Gay Community

GUANGZHOU, China -- As people in this southern Chinese city prepare for bed each night, Roger Meng is just getting started. Alone at a desk in his tiny fifth-floor apartment, the 26-year-old computer whiz turns on his laptop and dives into the virtual gay community he created 18 months ago. Eleven o'clock is rush hour at "Guangzhou Comrade" -- www.gztz.org -- Meng's Web page for Chinese homosexuals. Away from the office where their sexuality remains a secret, several hundred gay men connect to the Chinese-language site every evening, conversing in chat rooms, scanning personal ads and reading articles about homosexual life in other countries.

Thousands of people gathered in Druid Hill Park yesterday to paint the park with rainbows, triangles and a sense of pride.The Baltimore Pride festival brought community health and legal services, clubs, and activist groups together with area gays, lesbians, transsexuals, their friends and families.The event, sponsored by the Gay and Lesbian Community Center of Baltimore, drew an estimated 20,000 people last year and organizers expected a larger turnout yesterday.The festival, in its 19th year, is designed to provide a haven for gay celebration.

The headline on an article in Sunday's Maryland section about a conference on homosexuality misidentified the denomination of the Rev. Tony Campolo. He is a Baptist minister.The Sun regrets the errors.The Rev. Tony Campolo, president of the Evangelical Association for the Promotion of Education and spiritual adviser to President Clinton, and his wife, Peggy, a writer, stood together in the pulpit and preached tolerance yesterday at a Towson United Methodist Church discussion on homosexuality.

YOU know, I was just thinking: When was the last time I got together with a million or so of my closest friends?It was in 1993, when people from across the gay spectrum gathered in Washington and turned the nation's capital into a gay capital. It was exhilarating, empowering and enriching to be together with so many people who were out -- or came out -- for one thing: seeking our full civil rights.With a major increase in gay visibility and key victories in workplace, family and other arenas since the march, it's been a whirlwind five years -- we're not in Kansas anymore.

WASHINGTON -- When David Catania heard that he had won a D.C. Council seat this week, the first thing he did was tell a crowd of supporters how thankful he was for Ken Baker, his companion of four years.The fact that Catania is the council's first openly gay council member is not the only reason why his victory is remarkable. He is also white in a majority-black city and a Republican in a town where there are 10 times as many Democrats as Republicans.Catania, a 29-year-old political neophyte with a doughy face and wire-rimmed glasses, surprised the establishment here in Tuesday's special election for the open at-large seat.

There's been much discussion in the gay community lately concerning the so-called "circuit parties," which have become annual high holy days for tens of thousands of gay men. For the uninitiated, circuit parties, in such gay meccas as Fire Island and Palm Springs, are marathon bacchanals where gay men ingest prodigious amounts of drugs, cruise incessantly, and bop and bounce their stunningly buff bods at 140 beats per minute.They've been going on for years, but they've been under the microscope since last August, when a Fire Island partygoer overdosed and ended up comatose and on life support.

MIAMI -- As the national manhunt for the suspected killer of fashion designer Gianni Versace intensified yesterday, an air of unease hung over glitzy South Beach -- and particularly the gay community here.Police released little new information about Andrew Phillip Cunanan, the prime suspect and reported gay prostitute who has been linked to four other slyings around the country, most often of gay men he seemed to know.WPLG-TV, an ABC affiliate, reported last night that video from a surveillance camera at a hotel near the scene of Versace's death might further link Cunanan to the crime.

SAN FRANCISCO -- Eric Ciasullo runs through his schedule as if he were on a sight-seeing trip through the Land of Pharmacology. If it's 7 o'clock this must be Crixivan. If it's 8 o'clock it must be DDI. If it's 9: 30, it must be D4T, Diflucan, Acyclovir, Bactrim, Myambutol, Biaxin.He opens the medicine chest in his apartment to show me shelves full of bottles. It is a daunting regimen of 19 pills -- some to be taken on an empty stomach, others on a full stomach, some with water -- that he must take every day, for the foreseeable future.

BOSTON -- Memo to the travel agent: Don't start booking those wedding packages to Honolulu just yet. The weather on the islands is delightful but the timing is a bit premature.Last Tuesday a Hawaii Circuit Court judge ruled that the state had to issue marriage licenses to gay couples. But he put off the first wedding date for at least a year until the Hawaii Supreme Court hears an appeal.Honolulu may then become the Reno of gay marriages. But no one knows whether a gay couple wed on Maui will still be married when they get to the mainland.

Leonard Jackson, 44, prominent figure in gay communityLeonard "Len" C. Jackson, a prominent figure in the Baltimore gay and lesbian community, died Tuesday at home from complications of AIDS.He was 44.The native of New Bedford, Mass., graduated from Duke University in 1975 and lived briefly in New Orleans before moving to Atlanta, where he owned and was chef of the Jackson Square Restaurant. He moved to Baltimore in 1988.From 1988 until 1991, he was executive director of the Gay and Lesbian Community Center of Baltimore.