Over a hundred people gathered at the historic Stonewall Inn in New York City on November 2, a rainy Friday night, in order to fundraise for efforts to realize marriage equality in Taiwan...
With three consecutive weekends in Taipei seeing demonstrations by civil society groups before local elections and national referendums next month, this repeats a familiar pattern of a wave of protests preceding elections in Taiwan...
The 16th annual pride parade took place today in Taipei, drawing an claimed 140,000 participants, which would be a new record. This year’s pride parade would be a politically charged event, seeing as a referendum on gay marriage is set to take place next month during elections on November 24th, and this question loomed over the event...
Many uncertainties remain for efforts to realize marriage equality in Taiwan, with the approval of multiple referendums on marriage equality and sexual education. Two referendums, pushed for by marriage equality supporters, have phrasing favorable to the legalization of marriage equality and have reached the necessary benchmarks to be held. On the other hand, referendums with phrasing unfavorable to gay marriage and sexual education have also reached necessary benchmarks to be held, as pushed for by anti-gay groups...
Recent events in Singapore provide a negative object lesson for Taiwan, with public suggestions that the question of whether to decriminalize homosexuality triggered after India moved to decriminalize homosexuality. This invites a number of comparisons to Taiwan...
The referendum will soon become a highly contested political battleground in Taiwan, with a number of ongoing referendum initiatives likely to qualify for making it onto the ballot in 2018 elections, At this juncture, one can also venture a number of preliminary observations about what the effects of referendum reform in Taiwan have been...
A demonstration was held by LGBTQ groups this morning to demonstrate the Central Election Commission passing a referendum pushed for by anti-gay groups. The referendum seeks to overturn a judicial ruling in favor of the legalization of marriage equality in Taiwan by the Council of Grand Justices last year. In particular, the demonstration serves as the start of what will necessarily be a longer campaign by LGBTQ groups...
Lucie Liu is the director of taipeilove* - The Documentary, an upcoming documentary on the marriage equality movement in Taiwan. The following interview was conducted by New Bloom editor Brian Hioe on December 19th in Taipei...
While LGBTQ organizations in Taiwan such as the Taiwan Tongzhi Hotline have publicly stated that the recall vote recently faced by NPP chair Huang Kuo-Chang should be a wake-up call for LGBTQ groups in Taiwan, as a reminder of the fact that they remain opposed by a number of socially conservative forces, this also raises a question worth considering. Was it, in fact, anti-gay marriage groups which were the primary force behind the recall vote against Huang? Ultimately, even if the recall vote did not succeed, what one finds in examining the social forces behind the recall vote is that the NPP may have been outgunned from the beginning by conservative social forces...
Huang Kuo-Chang has survived the recall vote organized against him by anti-gay marriage groups in his electoral district of New Taipei 12. Nevertheless, this was by the recall vote not meeting the necessary benchmark to pass, and the amount of voters who voted in favor of the recall were greater than those that voted against it. What now for the NPP, then?...
