VIETNAMESE GAYS PARTY

April 08, 2002 A gay fashion show and dance at a hotel in Long Hai, Vietnam, attracted hundreds of homosexuals in late March, the newspaper Thanh Nien reported April 1. The official youth daily called the event a "highly frenzied ... monstrosity," noting that most of the models had been "partially turned into women" at sex-change clinics in neighboring Thailand. "It was an abnormal phenomenon in the activities of the youth [that] is foreign to our country's cultural tradition," the newspaper said. "This monstrosity poses a headache for officials in charge of culture and education." Very little gay news emerges from Vietnam. In 1998, Agence-France Presse reported that the national assembly banned gay marriage in response to ceremonies that had taken place. In 1999, activists in San Francisco spread word of a gay AIDS-education group in Ho Chi Minh City. They said the organization -- called Information, Education, Communication -- had 40 members who dispensed condoms, advice and crudely duplicated pamphlets to the estimated 20,000 men who visit the city's gay pick-up spots. Also in 1999, Vietnam's Labor Ministry reportedly banned HIV carriers from working in hotels, kindergartens, restaurants, health-care facilities, beauty shops, vaccine-production labs and cosmetic-surgery facilities. The ministry said there would be no mass-testing program but that people already known to be infected would have to leave their jobs.