Fridae

Members of the LGBT community in Singapore today expressed their disappointment and outrage over the prime minister's reasoning as to why section 377A of the Penal Code which criminalises gay sex should remain.

This week, the Love and Pride Film Festival presents four LGBT-themed films for Singaporean audiences. We focus on a festival highlight: Vu Ngoc Dang's Lost in Paradise, which may be Vietnam's very first gay movie.

Performing in Singapore on Saturday night, Taiwanese pop star and gay equality advocate Chang Hui-mei, who is popularly known as A-mei, showed her support for gay men and lesbians as she waved a rainbow flag and same-sex couples in the audience were shown kissing on the large screen.

An elderly couple in Beijing, China who came out as gay and announced their upcoming marriage on Weibo, the popular Chinese microblogging social network, has attracted thousands of comments and gained over 5,000 fans in days.

President Barack Obama on Monday became the first US president to use the word “gay” and express his support for full equality for gay men and lesbians in his inauguration speech at the presidential swearing-in ceremony.

A second pastor, who appealed to his church members to support another church in its call to lobby the government to retain a law which criminalises sex between men, has deleted references to the issue from his statement.

A rising star in Cambodia's contemporary art scene, Vuth Lyno creates photographic portraits of LGBTs in his country. Fridae talks to him about his work before his presentation in Singapore as part of TheatreWorks's Superintense on Sat, 19 Jan. His exhibition Thoamada II will be open from 26 Jan to 2 Mar in Phnom Penh.

Under new guidelines regulating commercial surrogacy arrangements in India, gay couples and single foreigners will no longer be eligible to have an Indian surrogate bear their child.

The idea that "the family unit comprises of a man as Father, a woman as Mother, and Children" is not biblical, writes Rev Miak Siew, executive pastor of Singapore's Free Community Church and member of gay advocacy group People Like Us. Here he responds to a Singapore pastor's recent comments that the acceptance of gays would pose a "looming threat" to the family unit.

A pastor of a megachurch in Singapore has called on his congregation – with a visiting former Prime Minister in the audience – to lobby the government to retain a colonial-era law which criminalises sex between men.