused him in petrol and threatened to set him on fire. The boy told the Tagesspiegel newspaper that he had come out as gay, and as a result his father had decided to try and force him to marry a woman. He said he hoped his case would draw attention to issues faced by gay Muslim men.

Drama At Germany's Eurovision Contest

The BBC reports:

The winner of the search to find Germany's Eurovision Song Contest entrant turned down the chance to represent his country on live TV. Andreas Kummert initially thanked the public for selecting his song Heart Of Stone as Germany's entry. But, shortly afterwards, he took the microphone from presenter Barbara Schoneberger and said: "I'm really not in the right shape to accept this." Instead, he said, "I give my title to Ann Sophie", the 24-year-old runner-up. Ann Sophie looked visibly confused by the turn of events; while many in the studio audience booed. After being confirmed as the winner, the singer turned to the audience and asked them "do you even want this?" Finally accepting her fate, she launched into her song, Black Smoke.

Kummert's folksy entry is here. The first clip below is subtitled and the default winner's entry is after that.

On Germany's Penis Enlargement Industry

Clip recap:

Germany seems to be the penis enlargement capital of the world with about 20% of all enlargement surgeries occurring there. Many men are lured into surgery by the promise of a better sex life, but is the procedure to good to be true? We spoke to a former patient who said that while the surgery increased his size by about 1 or 2 centimeters, but it also took weeks to recover and left him looking deformed. We also met with a upcoming patient who seemed to be getting cold feet after hearing about the mixed results.

Probably not safe for the office. Bottom line: Don't do this.

BERLIN: Grindr "Art Project" Roils Locals

A Dutch artist is sitting in a Berlin gayborhood storefront where he is live-streaming photos and chats with unsuspecting local Grindr users to giant video screens in the window. Some of these men, perhaps unsurprisingly, are furious. Via Gay Star News:

The project is called Wanna Play? But many Grindr users don't consider the art playful, some consider it to be a gross invasion of their privacy. Others say they have felt manipulated into acting oddly or writing messages that they would never have done if it was being broadcast for the world to see. Parker Tilghman is one of the men furious over the art show. When he started chatting to Verhoeven, they traded pictures and chatted for awhile before he was asked whether he was interested in shaving the artist's beard. "Given the odd nature of our conversation I comically asked, 'Are you going to murder me?' to which he responded, 'No, but I'm afraid you might be the one to murder me.' When Tilghman went to the address the artist gave him, standing on the corner of Marienenstrasse, he saw his Grindr chat out there for everyone to see. "Someone involved in the project confronted me and I shouted at him louder than I have ever shouted in my life. The entire block stopped, at one point they started clapping. I screamed, 'How dare you? You are violating peoples lives, you are publicly mocking people and projecting the pictures and words onto a screen that an entire city block in one of the busiest parts of Kreuzberg for everyone to see.'"

The two-week installation is in its third day and is live-streaming here. At this writing it appears that the screen is turned off.

Germany Pitches For LGBT Tourism

Germany's National Tourism Office has launched a new website in support of LGBT tourism. Via Gay Times:

The country that gave us Adidas, Einstein and World Cup winning super-stud, Mario Gotze (move over Beckham) has now published the perfect resource to plan your next trip to Germany, and it’s all tailored exclusively with LGBT visitors in mind. That doesn’t mean that this new website is all about pride events, parties and bars though. Of course there is some really useful information on the LGBT scene in Germany’s five largest cities — Munich, Berlin, Frankfurt, Hamburg and Cologne, as well as details of the major LGBT festivals and events that take place across the country. But there is also information on Germany’s buzzing art landscape, cutting-edge architecture, latest design trends as well as what’s happening right now on the German fashion scene too.

BERLIN: Gay Mayor To Retire

Berlin Mayor Klaus Wowereit is retiring after 13 years.

For years, Wowereit had enjoyed popularity far beyond the capital's borders, not least thanks to a deft turn of phrase and considerable fearlessness in the face of the tabloid media. "I'm gay and that's OK," he casually remarked in the runup to his election in 2001, becoming the first high-profile German politician to declare his homosexuality. Another snappy phrase, his 2003 description of Berlin as "poor but sexy", summed up his achievement in reinventing the formerly divided city as Europe's capital of cool, helping to attract tourists and investors from across the globe. On Tuesday, Wowereit said at the press conference called to announce his departure that he was leaving in response to increased speculation about his future from within his own Social Democratic party ranks. He said he had originally wanted to announce his intention in June, "but then we won the World Cup". He is to leave office on 11 December.

Zwiebacks For Gays

A short new spot out of Germany.

(Tipped by JMG reader Hartmut)

NEW YORK CITY: German Artists Claim Credit For White Flags On Brooklyn Bridge

Three weeks ago New York City woke up to see that the massive American flags that fly atop each of the towers of the allegedly highly-guarded Brooklyn Bridge had been replaced by white flags. Multiple city and federal agencies investigated and yesterday a pair of German artists claimed credit for the stunt. Via the New York Times:

When the flags appeared, rumors flapped: It was a prank or a grave security breach. But the artists, Mischa Leinkauf and Matthias Wermke, say the flags — with hand-stitched stars and stripes, all white — had nothing to do with terrorism. In a series of phone interviews, they explained that they only wanted to celebrate “the beauty of public space” and the great American bridge whose German-born engineer, John Roebling, died in 1869 on July 22, the day the white flags appeared. The artists decided recently to explain themselves, and provided slightly cryptic pictures and videos of the flags, seemingly shot at night from atop the bridge. They point to other such projects they’ve done in far-flung places that haven’t made waves, and they claimed to be somewhat taken aback by the reception here.

The artists says that when they removed the original flags, they were ceremonially folded per US code and will be returned to the city.

Germany Celebrates World Cup

World Cup Open Thread

Judging by Twitter, many of the nation's offices have suspended work to watch the USA vs Germany match. If you're among those folks, here's an open thread to weigh in, at least on the hotness of the players.

UPDATE: The USA has lost.

Cooper: I'm No Expert On Vaginas