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Valentine’s Day.
Sunday, 12 February, you are invited to the Safer Sex Promotion Party dedicated to Valentine’s Day at the Inside night club. A fabulous entertainment program, contests, presents and good mood are waiting for you. The Love Mail will be at your service all night long.
We will be pleased to see you there.
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Periodically, Moldovan mass media raise issue of sexual minorities. However, unfortunately, various talk show guests – with politicians and civil servants being among them – often use the issue to insult somebody displaying their negative attitude towards homosexuals in general.
Annually, December 1st is marked as the World AIDS Day. This year, our Ministry of Health, along with international partners (UNAIDS, UNICEF, World AIDS Campaign, Y-PEER), besides carrying out traditional cultural and educational activities, decided to reward the most ardent fighters against the disease. 
In the evening of 30 November, the NIT channel news blocks aired a very long (which is already surprising) reportage allegedly in defense of ‘Eurasian moral values’ and against ‘corrupting influence’ of European Union and homosexualism. The voiceover, accompanying shots of exalted people dressed in Halloween outfits (as I understand, these are gays themselves by default), is telling that the anti-discrimination law is a promotion of European values in the form of amoral and, contrary to our society, homosexualism, and that the governing Alliance wants to deceptively push through this law which will protect homosexuals despite the fact that there exist more important problems in our country than discrimination. 
GENDERDOC-M has recently become taking its beneficiaries outside the city more often. One can freely discuss an urgent issue, receive a certain piece of information, as well as to divert oneself from problems, breath fresh air, and, of course, see something new – all out of the office. Every time the trip is though of the way that people could better get to know their country, and, if needed, to talk about it with pride. 
This week parliament sittings resume. The legislative body must examine a number of difficult issues in short period of time – it will be impossible to postpone them any more. One of them regards adoption of the Law on Preventing and combating Discrimination in Moldova. The bill raises huge disputes. Its advocates say one shall forget about the European future and liberalized visa regime if the law isn’t adopted. Opponents assure adoption of the law will legalize same-sex marriage. What does the anti-discrimination law itself present, what’s its danger and importance? 
Very recently and even suddenly there appeared a suggestion at GENDERDOC-M to conduct a special research on domestic violence in gay couples. The idea appeared after the Centre’s psychology counselor Svetlana had noticed that, during counseling sessions, gays and lesbians often talked about clashes and altercations with their partners. First, they laughed over the fact that guys fight and throw nubbins of paper at each other, but later it turned out that violence issues in same-sex couples is rather urgent. 
My son is gay. My daughter lives with a girl. To accept such fact and accept it is much harder than it may seem at the first sight. To reconcile with such overturn of life mode, to bring back desire to live to parents and to keep on communicating with their children, to give them the opportunity to be proud of their son/daughter – all this is a long and painful process. It will take years of work to deal with this, and only LGBT community-based organisations, a qualified counsellor and parents, who have already understood and accepted their children the way those are, can attain peace and soul comfort. 
Beginning with August, the GENDERDOC-M Information Centre together with UNDP launched the project ‘Making Protection from Discrimination Real’. “It was very difficult to have received a grant on activities showing how wide discrimination is spread in Moldova”, tells Lobby and Advocacy Program coordinator, Angela Frolov. “Nevertheless, our centre’s application was accepted and we proceeded to business”. 
Several times a year, GENDERDOC-M Information Centre takes parents of gays, lesbians, bisexuals and transgender people to a retreat outside of Chisinau to facilitate the process of accepting and understanding their children for the former. Even a distinctive support group of parents, whose children came out, has already formed. And this group is pretending to become regional with the lapse of time. 
In June, in Bratislava (Slovakia) an LGBT Pride took place. It was realised the way its organisers had planned – a week of film screenings, conferences, exhibitions, parties, and it finished with a march across the capital city and a concert in the end. However, what they call Pride there is exactly the public rally within the cultural holidays – march across the city with flags and banners, a small talk-in with speeches by human rights defenders and a grand concert. 
